UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Transnational Intimacies: Korean Television Dramas, Romance, Erotics, and Race A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Gender Studies by Min Joo Lee 2020 © Copyright by Min Joo Lee 2020 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Transnational Intimacies: Korean Television Dramas, Romance, Erotics, and Race by Min Joo Lee Doctor of Philosophy in Gender Studies University of California, Los Angeles, 2020 Professor Purnima Mankekar, Chair In this dissertation, I examine the gendered and racial politics of women’s transnational sex tourism. I draw on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with women from Europe and North America who travel to South Korea to form intimate relations with South Korean men in a phenomenon known as Hallyu tourism. Hallyu (also known as the Korean Wave) is a transnational phenomenon whereby people from all over the world consume South Korean popular culture including music, films, and television programs. In my dissertation, I focus on the transnational popularity of romantic South Korean television dramas and how they generate erotic desires in their viewers for South Korean men. I build on interdisciplinary debates in the fields of Gender Studies, Asian Studies, and Media Studies to examine the racial, gendered, and sexual politics of the Hallyu tourists’ erotic desires and their intimate relationships with South Korea men. I argue that these transnational relationships of intimacy produce racialized ii discourses of South Korean masculinity emerging at the intersection of South Korean cultural conceptions of gender and transnational discourses of race. Furthermore, I suggest that these intimate encounters between South Korean men and “Western” female Hallyu tourists compel us to reconfigure binary conceptions of West versus East, national versus transnational, sex versus romance, and masculine versus feminine. By analyzing why and how the Hallyu tourists use South Korean television dramas to racially eroticize South Korean men, I demonstrate the inextricability of erotics from race and gender. iii The dissertation of Min Joo Lee is approved. Lieba Bernice Faier Elizabeth A. Marchant John T Caldwell Purnima Mankekar, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2020 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments vi Vita vii CHAPTER 1: Introduction 1 CHAPTER 2: Romance and Masculinity in Korean Television Dramas 40 CHAPTER 3: Korean Television Dramas: Between the National and the 80 Transnational CHAPTER 4: Digitalized Intimacies of Hallyu 117 CHAPTER 5: The Politics of Interracial Relationships and Hallyu Tourists’ 157 Racialized Erotic Desires CHAPTER 6: Korean Men, Racialized Erotic Desires, and Whiteness 198 CODA: Soft Power, Netflix, and Hallyu 241 Bibliography 253 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I received various forms of help from countless people in the process of writing this dissertation. First and foremost, I want to thank my advisor, Professor Purnima Mankekar, for mentoring me. Through her mentorship, I learned how to conduct research and teach with passion. I also want to thank my dissertation committee members, Professors Lieba Faier, Elizabeth Marchant, and John Caldwell, who provided helpful suggestions throughout the dissertation writing process. I thank the UCLA Department of Gender Studies Staff, Jenna Miller-Von Ah, Richard Medrano, Van Do-Nguyen, and Samantha Hogan. I also want to thank the academics that I met at Williams College, my alma mater, and at various conferences and workshops who have provided me with mentorship, support, and constructive criticisms. My parents and relatives provided me with an immense amount of emotional support on my journey to acquiring a Ph.D. They have encouraged me to dream big but also to take care of myself during my journey to achieve my dreams. My friends and peers within and beyond the UCLA Department of Gender Studies were also there for me to celebrate achievements of various sizes, and I thank them for being there for me. Lastly, I thank the individuals who agreed to participate in my research. Without their candid comments and their willingness to let me into their lives, this research would have not come to fruition. This research was completed with financial support from UCLA including UCLA Center for the Study of Women Travel Grant, UCLA Charles E. and Sue K. Young Fellowship Awards, and the UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship. vi VITA EDUCATION 2016 M.A. Gender Studies, University of California, Los Angeles 2014 B.A. Comparative Literature and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Williams College vii Chapter 1 Introduction Beginning in the early twenty-first century, Korean television dramas gained transnational popularity. This phenomenon, called Hallyu, has many components ranging from Korean television dramas, K-pop, K-entertainment to Korean beauty products, fashion, language, and food. Reports by the Korean Trade Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA 2017) suggest that the direct and indirect profits from Hallyu make it one of the fastest-growing industries in Korea. As a case in point, the Korean romance drama Descendants of the Sun (2016) was exported to 27 countries, including China, France, Romania, Sweden, Spain, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Myanmar, Cambodia, and the US. The Korean Creative Content Agency (KOCCA 2014) estimates that more than 18 million US viewers regularly stream these dramas on their digital devices. According to the report, these viewers devote as much as ten hours a week to watching Korean television dramas online. Not only do the Hallyu fans stream the dramas, but some of them also invest an extensive amount of time and money to physically travel to Korea in a practice called Hallyu tourism. Approximately 12 million Hallyu tourists visit Korea each year, spurred by their love of Korean popular culture (Korea Tourism Organization 2013). 81% of Hallyu fans are not ethnically Korean (KOCCA 2014). Instead, a majority of them are primarily non-Korean Asian or white women in their teens or twenties (KOCCA 2014). This data indicates that Korean television dramas have grown from a national pastime maligned as “low-brow nonsense” to become the bedrock of the Korean economy and “soft power.” Here, soft power refers to the country’s ability to attract foreigners and global capital through positive images associated with the country (Nye 1 Jr 2008). Hallyu has enhanced Korean soft power in ways that facilitate the consumption of Korean popular culture by millions of people around the world. Among the many components of Hallyu, I focus primarily on Korean television dramas because they complicate the supposed binary between fantasy and reality. My field research, as well as research conducted by other scholars, shows that K-pop fandom is primarily based on the idolization of the celebrities (Liew 2013). K-pop fans go to concerts and fan meetings to be in the presence of their favorite idols (Kim, Mayasari, and Oh 2013); they memorize Korean lyrics so they can sing along to the music; and sometimes they “cover-dance” to the music videos by emulating the dance moves of the idols (Liew 2013). Their fandom primarily revolves around their idolization of the K-pop stars. On the other hand, celebrities are only a part of the reason for Korean television dramas’ transnational popularity. I suggest that the emotions portrayed and invoked by the television dramas are the key to their success: the melodramas and heart- pounding romantic comedies make viewers imagine and fantasize about Korea to the point that they travel to Korea to engage in intimate relationships with Korean men. Although previous scholarship on Hallyu primarily focused on fans and tourists from other Asian countries, Hallyu tourists come from all over the world (Park 2014, Takeda 2014, Iwabuchi 2013). Since Hallyu is often studied as an inter-Asian phenomenon, its influence on fans outside Asia has not been as thoroughly analyzed. I conducted ethnographic field research from 2017 to 2018 with heterosexual, white, female Hallyu tourists in their late teens to early twenties from Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Russia, Canada, and the US who traveled to South Korea to forge intimate relations with Korean men. It is not my intention to argue that the Hallyu fans from this vast array of nations and cultures all interpret Korean dramas in the same way or desire Korean men in a monolithic manner. After all, as Ien 2 Ang (1996) points out, transnationality does not lead to homogeneity; transnational media merely work to facilitate the interconnections of cultures. Instead, I ask, what is it about Korean television dramas’ depiction of romance and masculinity that cuts across various cultural backgrounds of these tourists to move them to seek intimacy with Korean men in their “real life”? My research is positioned in relation to interdisciplinary and feminist debates on transnationalism including transnational travel, media, and fandom. My work engages with theories on spreadable media (Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013, Curtin 2003) as well as transnational media (Chalaby 2005, Mankekar 2015). In conversation with these bodies of scholarship, I analyze how Korean television dramas, as transnational media, “travel” to different parts of the world and, in turn, how they facilitate the travel of fans who want to make their romantic fantasies come true. I build on the definition of fandom as “meaningful engagement and balancing of conflicting forces between self, fantasy