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Copyright by Chuyun Oh 2015 The Dissertation Committee for Chuyun Oh Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: K-popscape: Gender Fluidity and Racial Hybridity in Transnational Korean Pop Dance Committee: Rebecca Rossen, Supervisor Omi Osun Joni L. Jones Paul Bonin-Rodriguez Cherise Smith Heather Hindman Youjeong Oh K-popscape: Gender Fluidity and Racial Hybridity in Transnational Korean Pop Dance by Chuyun Oh, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2015 Acknowledgements I would like to extend my thanks to PPP faculty members whose advice and help significantly contributed to my dissertation. I offer the deepest appreciations to my academic advisor, Rebecca Rossen, for supporting my dissertation and academic progress for the last five years with great enthusiasm, insight, and mentorship. I am also thankful to Omi Osun Joni L. Jones and Paul Bonin for their generous help and inspiring scholarship. I want to thank each member of my committee, Cherise Smith, Heather Hindman, and Youjeong Oh, for the time to read and respond to my work with advice. I also offer thanks to my colleagues, friends, and Theatre and Dance faculty members whose artistic and scholarly endeavors have significantly inspired my work. Lastly, I express my sincere gratitude and love to my family members and loved one. Without their help, care, love, and patience, everthing I have achieved would not have been possible. iv K-popscape: Gender Fluidity and Racial Hybridity in Transnational Korean Pop Dance Chuyun Oh, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2015 Supervisor: Rebecca Rossen Analyzing bodily representation and audience reception, my dissertation examines (a) how racial hybridity and gender fluidity in Korean pop (K-pop) music performances challenge racialized gender norms in the West, such as feminine/masculine, white/black, heterosexual/homosexual, and colonial mimicry/contemporary minstrelsy, and (b) how colonial history influences East Asian and Western audiences’ different understandings of cultural appropriation and engenders intercultural (mis) communication on a global stage. Drawing on theories from theatre, dance, and performance studies, gender studies, critical race studies, media studies, and Asian studies, I offer close readings of dancers’ bodies, movements, and choreographies as well as audiovisual contents in select K-pop music videos. I also analyze audience reception from media coverage to global fans’ online comments around the world to see both local and global implications of K-pop. In their videos, K-pop performers move between enacting and negating whiteness, blackness, Asianness, and Koreanness with their fluid gender representations. I argue that these complex, intersectional, and often contradictory v stagings, which I call K-popscape, are unreadable in the West due to the pervasiveness (and limitations) of stereotypes about Asian Americans. vi Table of Contents Introduction: Re-constructing Koreanness through K-pop ......................................1 Chapter 1: Good Girls: SNSD and Being ‘Appropriately’ Feminine ....................44 Chapter 2: Bad Girls: CL and Masquerading Otherness .......................................91 Chapter 3: Queering Masculinity in K-pop Cross-dressing .................................144 Chapter 4: Queering Spectatorship: Androgyny and Western Female Fandom …………………………………………………………………………….178 Conclusion: Re-historicizing Cultural Appropriation in Globalization ...............208 Glossary ...............................................................................................................249 Bibliography ........................................................................................................250 Vita……. ..............................................................................................................280 vii Introduction: Re-constructing Koreanness through K-pop On August 2013, Korean pop star G-Dragon (GD), a member of the boy band Big Bang, was accused of wearing blackface. In his instagram, GD posted a picture of himself in black makeup putting a T-shirt on his head. In the picture, his skin is completely black and he stares at the camera with defiant eyes. When followers on his instagram circulated the picture online, the image evoked outrage among some of the U.S. audiences who saw the image as an unfortunate “attempt to show solidarity with the 1 Trayvon Martin memorial movement.” On the thread, respondents also criticized GD’s insensitivity. They argued that since GD has appropriated Hip Hop through his music, he should have respected and been knowledgeable about the history of black people, 2 including minstrelsy. Other respondents disagreed, noting that Korea does not have a minstrelsy tradition like the U.S., and Koreans hardly know about the Trayvon Martin case. A commenter says, s/he believes that GD's performance has nothing to do with American history “[b]ecause what looks undoubtedly wrong to others could also be different for others… [Koreans] also don’t have cultural practices of [minstrelsy] like 3 other countries who have festivals and such” (ID: Jazz1***). Responding to this controversy, YG Entertainment, the company that produced and groomed GD, explained that the whole thing was a “huge misunderstanding” and “completely wrong and taken 1 Sahar, “G-Dragon In Blackface Controversy.” Seoulbeats, http://seoulbeats.com/2013/08/g-dragon-in- blackface-controversy/ (accessed September 1, 2013). 2 In my dissertation, I use Hip Hop as a capitalized term instead of hip-hop, for Hip Hop has a broader signifier as a cultural form and more than a music genre. 3 Sahar, Ibid. 1 4 out of context.” According to YG Entertainment, GD’s black makeup was not a commentary on race or politics in the U.S. but a visual concept. For his upcoming album teaser Coup D'état, they explained, GD painted his face black, white, and red simply because he likes the three colors. The colors were nothing but the artist’s personal preference to symbolically visualize the idea of protest, the album’s main theme. I evoke this scene to highlight the ways that bodily signs, including cultural appropriation, are differently understood and can engender cross-cultural misunderstanding. GD’s black face controversy demonstrates how Koreans are easily subsumed under the umbrella term of Asian American. If GD was an Asian American, he should be more sensitive when painting his face with black and be aware of how performance embodied such racial inequality throughout history. But GD and his show do not aim to comment on racial politics or this particular issue in the U.S. US audiences’ responses to GD’s photo reveal that they largely conflate Korean with Asian Americans (or white Americans), projecting US history onto Korean bodies, and thus rendering Koreanness invisible to U.S. audiences. Something is missing in the discourse of understanding K-pop – social and historical contexts in Korea, and thus, Koreanness. How and why was GD’s bodily representation differently understood among the U.S. audiences? How does the history of each country influence and shape Korean actors and the U.S. audience’s different understanding? Was GD guilty of minstrelsy or did the U.S. audience project their color symbolism onto GD’s body? These questions surrounding the notion of cultural appropriation lie at the core of my exploration of 4 Marc Hogan, “G-Dragon’s Camp Says K-Pop Star Wasn’t Wearing Blackface.” SPIN, http://www.spin.com/articles/g-dragon-denies-blackface-k-pop-hoodie-facepaint-trayvon-martin/ (accessed August 1, 2013). 2 Korean pop, a highly hybridized form of Korean pop music and dance that pulls liberally from Western and Asian pop music traditions to stage complex and fluid representations of race, gender, and nationality on a global stage. This study stems from these moments of cultural appropriation, cross cultural misunderstanding, and discrepancy surrounding Korean pop (hereafter K-pop). In the dissertation, I utilize an interdisciplinary approach to focus on and analyze four K-pop artists/groups and their video performances: the girls group Girls’ Generation, the female singer CL, the male singer GD, and select K-pop fan made compilation videos and cross- dressing performances. The primary goal of my dissertation is to understand Korean identity in glocal contexts by analyzing K-pop. Korean identity can be understood from various perspectives. In my work, I focuse on racial and gender identities represented in contemporary Korean culture, and how its hybridity tells us about postcolonial status of the society. In a global context, I also examine the ways in which K-pop dancers achieve or fail to claim their Koreanness in a global context, negotiating between the hypervisibility of Asian Americanness and the invisibility of contemporary Korean identity. It seems obvious to state that K-pop dancers are not Asian Americans and do not share the same history. And yet, their bodies are often conflated with Asian American bodies and subject to American stereotypes about Asian Americans. I will suggest that, due to the collapsing of K-pop artists with Asian-Americans, U.S. audience reception has at times framed K-pop either as a form of contemporary minstrelsy or a postcolonial mimicry. This perspective, however, views K-pop through an American-centric lens, and