Backlash: The Role of the Asian Financial Crisis in the Feminization of Korean Ideals of Male Beauty
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It may be a little premature of me to announce the following news to readers, but then it did make my weekend, and for the sake of those of you who are unwise enough to read this blog at work then perhaps I should use the opportunity to push the rather explicit advertisement in the previous post down “below the page” sooner rather than later.
But seriously though, I am inordinately happy to announce that alongside fellow panelists and bloggers Roger Wellor, Gomushin Girl and Liminality I’ll be presenting my paper entitled “Backlash: The Role of the Asian Financial Crisis in the Feminization of Korean Ideals of Male Beauty” at the sixth International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) conference at Chungnam National University in Daejeon in August next year, and I’d be very happy to meet any readers while I’m there. I understand if you won’t be penciling anything in your 2009 diaries quite yet though, and so I’ll make sure to remind everyone again somewhat closer to the date.
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In the meantime, you may be interested in the abstract I wrote for it, which I plan to be the midst of expanding into a Master’s thesis by this time next year. While (naturally) rather academic-sounding, for readers unfamiliar with this post that ultimately led to it then it will probably be easier than reading than the 5100 words that I originally wrote on it there:
In the mid-1990s, the dominant images of men in Korean popular culture were of strong, masculine figures that protected and provided for women, mirroring the male breadwinner ethos that underlay Korea’s then prevalent salaryman system and which, by dint of being much larger and more integral to the Korean economy than the Japanese one with which it is most often associated, had a correspondingly larger hold on the Korean psyche. Despite this, in accounting for the complete switch of dominant images of men to effeminate, youthful “kkotminam” in just a few short years after the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98, what limited literature exists on evolving Korean sexuality and gender roles in the last decade seems to exhibit a curious blind spot as to possible economic and employment-related factors, instead attributing it to, variously, a rising general “pan-Asian soft masculinity”, the import of Western notions of metrosexuality, and particularly of Japanese ones of “bishōnen”.
In this paper, I begin by acknowledging the validity of these factors but argue that the dominance of Japan in East Asian cultural studies has led scholars to overemphasize the latter, in turn ascribing too much agency to Korean women in their late-teens and early-twenties that were the primary recipients of such Japanese cultural products as “yaoi” fan-fiction. This is anachronistic, as public displays and discussions of female sexuality and ideals of male beauty were in reality very much proscribed in Korea for unmarried women before the 2002 World Cup, the locus of which was primarily married women instead. Indeed, as I will next discuss, in the mid-1990s there was an sudden and intense public discourse on both generated by increasingly radical depictions of married women’s sex lives in books and films, partially reflecting the coming of the age of the first generation of Korean women to receive democratic notions of gender and family life through their schooling but then encountering the reality of Korean patriarchy in their marriages, and partially also the concomitant liberation represented by increased numbers of Korean women entering the workforce: small, but growing, and symbolically significant in that they vindicated decades of the relegation of feminist concerns to the wider aims of the democratization movement as a whole, with the understanding that they would be addressed upon its success.
It is in these contexts that the Asian Financial Crisis struck Korea, and married women in particular would be the first to be laid-off as part of restructuring efforts, with the explicit justification that they would be supported by their husbands. Rather than retaining and reaffirming breadwinner ideals of male beauty as encouraged however, in the final part of this paper I demonstrate how images of men in Korean popular culture were suddenly dominated by kkotminam and such indirect criticisms of salarymen as were permitted under prevailing public opinion. This was a natural reaction to circumstances, and I conclude that explanations for the shift that do not consequently take the role of the crisis as a catalyst into account are inadequate.
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In hindsight, my overall argument about the increasing popularity of feminine ideals of Korean male beauty – that it at least partially stemmed from a sense of backlash and anger by Korean married women at their mass lay-offs and so forth – could possibly have been made a little clearer in that last paragraph, but then I was only just shy of the 500 word limit, and I’m not sure that I could have fitted everything necessary in otherwise. But it did the job, and so naturally I plan to write a great deal about the subject here as I work up to my thesis proposal and the conference paper (the feedback would be very helpful, and much appreciated), beginning by belatedly finishing my original series on it hopefully sometime soon. Apologies for the very long delay to that, and to my one on the relationship between Korean militarism and gender relations also, but the former has evolved a great deal as you’ve seen, and the latter…well, I’ll explain (and hope to compensate for) the delay when I restart that also, hopefully before the end of the month.
Whoa, congratulations! If I’m around I’ll definitely make the trip for that.
Wow, sounds awesome. I’m looking forward to your posts on the topic.
Congratulations!
I’ve added you to my blogroll, by the way.
Thanks everyone!
I’m very much looking forward to reading through this as a future series here.
Congratulations!
Thanks, but actually I have already started it: Part One and Two are here and here. I meant in the post that I would be continuing it, and I have parts Three to Six planned at this stage, although that might change as I go along.
All..
we should plan some sort of drunken hootenanny after the panel presentation. This will be my triumphant return to Daejeon, after all.
If any of the other commenters are interested in this kind of academic tomfoolery, drop me a line (rwellor (at) spunangel (dot) com), as I plan to propose more panels in the next two years. It’s bonus points if you are NOT a US citizen. ;-)
Indeed to the first, although I hope we get the chance to drink again well before August! And does the latter mean you’ll be staying in Korea for the next couple of years then?
fascinating subject matter. when i read the blog post i thought to myself “wow this sounds like an academic paper not a blog entry!” and then i read on…^_^
good luck at the presentation!
Isn’t a “drunken hootenanny” redundant?^^
I look forward to reading and commenting on your paper. The weird ways the currency crisis affected me in December ’97 was one of the first indications that I was “no longer in Kansas”. It is also now a very live episode on the way to whatever this recession will become. It could just be prologue.
Yet, I would hope you wouldn’t put too much stock in academic activities and keep blogging. I understand the inclination to climb the greasy pole. But, instead of becoming a rent-grabbing parasite in the universities along with the other tenured detritus, please keep pushing the envelope of blogging and private enterprise.
I have a blog on resin ball jointed dolls, which are currently dominated by Korean manufacturers. The male dolls, have been all hyper-feminized, until recently. There now is a glimmer of more ‘manly’ dolls being made, though most still have pretty faces. The dolls are sculpted by both male and female artists.
The Korean dolls are definitely different form the Japanese dolls, especially the male ones, and they are collected all over the world. You might want to look into them a little.
Oh, the link to my site isn’t the doll site. Here:
http://www.collectacy.com/
If you want to see the work of different manufacturers, check out the BJD companies and retailers page. Different companies often do different types of dolls, but many of the most popular are the makers of boy dolls. Souldoll is a good one to look at, Luts, Dollmore, Soom (which is opening the 1st korean doll shop ever in Tokyo). Makers of more masculine dolls would be the new Raurencio Studio and Iplehouse just came out with a more male built body.
Douglaskev, thanks also.
Gomushin Girl, indeed, although I confess that I never heard of the word until now, and now having learned then I hope we can keep the folk singers to a minimum…
Vapella, thank you very much for mentioning the dolls: I would never have thought of them myself, but they do sound like they’re one manifestation of the phenomenon that I describe, and may provide some useful extra evidence for it.
Baltimoron, thanks to you also, and no need to worry, for I will always write and/or blog. But it’s about time I got paid to do that rather than screaming at intellectually-handicapped children in unheated, dirty classrooms every evening, and unfortunately merely having a blog doesn’t quite cut it for achieving that goal, especially in status-conscious Korea where a position in academia works wonders and everyone thinks that my blog is equivalent to their and 27 million other Koreans’ Cyworld “홈피”. So now that things have settled down with the new baby, then I’ll be making much more of an effort to make a name for myself next year, especially in other, more traditional forms of media.