“Becoming an American Princess?”: The
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by IUScholarWorks “BECOMING AN AMERICAN PRINCESS?”: THE INTERPRETATIONS OF AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE BY YOUNG KOREAN GIRLS LIVING IN THE UNITED STATES R. Lena Lee Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction Indiana University May 2006 Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. _____________________________ Mary B. McMullen, Ph.D., Committee Chairperson ______________________________ Jesse H. Goodman, Ph.D., Doctoral Committee Dissertation Director _______________________________ Cary A. Buzzelli, Ph.D., Member ________________________________ William A. Corsaro, Ph.D., Member April 28, 2006 ii © 2006 R. Lena Lee ALL RIGHTS RESERVED iii To My Father, Jooyong Lee, Who is the Strongest Person in My Life iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Since I started this study, I have continually realized how blessed and lucky I am because of the great people around me. This dissertation is not merely mine but also theirs because I couldn’t have done it without them. First of all, I would like to thank my dissertation director, Dr. Jesse Goodman. Providing constant support and exceptional insight to my academic interest, he has been with me from my first class of the doctoral program to the last moment of my dissertation defense. By allowing me to pursue various kinds of questions and ideas, he encouraged me to freely explore every subject about which I wanted to know and learn. Therefore, he was a powerful force who led me to learn not only how to study and teach, but also how to live. Next, I would like to recognize my committee chairperson, Dr. Mary McMullen. Her admirable caring has always inspired me to enjoy my studies, have great passion for my career, and feel confident about my ability. It was she who helped me to overcome hardships which I have experienced through the years and finally finish my dissertation. She taught me how to become a strong, respected woman who can be a model for students, teachers, colleagues, and one’s own children and family. She is thus a mirror in which I kept reflecting myself and projecting my future. I also wish to express my appreciation to two members of my committee—Dr. Cary Buzzelli and Dr. William Corsaro. Both of them greatly supported my study by providing valuable comments and pertinent advice. Their assistance helped me get v through the long journey of this dissertation. In addition, I want to thank Dr. Ann Trousdale from Louisiana State University, Dr. Curt Bonk from the Department of Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University, and Dr. Michelle Scott from Ohio State University. All of them gave me their warm words, sincere friendships, and knowledgeable feedback during the dissertation process even though they were not my committee members. I would also like to acknowledge the Daisy Jones Fellowship, which financially supported my dissertation, and ten Korean girls and their families, who participated in my study. I thank my family members from the bottom of my heart: my parents, Inja Kim and Jooyong Lee, and three sisters, Kyungah, Eunah, and Jinah Lee, who gave me endless love, sacrifice, and trust which helped me keep going my way; my husband, Chungmoo Lee, who was the only person that has taken care of my pain and tears with continual love for the last 8 years. Thank you, my wonderful family. Most importantly, I wish to give a very special thank to my son, Christopher Jihoon Lee, who had to understand his mother’s situation even before he was born. His shiny smiles and dazzling eyes were the sole inspiration which made me rethink the meaning of education, life, and the world itself more seriously and thoroughly. Love you, Joon. vi PREFACE There is a poster on the wall of my study room which has six Disney female characters on it. One day, my two and a half-year-old son walked into the room and discovered the poster. Taking a glance at it, he suddenly called out, “That’s mom! That’s mom!” He was pointing at the Princess Aurora in Sleeping Beauty. His exclamation made me curious because I couldn’t find anything similar between the Princess and me. As a Korean I’m not blond with blue eyes or bright white skin, and I don’t wear a fancy pink dress, which the Princess Aurora does. A couple of days later, I talked about this story with my husband, who gave me that poster a few years ago. After hearing the story, he laughed and said, “That’s what you want to hear!” He continued, saying, “Many girls like princess things and…want to be a princess. You also like that stuff and…you want to be a princess, too. Don’t you? That was why I gave that poster to you.” These stories made me wonder about two different but related issues: the first one was what made my son think of me as a sleeping beauty, and the second one was where my husband’s assumptions about the relationship between girls and princesses came from. I tried to find a possible answer to the first question by recalling my childhood memories of my mom. When I was little, I had always thought that my mom was the most beautiful woman in the world. A girl’s mom often represents ideal beauty in the child’s eyes, regardless of what her mother actually looks like. I even saw my mother as having great power over me, which was sometimes like magic because she seemed to do everything vii and make everything. Now my son may think as I did; he may see magnificent beauty and power in his mother, in me. However, even though I assumed that my son’s thinking was similar to my own as a child, I still had another question about his reaction. Because I only supposed and estimated what my son’s thoughts were, without knowing about what he actually meant, I was not sure if my presumption was correct. Was what I supposed really true about his thinking? Based on the arguments of several theorists in cultural studies, the female characters in Disney films are usually good-looking White Americans. I thus asked myself: Has my son been Americanized so much in spite of his young age, or did my son’s responses result merely from his level of development? According to developmental psychology, my son wasn’t likely to recognize racial differences in popular culture because a child only begins to distinguish differences among races as they are presented in the media at age three. How then can I explain his identification of specific white American characteristics with me, as these are represented by the Princess Aurora of Sleeping Beauty, Kim of Kim Possible,i or Sam, a female character in Totally Spies,ii rather than any other female characters in American popular culture? Did he perhaps have some unknown way of associating them with me? As for my husband’s implied syllogism, which is “All females want to be a princess. You are a female. Therefore, you want to be a princess,” it allowed me to ponder some questions as well. Was his assumption only his own and therefore based on what he might see in me, or was it socio-culturally constructed? No matter what his assumption was based on, how have I been influenced by it? Furthermore, how are many viii other young girls or women in society influenced by the assumptions of such “others,” in this case, males? Is it really true that, as Walkerdine (1997) criticizes, these females’ pleasure has often been seen as “involving the fantasizing of another life”(p. 135), one which corresponds with the hegemonic position in that they always desire to be beautiful, white, and royal? Even though I have wanted to know the answers to these questions, there are not enough answers that have been initiated by children or females themselves. What I have heard is mostly about “others’” gazes and the expectations of children and females, not their stories, which can reveal how much they struggle and how they try to get through these others’ inaccurate assumptions. Where, then, are the voices of children and females now? Why have they been unsung? What do they really want to say about themselves and society? Objectified by and excluded from a group or a whole society, don’t they still live in silence? Considering the questions that were raised above, this study is an attempt to listen to young Korean girls whose voices are not considered important enough by society to allow them to say what they think about various social values that are embedded in popular culture. I hope, therefore, that this study may help to find a way to create a democratic learning environment in which every child’s voice and experiences can be respected and heard (Freire & Giroux, 1989). ix Preface Notes i Kim Possible is a TV cartoon series that has been on the Disney Channel since 2002. In it, a high school teen, Kim, is a white girl who is a cheerleading captain, an honors student, and the savior of the world from villains. ii Totally Spies is a fast-paced action cartoon that has been on the Cartoon Network since 2001. It is about three college students in Beverley Hills who unwittingly become international secret agents. x ABSTRACT R.