The Visual and Sartorial Grammar of Korean Street Fashion

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Much to my surprise, I have become known as a street fashion photographer. I express surprise at this only because I am actually not merely interested in clothing as fashion objects. I am more interested in clothing as wearable cultural texts that are important because clothing, taken as wearable cultural texts, is quite a special thing, a category worthy of special consideration. Clothing is special in that it is inherently personal in how the wearer makes an active choice to participate in a public, semiotic conversation in which fashion items not only have socio-cultural meaning, but the items themselves are chosen as part of a statement that says something about the wearer. Yet, on the flip side, fashion items are individual objects possessed of various meanings that have been societally assigned to them, much like words within a language, with the wearer choosing to construct these various objects into a greater whole, much like a speaker constructs words s/he learned elsewhere into a sentence. There are grammatical rules that govern the sentences we make, such that they are understandable to other speakers of the language, but we are free to make the statements we want. We can play with the rules, make puns, construct poems, or even choose to obfuscate meaning for rhetorical purposes. And there are myriad styles of speech, some formal, some filled with slang, and some that even purposely violate grammar and usage rules so as to make a certain kind of point. But inevitably, we tend to know what the speaker is trying to say, even if it is unconventional or even sometimes difficult to decipher. And it is sometimes in the violation of these rules, or their reworking or purposeful misapplication, that the fun in language lies.

The classic 1959 Gwendolyn Brooks poem "We Real Cool" is a quick and easy, and greatly apropos, example to illustrate this idea, full as it is of then-transgressive ebonics and subject matter, about a group of young black men who decide to skip school to play in a pool hall:

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We   
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We   
Die soon.

The poet herself is the first speaker. The second speaker is the actor Morgan Freeman. We Real Cool By Gwendolyn Brooks THE POOL PLAYERS. SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL. We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June.

In this way, this picture embodies this kind of transgressive, youthful daring as expressed in both the people's actions described in the poem, as well as the way the poem employs and repurposes language to make its point. 

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Understood with this working metaphor -- the sartorial statement as a concrete, conscious expression, especially as one of identity -- it should become easy to see a good photographic portrait of such extraordinarily expressive individuals as visual records of these various sartorial statements and conversations. And in this way, clothing acts as both individual and social texts worthy of study and recording, and systematized re-presentation. 

I found this young woman, Gyu-eun, a 3rd-year high school student presently in the final stretch of preparing for the all-important Korean college entrance exam coming up this November 17th, of particular interest this past Seoul Fashion Week (SS 2016) mostly because of her inversion of a basic piece of fashion grammar by her wearing of her shirt backwards. It is a surprising choice, and technically "wrong" (bad fashion grammar), but it works quite well and naturally to the point that I did not consciously notice the choice until I had already decided to start shooting her. Subconsciously, I may have noticed something peculiar, as it may have caused my initial interest in her look, but it was not a conscious reason I chose to photograph her. Her goal of appearing fashionable and unique was accomplished, but with "bad" fashion grammar. Still, much like the Gwendolyn Brooks poem mentioned above, it succinctly and successfully conveys the point, and with a great deal of eloquence that cannot be conveyed with mainstream, "proper" grammar. To wit, "She real cool."

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In short, the new Korean paepi (패션피플=패피=Korean for "fashion people" or its shortening pae +pi) are engaged in a creative remixing of sartorial grammar on both the individual and group levels.  In this sense, they are being quite creative as they express their individuality in a social space that has been long regulated by not just other members of society, but by even the state itself. The sartorial realm has become both a site of identity assertion and contestation for paepi youth, complicated yet even more by the consumptive and commercial nature of fashion as a social endeavour. 

Their power isn't in each one being the best dresser ever, or being completely original, but in the act of dressing up itself, in the choice to create a new identity related to the consumption and wearing of clothing. From this culture of consumption, they've created a new class of creative consumption, of asserting identity through clothing in a way new to Korean society.

In this sense, the creative act here Like a 1930's jazz musician in a club, or a early 1980's rapper performing at a local block party, it's not just what they're performing, but the social bravery in the performance that sets the paepi apart, that gives the creative act of riffing or remixing meaning.

Why Street Fashion Is Sociologically Important

An article you should take a look at and an idea worthy of your intellectual consideration:

Fashion and the ways people dress are not only decided by the weather: because there are clothes you must wear and others that you just cannot appear in public anymore with, these seemingly individual decisions are in fact some truly social facts, as Émile Durkheim would probably have said. Moreover, the studying of fashion as a social phenomenon that influences the clothes we decide to buy, wear, and even be proud of (at least for some time) is possibly one of the easiest examples of what sociology is all about; with, in the case of fashion, numerous references to culture, norms, representations, consumption, social roles and models. Whenever a social scientist has to explain to any newcomer or non-sociologist the basics and purpose of the sociological science as a discipline, the understanding of fashion movements should be among the first examples that come to mind. Being ‘fashionable’ or, on the contrary, ‘out-of-fashion’ are the immediate consequences of judgments that are determined and limited by the cultural norms to which one belongs, at a given moment. Hence, whenever some people look at photographs of their youth, they are often ashamed of their previous looks and clothes even though they thought then they were absolutely à la mode.

http://soc.sagepub.com/content/47/2/407.short

"Appearance Stratification and Identity: Fashion as the Clearest Example of What Sociology is All About" (Yves Laberge 2013 47: 407 Sociology)

CL, Dr. Pepper, and Gendered Mastery

South Korea (hereafter "Korea") is a supreme cultural appropriation machine and CL is its prophet. CL, née Lee Chaelin (hereafter, CL), is a master of appropriating African-American culture with apparent impunity, on two levels. First, on the basic level at which the term "cultural appropriation" is often tossed around in public discourse on hip hop and rap music as performed by non-black actors, there is the level of the semiotic symbols and other concrete bits of hip hop-ricana that associated with the deliberate signification and invocation of authentic blackness within genre products or cultural products that strive to be included within the genre. A second, more subtle mode of appropriation is at the level of signifying authenticity or even a mode of authenticity signification itself. Modes of signification themselves are what is being appropriated, as opposed to mere objects or discrete signs piece-by-piece:

Modes of Authenticity Signification

Universal modes (inbound)
a) fictive criminality
b) field mastery

CL-specific hybrid modes (outbound)
c) symbolic misogyny  
d) mock ebonics (in Korea, specifically, Kebonics)

Beginnings and Motivations

I am not a K-pop fan. This is not to say that I do not occasionally enjoy songs that bubble to the top of the genre's popularity, but I generally do not keep up with any particular acts nor keep track of the artistic trajectories of its most popular performers. While I was indeed struck by the virtuosic qualities of CL as far back as her 2ne1, girl-group days and her solo hit "Bad Girl", I engage with CL as a rap artist in the context of my far older status as a rap fan from the time of my childhood and the time of the genre's popular quickening in the mid-to-late 1980s. As a fan, my priorities have always been lyricism, swagger, and musicality, in about that order, meaning that foundational male acts such as Eric B. & Rakim, LL Cool J, the Fat Boys, and Run-DMC form the outlines of my hip-hop habitus. When it comes to female MCs on the mic from that era who met my set of musical standards and priorities, acts such as Salt& Pepa, MC Lyte, and Queen Latifah informed the development of my musical tastes and preferences, especially as they find gendered form in my choices to purchase or otherwise consume their musical products. This is the way I end up engaging with CL as a rap performer, even in Korea. So her lyricism, swagger, and musicality played a big role in determining that I would really connect with "Dr. Pepper" when it came across my desk in 2015.

This article asserts that CL is charting a strategically wise, semiotically deliberate path out of the figurative building of K-pop as a genre and Korea itself, even as she utilizes "street cred" gained by recognition in the core of authentic hip-hop in the US market as the center, which thereby gives her even more "street cred" back home in the Korean hip-hop periphery. To paraphrase the words of the immortal Rakim, one of rap and hip-hop culture's founders, "CL gets stronger as CL gets bolder."

But what is the source of her boldness? I assert that indeed, as CL engages more directly with non-K-popped, foreign elements of the musical genre in which CL is seen -- even (and especially) in Korea -- to function, as in the underground form known as "trap" music, she bolsters her perceived level of hip-hop, foreign-originated authenticity. this is most clearly seen in her 2015 video "Dr. Pepper."

The official music video for Diplo X CL X RiFF RAFF X OG Maco - Doctor Pepper. Stream the full track and other Artist releases here or show support on iTunes.

A big question, beyond what's going on in a single CL video, in how Korean popular music gets away with so much “cultural appropriation” without rebuke or much pushback from hip hop fans who often point out the inherent contradictions in the process of appropriation. Why Korean cultural appropriation of African-American culture in K-pop seems to work without arousing much ire in the United States is because it is a fairly obvious borrowing, in which the borrowing itself is always inherently attributed, and instances of this borrowing is constantly linguistically and culturally marked. Instants of faux ebonics-inflected Koreanized English -- what this paper will call "Kebonics" -- deployment mark both Derridan différance and a connection with a semiotically-defined, authentic Black Hip Hop imaginary. This différance is underlined also by the status of South Korea's relationship with the United States, it's important to remember that this is not a case of a white American overculture borrowing African-American cultural forms and calling them its own, which is why its so irksome and an issue in the USA, but borrowing any aspect of black culture and using it in a Korean context is different because the act of borrowing is obvious as the borrowing isn't perceived as just African-American, but rather American, and hence a part of the neo-colonial US-Korea relationship. In short, unlike the American overculture discovering Elvis after an appropriative act of borrowing down the power hierarchy, a Korean musical act channeling the style and execution of American hip hop is borrowing up in very essentially different power relationship to the culture at the periphery and the one that defines the center of the metropole. In short, unlike the American overculture discovering Elvis after an appropriative act of borrowing down the power hierarchy, a Korean musical act channeling the style and execution of American hip hop is borrowing up in very essentially different power relationship to the culture at the periphery and the one that defines the center of the metropole. Another interesting semiotic strategy employed in CL’s videos that aid in the appropriation of African American music culture while also bolstering the perceived authenticity of the text as part of the same conversation with it, is the way she employed the same “fictive criminality” that US rapper Ice Cube and NWA demonstrated in declaring their own mastery of the field and art, as well as over female bodies, is by the linking of said fictive criminality with the objectification of said female bodies as a sign of their virility and male power. Indeed, this is not very different from many videos in the genre, or from what CL does in her own videos. This is what helps establish her as authentic, both in Korea and outside. 

On Authenticity

Here, I take Kembrew McLeod's cogent and useful discussion of the notion of authenticity in hip-hop from his article "Authenticity WIthin Hip-Hop and Other Cultures Threatened with Assimilation" as a point of theoretical departure. Mcleod says that "...invocations of authenticity..." occurs not just in relation to hip-hop but can "...also take place in other cultures that, like hip-hop, are threatened with assimilation by a larger, mainstream culture." (Mcleod, 134) It is here that I would make a departure by way of making additions to his ideas while also linking the definition to the Korean case.  I would add that Korean hip-hop not a culture dealing discursively with assimilation into a larger mainstream, but necessarily functions within the context of the Korean historical concept of sadaejuui (사대주의), as part of a constant struggle to prove itself as legitimate both to Koreans at the periphery and American hip-hop at the center.

Power, Politics, and Sadaejuui
What one must know about Korean culture vis a vis hip-hop is that certain key socio-historical frames of thinking frame the way Koreans approach the genre. Korea in the modern era and for a good several centuries before it has always been affected by colonial or neo-colonial relationships with vastly more powerful sponsor states. This was true for China, which was never a conqueror or a sovereign over ancient Korea (Joseon), but a suzerain. The first great articulator (and architect) of modern Korean history, Shin Chae-ho, called this relationship (and the lackeyesque attitude/identity it engendered) sa-dae-ju-ui, a four character Chinese term that means "deference to the greater power") "Korea" had enjoyed a mostly beneficial suzerainty relationship with "China" for a huge stretch of historical time by the time imperial Japan formally annexed Korea in 1910 and officially ended Korea's political independence and forced Korea into a traditional, exploitative colonial  relationship that would last until the Japanese empire's resource needs clashed with that of the United States, causing the ill-fated political decision to "brush back" the US with the attack on Pearl Harbor, which launched a war that would end with the nuclear obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the end of the Japanese military empire, and suddenly thrust a newly liberated South Korea into the controlling hands of its former vanqquisher's vanquisher. To allow sadaejuui to make sense of all of this, as the greater power changed from China to Japan to the United States, the language of power changed from Chinese to Japanese to English. The race of the Powerful Ones changed, as did the ideologies which justified and rationalized their cultural power, and the common sense ways of making sense of the world also changed, from the pure Han Chinese ideal that overlapped quite well with Korean notions of ethnicity and aesthetics, to one that privileged the pure, Sun God Ameterasu-descended, pure Yamato race of Japan, to that of the American notion that "White is Right", since the fact that the racial hierarchy of their new occupiers mattered in how things got done and who got to do them was not lost on Koreans. The fact that few blacks were officers were black and almost all blacks were enlisted men was not lost on Koreans, and even Korean prostitutes knew not to cross the racial lines dictated by their clientele; you either took black guys or white soldiers, not both. Add to this the powerful messages sent by Hollywood films and American television, magazines, and popular music and it makes for quite a heady Cocktail of Western Power. 

The semiotic language of sadaejuui is one that CL speaks well, as she constantly works to establish and maintain her popularity by linking herself to both people and practices from the (African-)American center. Indeed, CL is fluent in the literal and semiotic "language of power" that Khip-hop must speak in order to be viable not just outside its borders, but within Korea itself. 

CL's "Dr. Pepper" video is again instructive here. . A lot of different keywords and bits of theory could be invoked here, several of which have recently entered the popular discourse and theoretical imagination: objectification and commodification of the female body, the heterosexual male gaze (even if it isn't employed by a male heterosexual), and sexual fetish totems. Structurally, CL in "Dr. Pepper" is no different from how Ice Cube and NWA demonstrated their mastery of the field and art, as well as over female bodies, by linking fictive criminality with the objectification of said female bodies as a sign of their virility and male power. Indeed, this is not very different from many videos in the genre. Behold, a classic example from the genre and anothet exemplary work, NWA's "Hello":

[N.W.A] Hello [Ice Cube, Dr.Dre & MC Ren] 投稿者 molotov87

For CL to utilize American authenticity modes that in her videos, such as she did in "Bad Girl", could potentially be too much for a Korean audience,  yet utilizing women in the same way in her video is still (perhaps paradoxically) still a natural fit. This semiotic deployment of the woman's body is both uncannily unfamiliar yet eerily familiar. It is a display of her mastery over her sector of the rap field, and the use of dominated female bodies seems pretty semiotically familiar to a South Korean audience that is quite used to this formula as it evolved in the United States, the culture in which the form originates.

CL NEW SOLO SINGLE '나쁜 기집애 (THE BADDEST FEMALE)' Available on iTunes @ http://smarturl.it/CLTheBaddestFemale #2NE1 #CL #나쁜기집애 #THEBADDESTFEMALE More about 2NE1 @ http://www.yg-2ne1.com/ http://www.facebook.com/2ne1 http://www.youtube.com/2ne1 http://iTunes.com/2NE1 http://weibo.com/2ne1asia http://twitter.com/ygent_official

What I point out in the CL video above is the degree to which it successfully appropriates all kinds of cultural elements that are indeed alien to anything going on in Korean society and are loaded with meaning from value systems that are at least somewhat to completely incompatible with Korean society. Having a gold "grill" (with fangs, no less!), lascivious play with and display of a riding crop, which is a mainstay of S/M culture, the obvious nod to chola culture with the lowrider bicycle and the apparent moment of arrest by the police, which all adds up to a nod in the direction of LA gang culture, as well as urban life in LA, especially as punctuated by the allusion to actual biker gangs, then the performance of a dance "gang" with masks and apparently "dangerous" wear and moves. It is all topped off by a shot of  Adidas shoes tied together and thrown over a wire, which is a staple in urban, gang culture as a monument to someone dearly departed. None of these elements are familiar to the average Korean viewer and in fact likely feel quite foreign objects that mark foreign practices from foreign -- nay, American -- cultural contexts. 

The fact of the foreignness of these objects is not lost on a Korean viewer. Indeed, in the overlapping historio-psychological modes of Korean thinking of sadaejuui and modern Korean post-coloniality, it is the particular way in which they are foreign that is important. This is the key way that Korean hip hop at the periphery approaches the American center. As non-black potential approriators, Koreans are coming at the center from the figurative and literal bottom and from the far outside, whereas someone like Eminem comes into the field from above, and from the inside of a culture that is already sensitive to the issue of whitely-raced appropriators. 

CJ CGV 상영전 광고영상

The "Global Fetish"
And yes, Koreans had to imbibe that special cocktail of geopolitical-cultural power, to drink that special flavor of the neo-colonial Kool-Aid. And it was within that general historiopsychological frame of sadaejuui that Korean national deveopment took place, with the concrete assistance and support of the USA (and former colonizer Japan, many Koreans like to conveniently forget), while that development process founf internal validation through external markers. Symbolic GDP levels of 10,000 or 20,000 per capita GDP were important psychological moments for Korea, as were the 1988 Olympics, which was both an impetus and a symbol for Korea becoming modern, or at least, being seen that way. This sadaejuui pattern of thinking backgrounded everything Koreans did on their own, internally, with validation of these efforts coming from the outside, most importantly, the White West, and even more importantly, the USA. So, as the "global" has become more than just a pipe dream and a reality for a Korea with not just a highly developed infrastructure in heavy industry, factory production, and ideologies of anti-Communism that have served the Republic well, but which now has a highly developed popular culture infrastructure in music, film, food, and fashion, there is now a discernible "global fetish" that undergirds and validates Korean cultural projects. The recent "Premium Korea" ad from the CJ group is a perfect case with which to illustrate how sadajuui has evolved into a "global fetish" (a brilliant concept articulated by scholar Kim Hyunjung) that both undergirds and validates all commercial and cultural endeavors in Korea, as well as the Korean national project itself. 

Put simply, Korean people are quite used to bright and shiny, obviously and incongruously foreign things sticking out from Korean cultures, aesthetics, and things; indeed,  from Koreanness itself. And the way the sticking out happens is, for the most part, shot through with positive feelings, positive connotations. Ever since the beginning of Korean modernity itself -- and one shouldn't forget that the very ideas of progress, enlightenment, and modernity themselves were initially foreign concepts from outside, mostly filtered through Japan -- foreign things have always been associated with things that were generally understood to be good. (reference Andre Schmid's Korea Between Empires here.)

Then Korea enters its quite accidental encounter with America in the 1950s and ends up under the control and in the thrall of the notion of America and her things. American technologies, buildings, fashions, music, aesthetics, ideas, and even American English. And things American are not only obviously superior, but they are good. 

Americans, on the other hand, are generally used to a different relationship with foreign otherness within the realm of popular culture and aesthetic concerns. Americans generally don't like to watch subtitled films, listen to pop music in languages they don't understand, or wear fashions that obviously come from specific other places. Now, when one adds on the historically specific encounter with an entity such as Frenchness, the feelings become suddenly, starkly (and perhaps even viciously) negative. The French language itself sounds effeminate and offensively foreign to American ears in a way that Italian or Spanish do not (those languages are a whole separate set of stories), the idea of sporting French fashions seems pompous and even ostentatious, and one must consider the way that the descriptor French itself carries the notion of something done wrong or even perversely. The "French kiss" is a lewd, tongue-filled verson of a normal, decent kiss, since the French were known for doing things more lasciviously and decadently --immorally -- than Americans thought of themselves as doing. This is the particular way that Americans constructed Americanness against this particular other. Whatever the reasons or particular examples, the general Korean cultural attitude toward a certain kind of otherness vis a vis the great powers that have at different times exerted great influence over Korea has historically been one of deferential respect, especially as other great powers have carried with/through their influence ideas such as Enlightenment, Progress, or Modernity. Clear examples of how certain attitudes and positive "gusts of popular feeling" rode along with the concrete objects or technologies that marked these concepts were the Newspaper, the idea of National History, and the Department Store, respectively. In fact, one can argue (as scholar Katarzyna J. Cwiertka has brilliantly talked about in an essay called "Dining Out in the Land of Desire: Colonial Seoul and the Korean Culture of Consumption"). 

Indeed, as several top Korean Studies scholars of modernity in Korea have argued elsewhere, even the very notions of modern identity and subjectivity themselves found expression and focus through now-seemingly-mundane things/places/concepts such as the department store, the radio, the movie theater, the public school, or even popular notions, such as the "modern girl" or "culture" -- and it should not escape the astute reader's notice that many of these concepts revolve centrally around new forms of modern media and modern modes of economic consumption. None of this relationship between what "historical materialist" historians such as the infamous Karl Marx call the fundamental and concrete, economic base of society (you could think of this as one might the hardware of a computer, which is one way I tell my students to think about it) that largely creates/controls/influences the malleable, less concrete stuff atop it (one might think of this as the "software") called the superstructure has changed much. This is what Cultural Studies folks believe, and how such scholars think -- that the stuff in our heads, or that comes from our heads, such as found in ideas or beliefs (ideology), things with messages such as novels, movies, and music videos (cultural texts), or even practices (say, like bowing to one's elders, trends in popular dance) all exist within the bounds of social norms (rules to live by) that support the smooth operation of the base. 

Yes, even -- and perhaps especially -- everyday fashion. If say, one lives within an economy defined by consumer capitalism that encourages -- nay, relies upon -- people consuming things to keep the fires burning and the wheels turning, and one of the popular impetuses of buying is argued to be that one's identity can best be defined through what one buys (such as in cell phone cases, t-shirts, or even the clothing one buys that define "looks" that identify our affinities, such as in "punk" or "goth"), it is easy to see why this kind of behavior bolsters a value that helps keep all kinds of consumption happening and seen as a positive social good. This is a Cultural Studies way of looking at say, Korean street fashion as a cultural text, as a social and economic activity that helps keep the machine of the base humming and thrumming and helps everything in society just make sense. 

In this video made by BIGBANG, one can see the particular Korean expression of this semiotic language of masculinized mastery in therap field in not only the rappers' domination of all the women in the video as servile sexual objects, but also in the way nationality is employed in this process, as the fact that modern versions of the Korean traditional hanbok are being worn by the Caucasian, western women as they playfully indulge the men their sexual flirtations is one lost on nary a single Korean viewer. This is a semiotic wink to the strong message here that a masculine Korea has dominated the West as symbolized by the sartorial domination of its women, as they wear the feminine hanbok even as the men wear exaggerated forms of  western dress. Indeed, the Korean male dominating the women of the metropole is as significant to the solidification of their assertions of internationalized male mastery as it is to the vainglorious drive to be seen as an internationally recognized Korean musical act. It all kind of blends together. It is here that I am reminded that there is an entire genre of pornography dedicated entirely to the idea of power play through clothing, with abbreviations such as CMNF (Clothed Male Naked Female) and ENF (Embarassed Naked Female). 

Available on iTunes @ http://smarturl.it/BIGBANG_M #‎BIGBANG‬ ‪#‎빅뱅‬ #BAEBAE ‪#‎BIGBANGMADE‬ ‪#‎MADESERIESM‬ More about BIGBANG @ http://ygbigbang.com/ http://www.facebook.com/bigbang http://www.youtube.com/BIGBANG http://sptfy.com/BIGBANG http://twitter.com/ygent_official

But back to CL's video here: I think she's also channeling the attitude of Trina, who is definitely "da baddest bitch" and is indeedis the archetype of contemporary rap female baddassery in the rap field in the United States. She sings the anthem of a masculinized mastery in rap that has truly been flipped onto its back and thrown in the face of the men who have antagonized her.

Music video by Trina performing Da Baddest Bitch. Off the album Da Baddest Bitch. © 2000 Atlantic

Trina here does it in the way that Americans can accept and let her get away with, but CL could never go this far, at least not in Korean culture,  unless it becomes a runaway hit and she can get away with overt rejection of male supremacy in Korea under the protection of the global gaze, in the same way that PSY got away with murder here with his own runaway hit videos. 

Trina is someone with whom CL must surely be familiar, especially in that her own music video "the baddest girl" seems to be functioning in the same mode (and even share the same music video titles) of social pushback against traditional male-defined roles of femininity.

CL NEW SOLO SINGLE [나쁜 기집애 (THE BADDEST FEMALE)] ▶ iTunes: http://smarturl.it/CLTheBaddestFemale ▶ eBay: http://stores.ebay.com/YG-Entertainment ▶ YG-eshop: http://www.ygeshop.com ▶ YG-eshop (China): http://cn.ygeshop.com For More Information @ http://www.facebook.com/2ne1 http://twitter.com/ygent_official http://me2day.net/ygonair http://www.yg-2ne1.com App Store: http://goo.gl/l9TU6 Google Play: http://goo.gl/UiEn © YG Entertainment Inc. All rights reserved.

But of course CL could never take her assertions of sexuality and throwing that back in the face of male sexual power in quite the same literal and direct way, which is why it's channeled through traditional symbols of sexual ownership, namely the barely clad girls writhing in front of the camera in her Dr. Pepper video at the top of this post, as ubiquitous symbols of her mastery. 

Semiotically, there's actually quite a bit going on here. One thing that strikes me about this video is the fact that she is the only woman amongst every female in the video who gets to wear high heels, which is very symbol of female sexual power. It strikes me that all of the other women, the backup dancers on the ground, are shown without their faces and stripped of any symbol of female sexual assertiveness. In a way, the only women who are stripped of that power and opened to the mastery of others as represented by the heterosexual male gaze, are the women writhing on the ground, and this imagery makes it very clear that the women who are presented semiotically as signs/accoutrements of male mastery, very much does not include CL, who literally stands on top of things, performing and laying down the raps with the other male rappers featured in the video. She is not a girl who gets fucked but does the fucking, along with the men. IN this sense, the aesthetic deployment here is one found in CMNF (Clothed Male Naked Female) pornography. Such an aesthetic was not lost on Robin Thicke in his photo shoot for Treats! Magazine, a photo shoot and set of semiotic, sartorial ideas that was the inspiration for his music video "Blurred Lines."

This is a behind the scene video (clean) from the cover shoot of Treats! Issue 6. To see the uncensored full version go to http://treatsmagazine.com "Blurred Lines" Has nothing on this!! Music by: Skrillex - Dive Bomb Provided by: Jingle Punks Photography: Steve Shaw Video: Michael Brillantes & Jim Dziura Video Production: Mike Welch Fashion Stylist: Arturo D.

Indeed, the interplay between clothing and power is apparent in Thicke's final video, in which he is clothed in the ultimate embodiement of male power, in a classic dark gray suit, open-collared black shirt, and aviator glasses. The women are obviously objects of his gaze and control, and are conspicuously unclothed. CL employs this mode of sartorial domination in her Dr. Pepper video, to great effect. This mode of semiotic employment is one not lost on the viewer, even if the particular points of its deployment are not consciously obvious. Indeed, the meta-argument in the symbolic empowerment of the men in the actual defrocking of all the women in Thicke's video speaks to a visible, visceral sexual domination of women in that video, and is a semiotic mode that CL deploys quite well in her own video. 

On "Cultural Appropriation"
But a big question, beyond what's going on in CL's video, in how Korean popular music gets away with so much cultural appropriation without rebuke or much pushback from hip hop fans who often point out the inherent contradictions in the process of appropriation. Why Korean cultural appropriation of African-American culture in K-pop seems to work without arousing much ire:

It's an inherently conscious cultural appropriation.
It's a fairly conscious process, in which the cultural borrowing is always inherently attributed. In the case of South Korea's relationship with the UNited States, it's important to remember that this is not a case of a white American overculture borrowing African-American cultural forms and calling them its own, which is why its so irksome and an issue in the USA, but borrowing any aspect of black culture and using it in a Korean context is different because the act of borrowing is obvious as the borrowing isn't perceived as just African-American, but rather American, and hence a part of the neo-colonial US-Korea relationship. In short, unlike the American overculture discovering Elvis after an appropriative act of borrowing down, a Korean musical act channeling the style and execution of American hip hop is borrowing up in very essentially different power relationship to the culture at the periphery and the one that defines the center of the metropole. 

A Point of departure
A point of departure for CL, as well as a turning point in K-pop....

"Passing Through: Existential Authenticity in the Korean Street Fashion Practices of Chinese Tourists"

Three Korean nationals wear the (now trendy) hanbok in Insadong, Seoul, which is a prime "arena of the authentic" in Korea, where the hanbok has long been a semiotic marker for Korean Tradition. In a Society of the Spectacle, even the Traditional has become just another referent in a sea of symbols that have become equivocated into meaninglessness, and just another element to be recycled into the relentless, all-consuming maw of the Trend Machine.

Ning Wang (1999) provides a lot of the theoretical undergirding for this paper in his explication of what he calls "existential authenticity" in tourism studies. In observing and interacting with young subjects as a street photographer in Seoul, I have increasingly come into contact with seemingly Korean subjects around popular tourist sites who turn out to be Chinese nationals who  are merely in Korean dress.

Unlike traditional Chinese tourists who seem content to sightsee the city of Seoul as a site of many toured objects, there is a sizeable number of tourists from China who actively engage in the much more participatory act of finding trendy Korean clothing, wearing them, and experiencing Korea as an apparent Korean. The act of passing -- no matter how superficially -- as a Korean seems to add quite a bit of existential authenticity to the tourism experience in Korea. Initial conversations with several subjects has yielded the existence of an industry  dedicated to providing Chinese tourists with this experience of passing through Korea as a Korean. 

Wang, N. (1999). "RETHINKING AUTHENTICITY IN TOURISM EXPERIENCE." Annals of Tourism Research 26(2): 349-370.

Background to the Study, from a Stunning Realization

I initially stumbled across the phenomenon of Chinese tourists “passing” as Korean locals as a street photographer shooting a story for the Huffington Post’s Style section, a story on the styles of the 2015 summer focusing on Ewha Women’s University in Seoul as a representative site of young female sartorial consumption. As an investigator and photographer, my goal was to identify the most common (frequently occurring) and representative examples of Korean summer 2015 fashions of the Seoul streets for the story. With my team of assistants/intern/students, we selected a young woman in an American football jersey dress who seemed the absolute epitome of that style of the time. 

However, I was surprised to learn from our short interaction in Korean that not only was she a Chinese national but that she was on a short trip for shopping, and was wearing the dress, shoes, and other items she had bought on the very trip she was on. It was, however, our very next subject, who brought about the moment of realization that was the impetus for the writing of the present article. 

On the same day and search for photographic subjects, we encountered two seemingly Korean young women dressed in matching trend items of the day, two sports jersey-style tops and a mass market approximation of the homemade “Daisy Duke” extremely short pants, made in the style of jean pants cut into shortsso short that the pockets extend below the home-hewn hemline, or alternatively, rolled up that short.

From "Existential" to "Performative" Authenticity

And upgrade from "existential authenticity" -- "performative authenticity": an integrated notion that draws heavily on Judith Butler’s notion of identity performance, and Bourdieu’s field theory and habitus, and conveys the “transposition of objective structures of the field into subjective practice of the individuals.”(Zhu)

This Is Where It Gets Queer

This is where I take a sharp departure into the seemingly unusual theoretical toolbox of psychology and what is now called queer studies. Important to the notion of “performative authenticity” is where the performance of particular acts imbued with identity-relevant symbolic meaning are the points through which individuals can reach — and actively maintain — a state of “existential authenticity”. It must be achieved and maintained through performative acts. In this sense, I argue that there is a hugely useful theoretical parallel between male-to-female transvestism and cosplay. 

Magnus Hirschfeld is the legendary physician/sexologistwho was a “key player in the development of taxonomies of sexual identities and who coined the terms “transvestite” and “transsexual.” This is where Hirschfeld’s data becomes useful as a parallel case of “performative authenticity”, where queer theory can combine with Butlerian critical theory and lead us to some useful insights regarding the question of dress and the performance of imagined identities. In this sense, the cases aren’t all that different (Chinese or even modern Koreans wearing a hanbok, cosplay, and transvestism) and stand in a relationship of useful parallel. So, it's time to talk about sex -- very queer sex -- as a performative act that defines a state of being.

This is where we get to the meat of the matter. Prior to the work of Magnus Hirschfeld, Freudian psychology was too focused on "fetish" as the way of explaining (largely male) crossdressing; it was supposedly an act related to the sexual excitement had in response to an object that itself was imbibed with special sexual meaning due to its symbolic associations with the person it represented (often a mother, lover, or other object of sublimated sexual desire). But Hirschfeld had a different insight. He held that his largely "heterosexual" male interviewees didn't express symbolic, fetishistic desire to touch, wear, or masturbate upon certain physical objects (which were usually items of women's clothing), but they were actually objects that enabled fleeting yet intense moments of being women. Importantly, these were usually "women" in some idealized, fantasy form (an innocent child, prostitute, or respectable Lady) and often such women as engaged in fantastical moments of extreme being female in the context of hypersexualized, often pornographic notions of femininity, such as being forced into prostitution or being raped. Besides these fleeting instants of femininity, most men describing such sexually motivated feelings of authenticity as women emphasize their extreme distaste (or disgust at) for the idea of having sex with a man as a man. It is apparent that the pleasure in sexual congress comes from the pleasure in achieving authenticity as a woman through the performance of womanness as defined through clothing, as opposed to the sexual acts themselves.  

If the achievement of authenticity and the pleasure in passing is not something that is easy to maintain as a passive, static state, but is instead something that requires continuous effort though the constant performance of meaningful acts that actively define that existential state of being is something that nominally heterosexual male crossdressers do through clothing, the parallel to another situation in which sartorial practices define the achievement and maintenance of a state of pleasurable passing as defined through performativity -- Chinese tourists in Korea passing as Korean -- becomes clear. My own ethnographic interactions and interviews suggest this is a  major factor in why and how Chinese tourists come to Korea. 

Itaewon, Christmas Eve. I spy a trifecta of trendy Korean fashion items from the cab and my amazingly speedy and persuasive assistant Teenie is on the ground in an instant, and has them in a verbal headlock enough for me to swoop in with the camera and start shooting. But little did we know that the pair was a couple of Chinese tourists, and since TEENIE is from Hong Kong, well, everything fell into place from there. They initiated that "everybody" does like they do, which is hit the Korean streets shopping for clothes, put them on, then start touring kora AS Korean people.

Koreans, Tradition, and Arenas of the Authentic

It occurs to me that not only is there a well-defined notion of the Authentic in korean contemporary culture -- usually defined as things associated with a constructed notion of "Tradition" in Korea and with their many sartorial, fetish markers -- but there are actual arenas of the Authentic. These are geographic areas in Korea that are metonyms of the Traditional, such as Gyeongbuk Palace in Seoul. It is my argument that this explains the recent huge uptick in the sartorial practice of wearing hanbok in the vicinity of as well as inside traditional structures. In a tourist economy in which where natives and tourists are both engaged in a struggle to achieve a pleasure in performing an imagines Authentic (whether that be defined as a mere Korean or more ideally, a Traditional Korean), this points to a multi-layered kind of phenomenon involving objectivist notions of the authentic articulated somewhat separately from the concerns of the constructivist/existentialist notions of the authentic. But what about when the “arenas of authenticity" are increasingly occupied by natives engaging in the same performative practices as the tourists? It would be unusual to see this unless there were two levels of authenticity here, no?

Two Chinese tourists "perform" Korean Tradition in the ultimate arena of Authenticity, the souvenir shop. 

Two Korean visitors to the Gyeongbok Palace "perform" Korean Tradition in the ultimate arena of Authenticity, the “souvenir shop” of national tourist sites. 

In the midst of a “culture industry”-dominated society that has succeeded in commodifying culture as a major part of the economy, it makes sense that the natives take pleasure in consuming it, although the nature of the performative authenticity — the basis of authenticity itself — may be vastly different. But the forms of performing authenticity look largely the same, as do the end goals of achieving a state of existential authenticity. This is where what is now called “queer” identity, tourism studies, and visual sociology can come together …especially when these young women,from inside and outside Korea, are engaging in the same performative sartorial practices…

In a situation in which both natives and tourists are both engaging in performative authenticity within arenas of authenticity, really, who is impersonating whom, and which is any more "real" than than the other? Or, alternatively, is the Korean doing Traditional Korea any less other than the Other? 

Working Bibliography

Asphodel, Autumn. "Passing as Female | Male to Female Transgender / Transsexual" (YouTube Video). 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLTcwqfDKXE.

Hill, Darryl B. "Sexuality and Gender in Hirschfeld’s Die Transvestiten : A Case of the "Elusive Evidence of the Ordinary" " Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, no. 3, July (2005): 316-32.

Wang, N. (1999). "RETHINKING AUTHENTICITY IN TOURISM EXPERIENCE." Annals of Tourism Research 26(2): 349-370.

Zhu, Yujie. "Performing Heritage: Rethinking Authenticity in Tourism." Annals of Tourism Research 39 (2012): 1495-513. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2012.04.003.

Han is Out; You Got Heung!?

The Heung of K-Pop and Hallyu
K-pop is like a mutant cultural form that really doesn’t represent the culture it hails from. But it is a product of the society that produced it, in that it is an end-justifies-the-means kind of organism, and is analagous to a cultural “cancer” that grows in the host, expanding unchecked past any internal controls that society can place upon it, and in the Korean case, is enabled by the will to power that defines the “global fetish,” possessed of an inexorable power to propogate that bursts past any attempt to curb its inexorable advance. Much like junk food fuels the obesity epidemic in industrialized nations through food markets driven by pure consumerism, K-pop resembles the aspects of other items within its conceptual category, but is certainly not art. It is something that resembles art that fulfills other carnal pleasures for the sake of doing so. Junk food is indeed something that one puts in the mouth and ingests, but it has no nutritional value; it is merely pleasant to eat and sates hunger. K-pop girl “idol groups,” replete as they are with teenaged girls in fetish clothing performing sexually suggestive dances, indeed sates the “hungry eye,” but there is little else of value other than simply encouraging catering to the bases and most vulgar of tastes while encouraging the ratcheting up of market competition in music in the singular dimension in which it is the most apt pupil – brazen sexual titillation. In this way, the social harm is done, albeit slowly, like the proverbial frog not in the well, but the stewpot, heating up so gradually that the frog never even realizes it is, indeed, cooked. But like everything in present-day South Korean culture, as long as someone’s buying, it’s going to be sold.

Combined with the all-rationalizing power of the “global fetish,” such runaway cultural mutations become pushed by a culture industry intent on fulfilling hangukinron fantasies of Korean cultural dominance, albeit with a kind of cultural product that is no more Korean in form than the ever-popular Korean snack food the ChocoPie. Although made in Korea, and a product of Korean culture in the strictest sense of the definition, it says absolutely nothing about the culture it came from in the greater sense that hangukinron thinkers seem to be using.

What is peculiar about the Kpop idol group cancer is its ability to mask itself from the obvious fact of its non- Koreanness. It metastisizes even as it becomes more invisible and impervious to the obvious critique its existence begs for in South Korean culture that in the not-too-distant past was concerned with the encroachment of Western culture and habitually described itself as “conservative.”. But it does its damage nonetheless.

The Relations of Production
As Korea become a nation driven by “pop” or even “Lolita nationalism,” driven by the most crass kind of consumptive, carnal desires possible, it slowly loses the ability to check the very Frankenstein monster it created. Such unseen eventualities and realities will be the most ironic of all, given the ideological agenda hangukinron evolved from and the particular societal needs it was intended to meet. Indeed, Marx would agree:

“In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.”[Shaw, William H. "The Handmill Gives You the Feudal Lord": Marx's Technological Determinism." History and Theory  18, No. 2, May (1979): 150]

To extend this quote and line of reasoning, a consumer capitalist society with no qualms about sacrificing even (and especially) young girls for the sake of production begets "Lolita nationalism" as dancing girls on the screen, as well as a culture with a virtuosic ability to collectively turn a blind eye to the obviousness and pervasiveness of prostitution. In short, Marx might argue that the relations and interests of production might be cause for the most mercantile amongst a group to figuratively “sell their mothers,” (or daughters, as the case may be), in the case of actual or visual prostitution (Lolita idol groups). It is hangukinron thinking that becomes the enabling rationale to allow the latter to be possible. In one sense, it may be obvious to assert that no matter the actual needs of capital or the state, hangukinron thinking in terms of national pride would never allow for a public recognition of the role prostitutes in bolstering national goals (as footage of Korean government officials in the 1950’s awarding the work of Korean camptown prostitutes for their work in gathering capital for the nation from US soldiers suggested did briefly happen), but that self-same hangukinron that would allow for national interests to laud the work of KPOP artists violating every Korean Confucian norm of propriety in the international sphere, even if it did eventually force the expurgation of their prostitute sisters from the national pride-laden, globalization-boosterish, “cultural export” model that has come to be the catchphrase du jour in recent years.

Han Is for Victims; Heung is for Victors
As a most elegant proof of the wisdom of Marx’s words, the surprising decision by the Ministry of Sports, Culture, and Tourism announced the official retiring of the concept of han as a fundmental aspect of Korean culture and character, as part of the ten foundational concepts constituting Korean “cultural DNA.” [Online News Bureau. "“한국문화 유전자는 恨 아닌 興” (Korean Culture's Gene Is Not Han but Heung)." 서울경제(Seoul Economic Daily), 2012.09.18] The ministry finalized the ten attributes of Koreans in accordance to the value of sustainability for the future. They are: Heung, Perseverance, Sharing, Paradox, Fermentation, Propriety, Passion, Community Spirit, Togetherness, and Natural.

Koreans are born with a unique disposition of Heung, an excitable energy combined with all sorts of different emotions including joy, sorrow, hatred, and desire. Heung is combined with a dynamic, bright, and positive spirit and drives a passionate compassion. It is not a thing you can fake.179

Note the “unique” nature of Korean heung, an essentialized part of a new Koreanness. Importantly, this article published on Korea.net, a Ministry-controlled public relations outlet, prominently displayed a Spanish-language, full-sized newspaper spread with pictorial instructions as to how to do PSY’s signature horse dance. Of course, the government officialization of Korea’s noriteo culture of play is in line with the social  relations that are a function of the consumer economy and would have likely been quite surprising to someone raised in the Korea of Kim Gi Chan’s golmok. In a Korea defined by the social relations of heung, nurtured in the structural cradle of consumer capitalism, anything goes, as long as you’re having fun. And if the outside world is buying what you’re selling, anything goes. And in the course of the culture's balls-to-the-walls, no-holds-barrred, anything goes quest for global recognition and its concomitant payout, what has disappeared is any sense of there possibly being too much, that things can be taken so far. Like the office worker on a business hweshik she really shouldn't be on, circumstances seem to require having fun at the party, but even when the going gets too heavy, there's not a sense that things have been ractheted up to excessive unless injury occurs. 

Perhaps this is the definition of “Hell” we must reach at this point, the peculiar kind of existential hell that someone can only know after the fact of “selling one’s mother” and living with those terrible wages of sin, much like the fabled Judas Iscariot might have felt in a quiet moment while gazing upon his 30 pieces of silver. This is one reason anthropologists are more effective outside of their own cultures and why, as I mentioned previously, they are encouraged to leave their own cultures to do their field work. In some ways, as an outsider, access to the inside is difficult; but in certain other, more important ways, access to the true, inner core of a culture, where the dirty secrets lie, is actually far easier. The most problematic and perhaps deeply embarrassing parts of any culture are usually kept wrapped tightly beneath layers of social taboo and willful ignorance of that subject. This is one reason that in America, race is a favorite topic of comedians and movie comedies; many Americans are, deep inside, quite uncomfortable about the subject, so it is often as source of embarrassed laughter and shocked expressions when certain obvious things are pointed out that everyone thinks about, but which most people find too embarrassing to say aloud. Hangukinron thinking helps maintain a deafening silence on a variety of obvious social ills that would mead one to question the appearance of obvious cracks in the developmental dream.

Thoughts on Minjok and The Matrix

What do we mean by "race?"

As I teach my students, both at the high school and the university level, "race" – along with other concepts such as "gender" and "nation" – are all socially constructed categories that are not real. By this, I mean to say that such a "social construction" does not empirically exist outside of the social system that made it. Much as in The Matrix, the system and all of the meanings inside don't have any real meaning; but what I think makes that film – and the inherent social critiques it provides – work is the fact that despite the system having been constructed, it and everything within it becomes real because everyone within the system agrees on its reality. And if you die in the Matrix, you die in real life. I like that, because, as I explain to students, just because race is constructed as a social category doesn't mean it hurts any less when a cop is beating you with his billy club. Rodney King couldn't have stopped and said, "Please stop, good sirs! Remember that race and my very blackness is a social construction no more real than your constructed whiteness!" POW, POW.

But at the same time, we can't forget that the very social categories we are trained to use are never constructed outside of the context of maintaining social hierarchy, control, and the interests of the greater power structure. The Matrix takes this literally, as human beings are represented as being the source of the system's power, yet that system is also the source of the individual's enslavement. "Sweet," I thought when I first laid eyes on this spectacular film back in 1999. "Now I finally have an easy and cool way to explain ideology and social constructions."

The complete control of the Matrix works only and precisely because it essentially hides its very existence. In Gramscian and Chomskyian terms, I can now more easily explain to students that overt, forced coercion and control don't work; people inevitable resist, dictatorships eventually destroyed. Like a Lucasfilm ending, the Death Star always gets blown up in the end. But when you create a system of complete hegemony – a term overused and hardly understood by most undergraduates who use it to sound cool – you really got something.

"Hegemony" is something I define to my high school history students as "control not through coercion, but consent." If you fool people into desiring certain things, into believing that they actually made a choice about their present situation within a system of choices, people generally tend to accept their fate, their social position. That's why Chomsky talks about the need to "manufacture consent" in liberal democracies; indeed, he says, it is within such systems that it is so difficult to resist and challenge the power structure. The media sets the terms of the debate, people protest through socially acceptable channels, voters decide between two candidates from two political parties that are essentially the same, and the show just goes on. So, as the Oracle says in the secondMatrix film, everything is about choice. This is obvious from even the first film, when Neo is given the blue and red pills with which to make the symbolic choice to wake himself up from the Matrix – you have to choose to see the light; it can't be simply shown to you.

If you want to get deeper and talk about our ability to choose – what is known in critical theory as agency – the fact that Smith is the key factor that sets the whole Matrix off course and into the hands of Neo is a brilliant expression of this idea within the plot: Neo having accidentally overwritten part of his resistant nature onto Smith at the end of the first movie, when Neo apparently "destroyed" him, made Smith into a literal "free agent," able to operate and make choices – self-interested ones – outside of the system. As it stated in the third film, Neo and Smith are Alpha and Omega, the flip-sides of the same coin. The only question is that of whether Smith's viral form of "free will" will eventually spread and take away that of humanity's, or whether the consequences of Neo's choice – as obvious Christ-figure and inevitable sacrificial lamb when he uploads himself as the code that will destroy Smith – will give humanity back its freedom, it's agency.

See, as we found out in the conversation with the very Freudian Architect in the second film, the role of "The One" is actually as a function of the system's full knowledge that some people – a very small fraction – will reject the program (ideology, social constructs) and resist. "This is about Zion," Neo realizes. The system plans for this eventuality by making the Matrix as real as possible – full of pain and pleasure, joy and pain – and the element of choice. The Oracle was "the intuitive program" who figured that shit out. But there's still that niggardly (and oh, yes, I do assign a lot of meaning to the fact that there were indeed a lot of niggas in the Matrix films, a series about resistance to enslavement) problem of the people who don't accept the program and will unplug, organize, and fight. "The One" is the control key that will take the best resisters and restart Zion as the Machines hit restart on the Matrix. Smart – "keep your friends close and your enemies closer." Better to have a group of resistance fighters whom you created and controlled and can eventually destroy when the time comes, rather than a real group of rabble-rousers outside of the system that is more difficult to co-opt and control.

http://ptosis.hubpages.com/hub/ChaosFreeWill Your life is the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to the programming of the matrix. You are the eventuality of an anomaly, which despite my sincerest efforts I have been unable to eliminate from what is otherwise a harmony of mathematical precision.

In the end, everything ends as the Machines would want, with the one new caveat that those who choose to live in the fantasy world are now actually doing so by real, albeit passive choice, as defined by the fact that if you want to wake up and unplug from the Matrix, you can do so and live truly free. Mankind gets its freedom - its agency – back because of Neo's original choice and ultimate sacrifice.

"Shit gets deeper."

Let's come back to Earth and the matter of our "matrix" of the social construct. Now, some Korean folks might say that such concepts are "Western" and don't apply to Korea. Well, that might be a good argument were it not for the fact that the very notions of "race" and "nation" and "history" itself were all first invented in the West and had great influence on the East. Does that mean that these concepts are inherently Western and that the East exists in a western mode? No. What I mean to say is that like any idea that spreads far beyond the borders of its origin point – this being the intellectual equivalent of the gene, the "meme" – such ideas continue spreading because of their own inherent merit, regardless of the place where they originated. And the further away it runs and evolves away from its original creation point, the less it is tinged with the specifics of the culture that produced it. So such memes such as "democracy" or "inalienable rights" may have started with the American constitution, but that doesn't mean such ideas remain uniquely American anymore.

Such is the case with Korean academia, which, for people academics and intellectuals who know something about the origins of the ideas in places such as history and anthropology, owes a great deal of its intellectual origins with Japan, China, the United States, and Europe – in that order of degree. The very idea of the use of a "nationalist historiography" to overtly create pride in the nation and a sense of national identity itself – one that Koreans trace back to Shin Chae Ho – goes back to its original Japanese architects, who were greatly influenced by Prussian ideas of "History" all the way back in Europe.

The fact that most Koreans really don't know much about Shin – except for what they read in tertiary sources (textbooks), which were themselves compiled by companies outsourced by the Korean Educational Development Institute, a government body directly supported by the Ministry of Education – illustrates this point.

Even if the general Korean wanted to wade through the Chinese characters Shin heavily utilized to write his works and knew about the great intellectual debts he had to Chinese and Japanese scholars, it would be still nearly impossible to get direct access to his collected works; they recently went out of print and I am desperately trying to find a copy of one of the three key volumes in the series. Such is the importance Korean society gives to its most vaunted historiographical founder; the collected works of the architect of Korean history itself is something that most Koreans can't read without assistance, and can't even buy.

Here's my point: most of the intellectual concepts with which anyone in the world uses as the bases of their national identity – in the Korean case minjok is the key organizing concept – is in itself little more than 100 years old. The myth of Korean history and people going back to 5,000 years depends on a self-defining concept of "us" that must be inherently de-historicized in order to work. Think back on Korean history; it is fraught with fighting kingdoms, battling "nations." They inherently thought of themselves as different from one another to fight with each other, and whatever identity one had was surely defined as different from that of the others. And yes, Korean "culture" has links to them all. But historical links do not a national identity make. Ask Shin Chae Ho or any other nationalist who has helped construct a national history – you need to actively build a national identity through myths and heroes, stories and fables. There must be central organizing concepts chosen to organize the others – the notion of minjok so close to Shin's heart was not naturally understood to be "real" before the 1900's – the construction of the modern notion of minjok and the nation is Shin's legacy. If it had existed before, why would historians remember him?

In the scan below, taken directly from the same stash of textbooks I lifted from my school and put in my bags before departing Korean in 1996, I have presented a section of the "Morals" textbook in the course of the same name that first-year middle school students are required to take.  And by the way, for the people complaining that the previous dictionary excerpts I presented were too "old" – my whole point in talking about these things is that is partially from such books and materials such as these that my former students – who are now in their early and mid-20's – form not only their own self-images, but images of others (non-Koreans) as well.

In this excerpt, the book asks why "we" would feel embarrassed to see a Korean behave recklessly in front of a foreigner, "our" face turning bright red in shame. Why would we feel like that? Because we all share the same "bloodline" and the same "consciousness" flows through that blood. I'll translate directly the paragraph I indicated in the text with a red star:

The minjok can be defined as having been passed down the same bloodline, using a common language, and that which has lived on between a common history and culture that is the basis of a consciousness of a community of 'us' that constitutes the group. Therefore – just like how we are constituted from the same blood as that of our ancestors – the minjok is made up of the concepts of family, ethnic group, or tribe, we sometimes point to the race and call it a large family. Just because a member of a large family lives far away doesn't mean that they stop being called family. In the same way, as a person born as a member of our race living in a foreign country, even if they have acquired another nationality, that person cannot come to the conclusion that they are not a part of our race.

 So it's not difficult to see why Koreans tend to be so essentialist about "race" and "nation" and "people" as they are conflated into the concept of minjok. When your school textbooks are busy defining the limits of the nation in such strict and blood-based ways, it is difficult to even try to imagine something else as being true; in fact, since so many people talk and think about minjok in this way that supports what the textbook says, where in everyday Korean culture could one find an alternative model of identity, a different way of imagining being Korean? Is it any surprise, then, that the news announcers actually talked about the "crisis" in the national blood supply? It's not that there's missing a certain rare type of blood, but it was a minor scandal in the early 1990's that "foreign" blood was "diluting" the "pure" Korean blood that would be given to transfusion patients. It sounds ridiculous to Western sensibilities, which are used to thinking about race in mostly genetic terms; but in a country obsessed with consanguinity, family lineage, and a Korean "blood quantum" (to borrow a term from Indian country), it makes a perverse sort of sense. Especially when your textbooks have been saying so for years.

It's a difficult thing to wrap one's mind around – since we were all born, raised, and educated to not only think of such concepts as "race" and "blood" as real; but remember that we were also trained to not question the origins of such notions. If we did that, then the whole fantasy would come tumbling down, like being unjacked from The Matrix; for this reason, no matter how much importance middle school textbooks place on the importance of the minjok, they will never, ever discuss the origins of the term itself. I don't think it's even a grand conspiracy theory – the textbook authors, as writers of a tertiary source, probably never even thought of this issue as they compiled information from the available secondary sources (books), and they almost certainly did not do original historical research themselves, consulting primary sources from the times. No one ever thinks to ask the questions:

"How old is the present concept of the minjok?"

"When did the modern notion of Korean identity itself begin?"

"What were earlier versions of identity that existed on this land we now call Korea?"

If such questions were asked – in any country – the results would be surprising. They would also reveal what most national propagandists are loathe to reveal – that the structure (albeit not the content) of national identity itself across all the nations in the world is more similar than it is different; in fact, it is almost the same. We all have different myths, symbols, and rationalizing ideologies, but the way in which we use them is exactly the same. If you want to check out Benedict Anderson's foundational work in the field of nationalism studies, you'll see that while it is somewhat centered on many European examples, the mechanics work, even in the cases of Asian nations, and especially in the case of Korea.

How dissimilar is Korea, really, from Anderson's explanation? Like most other nations in the world, what was required to create the present, modern notion of "Korea" was a national language, the spread of literacy, forms of mass media such as newspapers, the creations of "invented traditions" that perhaps pre-existed the nation but surely found new authority once the state gave them official sanction, etc. The list could go on, and there are always historically specific reasons parts of the Korean case doesn't fit into the Western model written in the 1980's. But when you look at modern Korean nationalism's founding moments from the 1880's and the colonial nightmare that gave them real power, or the appearance of Commodore Perry's black ships in the 1850's and the resultant "choice" of the Japanese to abandon their old ways and modernize from 1868, or the case of what is now France, Germany, the United States, or any other modern nation – the details and individual contenst differ, but the vessel is exactly the same.

In this way, one can't find any such thing as a "natural" national identity that isn't enforced by unnatural concepts instilled by unnatural institutions such as schools, national media, and invented traditions. People who live in what is now the "United States of America" still considered themselves English citizens up even until early 1776, even after the shooting war already started. How many times has the basic conception of "German" changed even in a single century? Germans alive in 1942 had a completely different notion of who was and wasn't a citizen – a true German – and the basis for inclusion within the group was based on notions of racialized pseudo-science which created concepts that the state wanted. Before that, there was a previous republic and before that "German" identity was centered around villages and provinces organized around the whims of royalty.

Look at the present notions of identity between even the two Koreas. What streak of historical continuity do the two Korea's really have in common between them? Yes, the two modern nations are "cultural cognates" of one another, but they are far more different than they are similar to one another. Historians always think in terms of the two competing concepts of historical "continuity and change" and try to trace historical connections to the past against historical breaks that mark the introduction of something new. One of the arrogant fantasies of South Koreans is that they share a lot in common with their "brethren" in north by these constructed notions of "blood" and consanguinuity; but I think it will come as a huge shock if and when the two Koreas come together to see that the differences of even a little more than half a century make for two really different peoples. Notions of social responsibility, the government's role in the life of the individual, and the fact of two hugely different economic/social ideologies of blind capitalism vs. authoritorian communism is going to make for two very different peoples coming together. Next to that, the rosy notion of minjok doesn't stand a chance.

Don't believe me? Let history play out – wait and see. See if the following doesn't come true:

– In the South Korean economy and society, North Korean men will become the most desired unskilled laborers, as they replace the undesirable foreign workers (because they are a threat to the "purity" of the Korean race) and will become available at whatever price the South Korean economy wants to pay them. They will be mostly based in the North, where the majority of South Korean factories will be, and on a limited basis as the result of special work visas that will be issued to them if they work in the South. These North Korean males will be shunned as marriage partners for South Korean women, and most South Korean families will 반대 the marriage of their daughters to North Korean men.

– North Korean women, however, will be the #1 hot commodity for South Korean men, as the recent disgusting media display of public (male) salivation over "North Korean beauties" and the re-popularization of the old saying of "남남북녀" (southern men for northern girls) indicate. Considering the fact that advertisements for "Marrying Vietnamese Virgins" are a common sight all over any Korean city – because of the ever-present problem of the male-tilted gender disparity caused by pre-natal screening that leads to the increasingly higher rate of abortions of girls as a couple without a son heads towards 2nd, 3rd, and 4th children – who better to marry than someone within "our" own minjok? I wonder which will win out – the dropping birth rate and the increasing expense of raising kids leading to less children overall and increased use of pre-natal screening to exterminate would-be daughters, or the inevitable (and positive) decreasing importance of gender itself in South Korean society. Hopefully the latter factor will grow such as to decrease the power of the former one, but only time will tell. But considering the myriad ways that women's bodies are already commodified as objects of consumption in South Korean society, North Korean women, with their lack of economic and social power, don't have much bright to look forward to in South Korea.

 
A movie with the popular saying as the title.

Yes, there will be famous examples of prominent and successful former North Koreans on formerly South Korean televisions, and in movies, newspapers, and other places in the public eye. But mark my words, the Korean notion of "minjok" will be utilized – as it has for a little more than 100 years – to accomplish the goals of the state and the elite that is largely in control of it. Images of reunited families and touching stories will abound on Korean televisions after any big national reunification. But that is, ladies and gentlemen, will be simply the beginning of another sad story, even as it will seem like the ending to one previous. Ideologies of nationalism shift and change with the times, but their utility to the group in power does not. I know many people won't agree, but see if this little chart of social hierarchy doesn't seem like it won't make sense, even before the fact:

– South Korean man 
– South Korean woman 
– North Korean woman 
– North Korean man

"THOUGHTS ON MINJOK AND THE MATRIX" WAS SOMETHING I ORIGINALLY BLOGGED HERE... 

Key Realted Readings:

1. Schmid, A. (2002). Korea between empires, 1895-1919. New York, Columbia University Press.

2. Shin, G.-W. (2006). Ethnic nationalism in Korea : genealogy, politics, and legacy. Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press.

The “Global Fetish” and the “Korean Wave” Ascendant

It is useful to characterize the way in which fetishized young female bodies as part of the commercialization and commodification of Korean culture and the desire to promote and export it abroad fits into Hyunjung Lee's notion of a greater “global fetish.”  I lifted this concept from Hyunjung Lee's  dissertation on "Global Fetishism: Dynamics of Transnational Performances in Contemporary South Korea,"  in which she talks about how the notion of the “global” in South Korea having become so elevated that it has become its own rationale, one capable of explaining  just about 
anything, or alternatively put, has become a rationalizing framework able to give meaning and worthiness to just about anything put into it, just because it promotes Korea or Korean culture in the global realm, or has functioned  to “globalize” South Korea. The two major examples she presented were those of Nanta and the musical production that told one of Korea's most tragic historical tales, The Last Empress. Any and all Korean cultural products and productions are seen to be worthy of representing Korea in the global arena and market. Indeed, in recent decades, the idea of the “global” has been raised to the  level of fetish, as a rationalizing desire unto itself. When combined with another prevailing wind of the times, that of “identity consumerism,” which I have defined as an ongoing process and tendency for people in  South Korea's runaway consumer capitalist culture to define existential questions at the macro level through consumptive behavior  as individuals,  the result is “the answer” to a certain kind of existential angst that was articulated especially loudly and clearly in the early 1990s in South Korean culture --   the question of “who are we?” and "where are we going?" became paramount once the material success of the nation became South Korean puritanical justification of the nation’s long-past articulation of sanctification, so the only question left remaining to ask is the most logical and inevitable ones, which would be, “what does this all mean?” And “was it all worth it?"

The inevitable answer might be “yes,” if one thinks about the advent of the “Korean Wave” and the discourse that has arisen around it since the term was coined back in 1999. Strangely and unexpectedly, modern Korean development dreams seem to have come true through this Korean Wave. Despite South Korea’s much-lauded success in shipping and steel production, and no matter how high the GDP rises, what this type of development-erathinking has always yearned for was a spiritual, Hegelian kind of recognition. It hurts the Korean nationalist to hear that Samsung is a globally-recognized company but yet nearly 60% of Americans think it to be Japanese, with a similar story being true for Korean conglomerate powerhouse Hyundai. Despite the bottom line being good for the Korean economy, this is still not as direct a form of recognition as a  public, international talk of the quality of Korea’s cultural products with Korea being mentioned by name. It is not just coincidental that the term “Korean Wave” itself was coined outside Korea. As a form of “soft power,” the Wave has been quite successful in expanding Korean cultural influence in a way these thinkers could scarcely have imagined: 

‘Korean Wave’ first began in the early 1990s in the film industry under the surveillance of the Korean government. It then spread throughout Asia’s rising middle-class in Asia as Internet technology penetrated the region. During the 2000s, ‘Korean Wave’ rose to become an economic phenomenon that contributes significantly to Korea’s national economy (Kim 2006). It has become both a national as well as transnational phenomenon (Ravina 2009). Here, Korean popular culture provides a form of pop nationalism that allows the nation-state to engage the forces of globalization in order to produce a transnational popular culture (Joo 2011). 
soft power that enables the state to promote Korean culture by capitalizing on cultural themes that are popular among Asian consumers. In this way, ‘Korean Wave’ provides an effective mean of cultural diplomacy. For example, Korean-Malaysian relations have improved with the rise of ‘Korean Wave’ in Malaysia. Many Malaysians develop favourable views toward Korean society through their consumption of popular Korean television dramas (Cho 2010). The popularity of Korean celebrity also has contributed to closer ties between the Korean government and other Southeast Asian countries (Shim 2011).

K-pop is like a mutant cultural form that really doesn’t represent the culture it hails from. But it is a product of the society that produced it, in that it is an end-justifies-the-means kind of organism, and is analagous to a cultural “cancer” that grows in the host, expanding unchecked past any internal controls that society can place upon it, and in the Korean case, is enabled by the will to power that defines the “global fetish,”  possessed of an inexorable power to propogate that bursts past any attempt to curb its inexorable advance. Much like junk food fuels the obesity epidemic in industrialized nations through food markets driven by pure consumerism, K-pop resembles the aspects of other items within its conceptual category, but is certainly not art. It is something that resembles art that fulfills other carnal pleasures for the sake of doing so. Junk food is indeed something that one puts in the mouth and ingests, but it has no nutritional value; it is merely pleasant to eat and sates hunger. K-pop girl “idol groups,” replete as they are with teenaged girls in fetish clothing performing sexually suggestive dances, indeed sates the “hungry eye,” but there is little else of value other than simply encouraging catering to the base and most vulgar of tastes while encouraging the ratcheting up of market competition in music in the singular dimension in which it is the most apt pupil – brazen sexual titillation.  In this way, the social harm is done, albeit slowly, like the proverbial frog not in the well, but the stewpot, heating up so gradually that the frog never even realizes it is, indeed, cooked. But like everything in present-day South Korean culture, as long as someone’s buying, it’s going to be sold. Combined with the all-rationalizing power of the “global fetish,” such runaway cultural mutations become pushed by a culture industry intent on fulfilling development-era fantasies of Korean cultural dominance, albeit with a kind of cultural product that is no more Korean in form than the ever-popular Korean snack food the Choco Pie. Although made in Korea, and a product of Korean culture in the strictest sense of the definition, it says absolutely nothing about the culture it came from in the greater sense that development-era thinkers seem to be using. What is peculiar about the K-pop idol group cancer is its ability to mask itself from the obvious fact of its non-Koreanness. It metastisizes even as it becomes more invisible and impervious to the obvious critique its existence begs for in South Korean culture that in the not-too-distant past was concerned with the encroachment of Western culture and habitually describes itself as “conservative.”. But it does its damage nonetheless.

Korean Fashion, Street Photography, and the "Korean Wave"

As I have argued elsewhere in my own classes on the topic, as well as in Korean media venues, there is really no “Korean Wave” besides the vainglorious media construction that has resulted from attempts to describe the very real global successes of some Korean cultural products as a singular, discrete phenomenon. That being said, I do recognize that certain Korean cultural products have indeed risen to global prominence according to a discernible pattern, which I call a “perfect storm” of structural forces and resulting conditions that combine in a singular and particular way to create anything from a growing interest in Korean dramas in Japan to the explosion of “Gangnam Style on computer screens across the planet. 

There are two crucial points I would like to make about these perfect storms of Korean Wave surges, assuming a “perfect storm” model of hallyu production:

1. There are individual agents responsible for specific points of hallyu success. It is a peculiar aspect of Korea’s growing status as a world metropolis that non-Koreans or even academics ostensibly studying hallyu as a phenomenon can play a role in the actual propagation of the “wave” itself. 
2. Much as in the cases of other accidentally successful manifestations of the “Korean Wave,” it was incidental and often quite accidental structural changes that allowed for the existence of certain cultural products. For example, it was a 1996 Korean Supreme Court case that declared previously harsh government censorship of films unconstitutional led to a change in the creative cultural environment that would allow films such as Old Boy, Lies, The King and the Clown, to be made and gain critical acclaim in international film festivals. 

In the case of Korean fashion, which I argue to be a very possible and probable flashpoint for another surge of the “Korean Wave,” recently described by the term “Korean Wave 3.0”, I exist as an intermediary (smong many) who has been helping lay the groundwork for an eventual “perfect storm” event that could vault the Korean fashion industry into the international eye given the right conditions, much in the same way that myriad social factors within South Korea combined to allow the creation of the film OldBoy, which would win accolades at the Cannes Film Festival and spur on interest in Korean cinema, or more recently, as PSY being able to focus his own talent and virtuosity into the YouTube video and dance sensation that famously spread across the planet like a runaway wildfire. 

More specifically, content producers such as myself seed the English-speaking Internet controlled by Google with the raw content that needs to exist on that fateful day when an Anna Wintour might hear about a prominent Korean designer and enter his name into a Google search. There is obviously quite a bit of content on the Korean-speaking Internet, but since the majority of the world does not speak Korean, a significant undergrowth of English-language content must exist for any interested outsider to stumble across. In terms of the actualization of so-called “soft power” in the Korean case, such cultural intermediaries are required as part of the quickening process that will eventually result in the propagation of Korean fashion content outside of the peninsula along similar lines of success taken by other fields such as K-pop or Korean cinema.

And Korean fashion, existing as it does within the new catchphrase and conceptual space defined by the term "Korean Wave 3.0", is ripe for the picking. One might ask the very good question of what is paticularly Korean about fashion in Korea, which many say is a hodge-podge of borrowed sartorial ideas and imported trends. One might even ask the related question of what one casn gain from taking pictures of -- or concerning oneself with -- clothing. Well, clothing is certainly worthy of serious attention, of even the most deadly serious social scientist interested in what makes the proverbial clock tick. 

The point is most clearly made in the article "Appearance Stratification and Identity: Fashion as the Clearest Example of What Sociology is All About" by Yves Laberge:

Fashion and the ways people dress are not only decided by the weather: because there are clothes you must wear and others that you just cannot appear in public anymore with, these seemingly individual decisions are in fact some truly social facts, as Émile Durkheim would probably have said. Moreover, the studying of fashion as a social phenomenon that influences the clothes we decide to buy, wear, and even be proud of (at least for some time) is possibly one of the easiest examples of what sociology is all about; with, in the case of fashion, numerous references to culture, norms, representations, consumption, social roles and models. Whenever a social scientist has to explain to any newcomer or non-sociologist the basics and purpose of the sociological science as a discipline, the understanding of fashion movements should be among the first examples that come to mind. (Laberge, 407)

I could make the same arguments about gender and describe the warp and woof of gendered subjectivity without the photographs, but these expressions, gestures, and poses – usually partially interpellated through clothing -- are some of the very moments that causes me to have certain moments of insight. As far as the photographic subjects-as-ethnographic subjects goes, the traditional understanding of ethical boundaries must be reconsidered. In response to the criticism that my photographs deprive the subjects of their “voice,” my simple response is that the subject is speaking, loud and clear, if one believes the sociologists of fashion and the body. In that sense, my camera is not much different than a field recorder documenting actual, if not metaphorical voices. I'm not telling anyone's stories, nor ever claimed to. I make observations as both photographer and academic. I don't hold to some notion of etic "truth" in the telling of the stories. What potential "harm " can a given picture cause? I have thought those questions out quite a bit in terms of reducing harm, but the conflict is that as a photographer, you have to believe in breaking eggs in order to make an omelette (or any photograph that anyone would even be interested in looking at), while as an academic mindful of ANCIENT notions of using photographs as DATA or photographic subjects as SUBJECTS in the paradigm of participant-observation, you are setting yourself up to be so fretful over the mere act of ding street photography that you prevent yourself from even using your camera. Simply put, in order to make any real images on the streets, you have to abandon certain antiquated notions of these people as traditional ethnographic subjects. It's a different ballgame when you're talking about mixing art and sociological practice.

The gathering of the visual data itself requires techniques and methods anathema to traditional research as done in the humanities and social sciences. But this does not mean that journalistic work in the service of academic pursuits should be dismissed as not having merit. Such work is done in society anyway; the best way to guarantee minimal harm to subjects is already provided for by pertinent laws and standards of professional behavior. Each society has its own, well-calibrated balance between ethical practice and the pursuit of data-as-truth. This is the culturally and societally specific set of guidelines that more deeply interested participant-observers must follow, or at least be cognizant of.