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ASIA2004: POPULAR CULTURE IN ASIA
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Table of Contents
Topic 1: Introduction: What Is (Asian) Popular Culture and Why It Matters...........................1
Chua, B. (2012). Structure, audience and soft power in East Asian pop culture (TransAsia: screen
cultures). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp. 9-30.
Topic 2: How to Read (Asian) Popular Culture.23
Storey, John. 2015. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction (7th ed.). Hoboken: Taylor
and Francis, 1-17.
Topic 3: Into Asia: Neo-colonialism, the Western Gaze and Asian Popular Culture..39
Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy, Theory, Culture &
Society 7(2): 295310.
Topic 4: What Is East Asian Popular Culture Anyway?.....................................................................55
Iwabuchi, Koichi. 2014. De-westernisation, Inter-Asian Referencing and Beyond, European Journal of
Cultural Studies 17(1): 4457.
Topic 5: Gender in Asian Popular Culture69
Park, J. (2013). Fighting Women in Contemporary Asian Cinema. Cultural Studies, 27(2), 242-256.
Topic 6: The Body in Popular Culture: Popular Culture, Cosmetic Surgery and Embodied
Performances85
Holliday, R., & Elfving-Hwang, J. (2012). Gender, Globalization and Aesthetic Surgery in South Korea.
Body & Society, 18(2), 58-81.
Topic 7: Talents and Idols: Celebrity, Audiences and the Creation of Cultural Industries109
Gil-sung Park. 2013. Manufacturing Creativity: Production, Performance and Dissemination of K-pop,
Korea Journal 53(4): 14-33.
Turner, Graeme. Understanding Celebrity. SAGE Publications: 2004, pp. 3-27.
Topic 8: Articulating Sexualities through Asian Popular Culture129

Sinnott, Megan. 2012. Korean-Pop, Tom Gay Kings, Les Queens and the Capitalist Transformation of
Sex/Gender Categories in Thailand, Asian Studies Review 36(4): 453474.
Topic 9: Asian Popular Culture as Protest?............................................................................................151
Pickles, Joanna. (2007). Punk, pop and protest: The birth and decline of political punk in Bandung.
Review of Indonesian and Malayan Affairs, 41(2), 223-246.
Topic 10: Reverse Flows: Popular Culture Out of Asia.175
Otmazgin, Nissin. 2014. Anime in the US: The Entrepreneurial Dimensions of Globalized Culture,
Pacific Affairs 87(1): 5369.
Topic 11: Soft Power? Popular Culture as Cultural Diplomacy193
Keane, Michael and Liu, Bonnie Rui. 2013. Chinas New Creative Strategy: The Utilization of Cultural
Soft Power and New markets. In Asian Popular Culture: The Global (Dis)continuity, ed. Anthony Fung
(London and New York: Routledge), 233-249.
Otmazgin, Nissim. 2011. A Tail that Wags the Dog? Cultural Industry and Cultural Policy in Japan and
South Korea. Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice, 13(3), 307-325.
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1 What is popular
culture?
Before we consider in detail the different ways in which popular culture has been
defined and analysed, I want to outline some of the general features of the debate that
the study of popular culture has generated. It is not my intention to pre-empt the
specific findings and arguments that will be presented in the following chapters. Here
I simply wish to map out the general conceptual landscape of popular culture. This is,
in many ways, a daunting task. As Tony Bennett (1980) points out, as it stands, the
concept of popular culture is virtually useless, a melting pot of confused and contra-
dictory meanings capable of misdirecting inquiry up any number of theoretical blind
alleys (18). Part of the difficulty stems from the implied otherness that is always absent/
present when we use the term popular culture. As we shall see in the chapters which
follow, popular culture is always defined, implicitly or explicitly, in contrast to other
conceptual categories: folk culture, mass culture, dominant culture, working-class cul-
ture, etc. A full definition must always take this into account. Moreover, as we shall also
see, whichever conceptual category is deployed as popular cultures absent other, it will
always powerfully affect the connotations brought into play when we use the term
popular culture.
Therefore, to study popular culture we must first confront the difficulty posed by the
term itself. That is, depending on how it is used, quite different areas of inquiry and
forms of theoretical definition and analytical focus are suggested (20). The main argu-
ment that I suspect readers will take from this book is that popular culture is in effect
an empty conceptual category, one that can be filled in a wide variety of often conflict-
ing ways, depending on the context of use.
Culture
In order to define popular culture we first need to define the term culture. Raymond
Williams (1983) calls culture one of the two or three most complicated words in the
English language (87). Williams suggests three broad definitions. First, culture can be
used to refer to a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development
(90). We could, for example, speak about the cultural development of Western Europe
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2 Chapter 1 What is popular culture?
and be referring only to intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic factors great philosophers,
great artists and great poets. This would be a perfectly understandable formulation. A
second use of the word culture might be to suggest a particular way of life, whether
of a people, a period or a group (ibid.). Using this definition, if we speak of the cul-
tural development of Western Europe, we would have in mind not just intellectual and
aesthetic factors, but the development of, for example, literacy, holidays, sport, religious
festivals. Finally, Williams suggests that culture can be used to refer to the works and
practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity (ibid.). In other words, culture
here means the texts and practices whose principal function is to signify, to produce or
to be the occasion for the production of meaning. Culture in this third definition is
synonymous with what structuralists and post-structuralists call signifying practices
(see Chapter 6). Using this definition, we would probably think of examples such as
poetry, the novel, ballet, opera, and fine art. To speak of popular culture usually means
to mobilize the second and third meanings of the word culture. The second meaning
culture as a particular way of life would allow us to speak of such practices as the
seaside holiday, the celebration of Christmas, and youth subcultures, as examples of
culture. These are usually referred to as lived cultures or practices. The third meaning
culture as signifying practices would allow us to speak of soap opera, pop music, and
comics, as examples of culture. These are usually referred to as texts. Few people would
imagine Williamss first definition when thinking about popular culture.
Ideology
Before we turn to the different definitions of popular culture, there is another term we
have to think about: ideology. Ideology is a crucial concept in the study of popular cul-
ture. Graeme Turner (1996) calls it the most important conceptual category in cultural
studies (182). James Carey (1996) has even suggested that British cultural studies
could be described just as easily and perhaps more accurately as ideological studies
(65). Like culture, ideology has many competing meanings. An understanding of this
concept is often complicated by the fact that in much cultural analysis the concept is
used interchangeably with culture itself, and especially popular culture. The fact that
ideology has been used to refer to the same conceptual terrain as culture and popular
culture makes it an important term in any understanding of the nature of popular cul-
ture. What follows is a brief discussion of just five of the many ways of understanding
ideology. We will consider only those meanings that have a bearing on the study of
popular culture.
First, ideology can refer to a systematic body of ideas articulated by a particular group
of people. For example, we could speak of professional ideology to refer to the ideas
which inform the practices of particular professional groups. We could also speak of
the ideology of the Labour Party. Here we would be referring to the collection of polit-
ical, economic and social ideas that inform the aspirations and activities of the Party.
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Ideology 3
A second definition suggests a certain masking, distortion, or concealment. Ideology

is used here to indicate how some texts and practices present distorted images of real-
ity. They produce what is sometimes called false consciousness. Such distortions, it is
argued, work in the interests of the powerful against the interests of the powerless.
Using this definition, we might speak of capitalist ideology. What would be intimated
by this usage would be the way in which ideology conceals the reality of domination
from those in power: the dominant class do not see themselves as exploiters or oppres-
sors. And, perhaps more importantly, the way in which ideology conceals the reality of
subordination from those who are powerless: the subordinate classes do not see them-
selves as oppressed or exploited. This definition derives from certain assumptions
about the circumstances of the production of texts and practices. It is argued that they
are the superstructural reflections or expressions of the power relations of the eco-
nomic base of society. This is one of the fundamental assumptions of classical
Marxism. Here is Karl Marxs (1976a) famous formulation:
In the social production of their existence men enter into definite, necessary rela-
tions, which are independent of their will, namely, relations of production corres-
ponding to a determinate stage of development of their material forces of production.
The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of
society, the real foundation on which there arises a legal and political superstruc-
ture and to which there correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The
mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual
life process in general (3).
What Marx is suggesting is that the way a society organizes the means of its eco-
nomic production will have a determining effect on the type of culture that society pro-
duces or makes possible. The cultural products of this so-called base/superstructure
relationship are deemed ideological to the extent that, as a result of this relationship,
they implicitly or explicitly support the interests of dominant groups who, socially,
politically, economically and culturally, benefit from this particular economic organiza-
tion of society. In Chapter 4, we will consider the modifications made by Marx and
Frederick Engels themselves to this formulation, and the way in which subsequent
Marxists have further modified what has come to be regarded by many cultural critics
as a rather mechanistic account of what we might call the social relations of culture and
popular culture. However, having said this, it is nevertheless the case that
acceptance of the contention that the flow of causal traffic within society is
unequally structured, such that the economy, in a privileged way, influences polit-
ical and ideological relationships in ways that are not true in reverse, has usually
been held to constitute a limit position for Marxism. Abandon this claim, it is
argued, and Marxism ceases to be Marxism (Bennett, 1982a: 81).
We can also use ideology in this general sense to refer to power relations outside
those of class. For instance, feminists speak of the power of patriarchal ideology, and
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how it operates to conceal, mask and distort gender relations in our society (see
Chapter 7). In Chapter 8 we will examine the ideology of racism.
A third definition of ideology (closely related to, and in some ways dependent on,
the second definition) uses the term to refer to ideological forms (Marx, 1976a: 5).
This usage is intended to draw attention to the way in which texts (television fiction,
pop songs, novels, feature films, etc.) always present a particular image of the world.
This definition depends on a notion of society as conflictual rather than consensual,
structured around inequality, exploitation and oppression. Texts are said to take sides,
consciously or unconsciously, in this conflict. The German playwright Bertolt Brecht
(1978) summarizes the point: Good or bad, a play always includes an image of the
world. . . . There is no play and no theatrical performance which does not in some way
affect the dispositions and conceptions of the audience. Art is never without conse-
quences (1501). Brechts point can be generalized to apply to all texts. Another way
of saying this would be simply to argue that all texts are ultimately political. That is,
they offer competing ideological significations of the way the world is or should be.
Popular culture is thus, as Hall (2009a) claims, a site where collective social under-
standings are created: a terrain on which the politics of signification are played out in
attempts to win people to particular ways of seeing the world (12223).
A fourth definition of ideology is one associated with the early work of the French
cultural theorist Roland Barthes (discussed in more detail in Chapter 6). Barthes argues
that ideology (or myth as Barthes himself calls it) operates mainly at the level of con-
notations, the secondary, often unconscious meanings that texts and practices carry, or
can be made to carry. For example, a Conservative Party political broadcast transmitted
in 1990 ended with the word socialism being transposed into red prison bars. What
was being suggested is that the socialism of the Labour Party is synonymous with
social, economic and political imprisonment. The broadcast was attempting to fix the
connotations of the word socialism. Moreover, it hoped to locate socialism in a binary
relationship in which it connoted unfreedom, whilst conservatism connoted freedom.
For Barthes, this would be a classic example of the operations of ideology, the attempt
to make universal and legitimate what is in fact partial and particular; an attempt
to pass off that which is cultural (i.e. humanly made) as something which is natural
(i.e. just existing). Similarly, it could be argued that in British society white, masculine,
heterosexual, middle class, are unmarked in the sense that they are the normal, the
natural, the universal, from which other ways of being are an inferior variation on an
original. This is made clear in such formulations as a female pop singer, a black jour-
nalist, a working-class writer, a gay comedian. In each instance the first term is used to
qualify the second as a deviation from the universal categories of pop singer, journal-
ist, writer and comedian.
A fifth definition is one that was very influential in the 1970s and early 1980s. It
is the definition of ideology developed by the French Marxist philosopher Louis
Althusser. We shall discuss Althusser in more detail in Chapter 4. Here I will simply
outline some key points about one of his definitions of ideology. Althussers main con-
tention is to see ideology not simply as a body of ideas, but as a material practice. What
he means by this is that ideology is encountered in the practices of everyday life and
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Popular culture 5
not simply in certain ideas about everyday life. Principally, what Althusser has in mind
is the way in which certain rituals and customs have the effect of binding us to the
social order: a social order that is marked by enormous inequalities of wealth, status
and power. Using this definition, we could describe the seaside holiday or the celebra-
tion of Christmas as examples of ideological practices. This would point to the way in
which they offer pleasure and release from the usual demands of the social order, but
that, ultimately, they return us to our places in the social order, refreshed and ready to
tolerate our exploitation and oppression until the next official break comes along. In
this sense, ideology works to reproduce the social conditions and social relations neces-
sary for the economic conditions and economic relations of capitalism to continue.
So far we have briefly examined different ways of defining culture and ideology.
What should be clear by now is that culture and ideology do cover much the same con-
ceptual landscape. The main difference between them is that ideology brings a polit-
ical dimension to the shared terrain. In addition, the introduction of the concept of
ideology suggests that relations of power and politics inescapably mark the culture/
ideology landscape; it suggests that the study of popular culture amounts to something
more than a simple discussion of entertainment and leisure.
Popular culture
There are various ways to define popular culture. This book is of course in part about
that very process, about the different ways in which various critical approaches have
attempted to fix the meaning of popular culture. Therefore, all I intend to do for the
remainder of this chapter is to sketch out six definitions of popular culture that in their
different, general ways, inform the study of popular culture. But first a few words about
the term popular. Williams (1983) suggests four current meanings: well liked by
many people; inferior kinds of work; work deliberately setting out to win favour with
the people; culture actually made by the people for themselves (237). Clearly, then,
any definition of popular culture will bring into play a complex combination of the dif-
ferent meanings of the term culture with the different meanings of the term popular.
The history of cultural theorys engagement with popular culture is, therefore, a history
of the different ways in which the two terms have been connected by theoretical labour
within particular historical and social contexts.
An obvious starting point in any attempt to define popular culture is to say that
popular culture is simply culture that is widely favoured or well liked by many people.
And, undoubtedly, such a quantitative index would meet the approval of many people.
We could examine sales of books, sales of CDs and DVDs. We could also examine
attendance records at concerts, sporting events, and festivals. We could also scrutinize
market research figures on audience preferences for different television programmes.
Such counting would undoubtedly tell us a great deal. The difficulty might prove to be
that, paradoxically, it tells us too much. Unless we can agree on a figure over which
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something becomes popular culture, and below which it is just culture, we might find
that widely favoured or well liked by many people included so much as to be virtually
useless as a conceptual definition of popular culture. Despite this problem, what is
clear is that any definition of popular culture must include a quantitative dimension.
The popular of popular culture would seem to demand it. What is also clear, however,
is that on its own, a quantitative index is not enough to provide an adequate definition
of popular culture. Such counting would almost certainly include the officially sanc-
tioned high culture which in terms of book and record sales and audience ratings for
television dramatisations of the classics, can justifiably claim to be popular in this
sense (Bennett, 1980: 201).
A second way of defining popular culture is to suggest that it is the culture that is left
over after we have decided what is high culture. Popular culture, in this definition, is
a residual category, there to accommodate texts and practices that fail to meet the
required standards to qualify as high culture. In other words, it is a definition of popu-
lar culture as inferior culture. What the culture/popular culture test might include is a
range of value judgements on a particular text or practice. For example, we might want
to insist on formal complexity. In other words, to be real culture, it has to be difficult.
Being difficult thus ensures its exclusive status as high culture. Its very difficulty liter-
ally excludes, an exclusion that guarantees the exclusivity of its audience. The French
sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues that cultural distinctions of this kind are often used
to support class distinctions. Taste is a deeply ideological category: it functions as
a marker of class (using the term in a double sense to mean both a social economic
category and the suggestion of a particular level of quality). For Bourdieu (1984), the
consumption of culture is predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a
social function of legitimating social differences (5). This will be discussed in more
detail in Chapters 9 and 10.
This definition of popular culture is often supported by claims that popular cul-
ture is mass-produced commercial culture, whereas high culture is the result of an
individual act of creation. The latter, therefore, deserves only a moral and aesthetic
response; the former requires only a fleeting sociological inspection to unlock what
little it has to offer. Whatever the method deployed, those who wish to make the case
for the division between high and popular culture generally insist that the division
between the two is absolutely clear. Moreover, not only is this division clear, it is trans-
historical fixed for all time. This latter point is usually insisted on, especially if the
division is dependent on supposed essential textual qualities. There are many problems
with this certainty. For example, William Shakespeare is now seen as the epitome
of high culture, yet as late as the nineteenth century his work was very much a part of
popular theatre.1 The same point can also be made about Charles Dickenss work.
Similarly, film noir can be seen to have crossed the border supposedly separating popu-
lar and high culture: in other words, what started as popular cinema is now the pre-
serve of academics and film clubs.2 One recent example of cultural traffic moving in the
other direction is Luciano Pavarottis recording of Puccinis Nessun Dorma. Even the
most rigorous defenders of high culture would not want to exclude Pavarotti or Puccini
from its select enclave. But in 1990, Pavarotti managed to take Nessun Dorma to
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Popular culture 7
number one in the British charts. Such commercial success on any quantitative ana-
lysis would make the composer, the performer and the aria, popular culture.3 In fact,
one student I know actually complained about the way in which the aria had been sup-
posedly devalued by its commercial success. He claimed that he now found it embar-
rassing to play the aria for fear that someone should think his musical taste was simply
the result of the aria being The Official BBC Grandstand World Cup Theme. Other stu-
dents laughed and mocked. But his complaint highlights something very significant
about the high/popular divide: the elitist investment that some put in its continuation.
On 30 July 1991, Pavarotti gave a free concert in Londons Hyde Park. About
250,000 people were expected, but because of heavy rain, the number who actually
attended was around 100,000. Two things about the event are of interest to a student
of popular culture. The first is the enormous popularity of the event. We could connect
this with the fact that Pavarottis previous two albums (Essential Pavarotti 1 and Essential
Pavarotti 2) had both topped the British album charts. His obvious popularity would
appear to call into question any clear division between high and popular culture.
Second, the extent of his popularity would appear to threaten the class exclusivity of a
high/popular divide. It is therefore interesting to note the way in which the event was
reported in the media. All the British tabloids carried news of the event on their front
pages. The Daily Mirror, for instance, had five pages devoted to the concert. What the
tabloid coverage reveals is a clear attempt to define the event for popular culture. The
Sun quoted a woman who said, I cant afford to go to posh opera houses with toffs and
fork out 100 a seat. The Daily Mirror ran an editorial in which it claimed that
Pavarottis performance wasnt for the rich but for the thousands . . . who could never
normally afford a night with an operatic star. When the event was reported on televi-
sion news programmes the following lunchtime, the tabloid coverage was included as
part of the general meaning of the event. Both the BBCs One Oclock News and ITVs
12.30 News, referred to the way in which the tabloids had covered the concert, and
moreover, the extent to which they had covered the concert. The old certainties of the
cultural landscape suddenly seemed in doubt. However, there was some attempt made
to reintroduce the old certainties: some critics said that a park is no place for opera
(One Oclock News); some opera enthusiasts might think it all a bit vulgar (12.30
News). Although such comments invoked the spectre of high-culture exclusivity, they
seemed strangely at a loss to offer any purchase on the event. The apparently obvious
cultural division between high and popular culture no longer seemed so obvious. It
suddenly seemed that the cultural had been replaced by the economic, revealing a divi-
sion between the rich and the thousands. It was the events very popularity that
forced the television news to confront, and ultimately to find wanting, old cultural
certainties. This can be partly illustrated by returning to the contradictory meaning
of the term popular.4 On the one hand, something is said to be good because it is
popular. An example of this usage would be: it was a popular performance. Yet, on
the other hand, something is said to be bad for the very same reason. Consider the
binary oppositions in Table 1.1. This demonstrates quite clearly the way in which
popular and popular culture carries within its definitional field connotations of infer-
iority; a second-best culture for those unable to understand, let alone appreciate, real
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Table 1.1 Popular culture as inferior culture.
Popular press Quality press

Popular cinema Art cinema
Popular entertainment Art
culture what Matthew Arnold refers to as the best that has been thought and said in
the world (see Chapter 2). Hall (2009b) argues that what is important here is not the
fact that popular forms move up and down the cultural escalator; more significant are
the forces and relations which sustain the distinction, the difference . . . [the] institu-
tions and institutional processes . . . required to sustain each and to continually mark
the difference between them (514). This is principally the work of the education sys-
tem and its promotion of a selective tradition (see Chapter 3).
A third way of defining popular culture is as mass culture. This draws heavily on
the previous definition. The mass culture perspective will be discussed in some detail
in Chapter 2; therefore all I want to do here is to suggest the basic terms of this
definition. The first point that those who refer to popular culture as mass culture want
to establish is that popular culture is a hopelessly commercial culture. It is mass-
produced for mass consumption. Its audience is a mass of non-discriminating con-
sumers. The culture itself is formulaic, manipulative (to the political right or left,
depending on who is doing the analysis). It is a culture that is consumed with brain-
numbed and brain-numbing passivity. But as John Fiske (1989a) points out, between
80 and 90 per cent of new products fail despite extensive advertising . . . many films fail
to recover even their promotional costs at the box office (31). Simon Frith (1983: 147)
also points out that about 80 per cent of singles and albums lose money. Such stat-
istics should clearly call into question the notion of consumption as an automatic
and passive activity (see Chapters 7 and 10).
Those working within the mass culture perspective usually have in mind a previous
golden age when cultural matters were very different. This usually takes one of two
forms: a lost organic community or a lost folk culture. But as Fiske (1989a) points out,
In capitalist societies there is no so-called authentic folk culture against which to mea-
sure the inauthenticity of mass culture, so bemoaning the loss of the authentic is a
fruitless exercise in romantic nostalgia (27). This also holds true for the lost organic
community. The Frankfurt School, as we shall see in Chapter 4, locate the lost golden
age, not in the past, but in the future.
For some cultural critics working within the mass culture paradigm, mass culture is
not just an imposed and impoverished culture, it is in a clear identifiable sense an
imported American culture: If popular culture in its modern form was invented in any
one place, it was . . . in the great cities of the United States, and above all in New York
(Maltby, 1989: 11; my italics). The claim that popular culture is American culture has
a long history within the theoretical mapping of popular culture. It operates under the
term Americanization. Its central theme is that British culture has declined under the
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Popular culture 9
homogenizing influence of American culture. There are two things we can say with
some confidence about the United States and popular culture. First, as Andrew Ross
(1989) has pointed out, popular culture has been socially and institutionally central
in America for longer and in a more significant way than in Europe (7). Second,
although the availability of American culture worldwide is undoubted, how what is
available is consumed is at the very least contradictory (see Chapter 9). What is true is
that in the 1950s (one of the key periods of Americanization), for many young people
in Britain, American culture represented a force of liberation against the grey certain-
ties of British everyday life. What is also clear is that the fear of Americanization is
closely related to a distrust (regardless of national origin) of emerging forms of popu-
lar culture. As with the mass culture perspective generally, there are political left and
political right versions of the argument. What are under threat are either the traditional
values of high culture, or the traditional way of life of a tempted working class.
There is what we might call a benign version of the mass culture perspective. The
texts and practices of popular culture are seen as forms of public fantasy. Popular cul-
ture is understood as a collective dream world. As Richard Maltby (1989) claims, popu-
lar culture provides escapism that is not an escape from or to anywhere, but an escape
of our utopian selves (14). In this sense, cultural practices such as Christmas and the
seaside holiday, it could be argued, function in much the same way as dreams: they
articulate, in a disguised form, collective (but repressed) wishes and desires. This is a
benign version of the mass culture critique because, as Maltby points out, If it is the
crime of popular culture that it has taken our dreams and packaged them and sold
them back to us, it is also the achievement of popular culture that it has brought us
more and more varied dreams than we could otherwise ever have known (ibid.).
Structuralism, although not usually placed within the mass culture perspective, and
certainly not sharing its moralistic approach, nevertheless sees popular culture as a sort
of ideological machine which more or less effortlessly reproduces the prevailing struc-
tures of power. Readers are seen as locked into specific reading positions. There is little
space for reader activity or textual contradiction. Part of post-structuralisms critique of
structuralism is the opening up of a critical space in which such questions can be
addressed. Chapter 6 will consider these issues in some detail.
A fourth definition contends that popular culture is the culture that originates from
the people. It takes issue with any approach that suggests that it is something imposed
on the people from above. According to this definition, the term should only be used
to indicate an authentic culture of the people. This is popular culture as folk culture:
a culture of the people for the people. As a definition of popular culture, it is often
equated with a highly romanticised concept of working-class culture construed as the
major source of symbolic protest within contemporary capitalism (Bennett, 1980: 27).
One problem with this approach is the question of who qualifies for inclusion in the
category the people. Another problem with it is that it evades the commercial nature
of much of the resources from which popular culture is made. No matter how much
we might insist on this definition, the fact remains that people do not spontaneously
produce culture from raw materials of their own making. Whatever popular culture is,
what is certain is that its raw materials are those which are commercially provided. This
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approach tends to avoid the full implications of this fact. Critical analysis of pop and
rock music is particularly replete with this kind of analysis of popular culture. At a con-
ference I once attended, a contribution from the floor suggested that Levi jeans would
never be able to use a song from The Jam to sell its products. The fact that they had
already used a song by The Clash would not shake this conviction. What underpinned
this conviction was a clear sense of cultural difference television commercials for Levi
jeans are mass culture, the music of The Jam is popular culture defined as an opposi-
tional culture of the people. The only way the two could meet would be through The
Jam selling out. As this was not going to happen, Levi jeans would never use a song
by The Jam to sell its products. But this had already happened to The Clash, a band
with equally sound political credentials. This circular exchange stalled to a stop. The
cultural studies use of the concept of hegemony would have, at the very least, fuelled
further discussion (see Chapter 4).
A fifth definition of popular culture, then, is one that draws on the political ana-
lysis of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, particularly on his development of the
concept of hegemony. Gramsci (2009) uses the term hegemony to refer to the way
in which dominant groups in society, through a process of intellectual and moral lead-
ership (75), seek to win the consent of subordinate groups in society. This will be dis-
cussed in some detail in Chapter 4. What I want to do here is to offer a general outline
of how cultural theorists have taken Gramscis political concept and used it to explain
the nature and politics of popular culture. Those using this approach see popular cul-
ture as a site of struggle between the resistance of subordinate groups and the forces
of incorporation operating in the interests of dominant groups. Popular culture in this
usage is not the imposed culture of the mass culture theorists, nor is it an emerging
from below, spontaneously oppositional culture of the people it is a terrain of
exchange and negotiation between the two: a terrain, as already stated, marked by resist-
ance and incorporation. The texts and practices of popular culture move within what
Gramsci (1971) calls a compromise equilibrium (161). The process is historical
(labelled popular culture one moment, and another kind of culture the next), but it is
also synchronic (moving between resistance and incorporation at any given historical
moment). For instance, the seaside holiday began as an aristocratic event and within
a hundred years it had become an example of popular culture. Film noir started as
despised popular cinema and within thirty years had become art cinema. In general
terms, those looking at popular culture from the perspective of hegemony theory tend
to see it as a terrain of ideological struggle between dominant and subordinate classes,
dominant and subordinate cultures. As Bennett (2009) explains,
The field of popular culture is structured by the attempt of the ruling class to win
hegemony and by forms of opposition to this endeavour. As such, it consists not
simply of an imposed mass culture that is coincident with dominant ideology, nor
simply of spontaneously oppositional cultures, but is rather an area of negotiation
between the two within which in different particular types of popular culture
dominant, subordinate and oppositional cultural and ideological values and ele-
ments are mixed in different permutations (96).
P-32
Popular culture 11
The compromise equilibrium of hegemony can also be employed to analyse differ-

ent types of conflict within and across popular culture. Bennett highlights class conflict,
but hegemony theory can also be used to explore and explain conflicts involving eth-
nicity, race, gender, generation, sexuality, disability, etc. all are at different moments
engaged in forms of cultural struggle against the homogenizing forces of incorporation
of the official or dominant culture. The key concept in this use of hegemony theory,
especially in post-Marxist cultural studies (see Chapter 4), is the concept of articula-
tion (the word being employed in its double sense to mean both to express and to
make a temporary connection). Popular culture is marked by what Chantal Mouffe
(1981) calls a process of disarticulationarticulation (231). The Conservative Party
political broadcast, discussed earlier, reveals this process in action. What was being
attempted was the disarticulation of socialism as a political movement concerned with
economic, social and political emancipation, in favour of its articulation as a political
movement concerned to impose restraints on individual freedom. Also, as we shall see
in Chapter 7, feminism has always recognized the importance of cultural struggle
within the contested landscape of popular culture. Feminist presses have published
science fiction, detective fiction and romance fiction. Such cultural interventions rep-
resent an attempt to articulate popular genres for feminist politics. It is also possible,
using hegemony theory, to locate the struggle between resistance and incorporation
as taking place within and across individual popular texts and practices. Raymond
Williams (1980) suggests that we can identify different moments within a popular text
or practice what he calls dominant, emergent and residual each pulling the
text in a different direction. Thus a text is made up of a contradictory mix of different
cultural forces. How these elements are articulated will depend in part on the social cir-
cumstances and historical conditions of production and consumption. Hall (1980a)
uses Williamss insight to construct a theory of reading positions: subordinate,
dominant, and negotiated. David Morley (1980) has modified the model to take into
account discourse and subjectivity: seeing reading as always an interaction between the
discourses of the text and the discourses of the reader.
There is another aspect of popular culture that is suggested by hegemony theory.
This is the claim that theories of popular culture are really theories about the constitu-
tion of the people. Hall (2009b), for instance, argues that popular culture is a con-
tested site for political constructions of the people and their relation to the power
bloc (see Chapter 4):
the people refers neither to everyone nor to a single group within society but to
a variety of social groups which, although differing from one another in other
respects (their class position or the particular struggles in which they are most
immediately engaged), are distinguished from the economically, politically and
culturally powerful groups within society and are hence potentially capable of
being united of being organised into the people versus the power bloc if their
separate struggles are connected (Bennett, 1986: 20).
This is of course to make popular culture a profoundly political concept.
P-33
Popular culture is a site where the construction of everyday life may be examined.
The point of doing this is not only academic that is, as an attempt to understand
a process or practice it is also political, to examine the power relations that con-
stitute this form of everyday life and thus reveal the configurations of interests its
construction serves (Turner, 1996: 6).
In Chapter 10, I will consider John Fiskes semiotic use of Gramscis concept of
hegemony. Fiske argues, as does Paul Willis from a slightly different perspective (also
discussed in Chapter 10), that popular culture is what people make from the products
of the culture industries mass culture is the repertoire, popular culture is what people
actively make from it, actually do with the commodities and commodified practices
they consume.
A sixth definition of popular culture is one informed by recent thinking around the
debate on postmodernism. This will be the subject of Chapter 9. All I want to do now
is to draw attention to some of the basic points in the debate about the relationship
between postmodernism and popular culture. The main point to insist on here is the
claim that postmodern culture is a culture that no longer recognizes the distinction
between high and popular culture. As we shall see, for some this is a reason to celebrate
an end to an elitism constructed on arbitrary distinctions of culture; for others it is a
reason to despair at the final victory of commerce over culture. An example of the sup-
posed interpenetration of commerce and culture (the postmodern blurring of the dis-
tinction between authentic and commercial culture) can be found in the relationship
between television commercials and pop music. For example, there is a growing list of
artists who have had hit records as a result of their songs appearing in television com-
mercials. One of the questions this relationship raises is: What is being sold: song or
product? I suppose the obvious answer is both. Moreover, it is now possible to buy
CDs that consist of the songs that have become successful, or have become successful
again, as a result of being used in advertisements. There is a wonderful circularity to
this: songs are used to sell products and the fact that they do this successfully is then
used to sell the songs. For those with little sympathy for either postmodernism or the
celebratory theorizing of some postmodernists, the real question is: What is such a
relationship doing to culture? Those on the political left might worry about its effect
on the oppositional possibilities of popular culture. Those on the political right might
worry about what it is doing to the status of real culture. This has resulted in a sus-
tained debate in cultural studies. The significance of popular culture is central to this
debate. This, and other questions, will be explored in Chapter 9. The chapter will also
address, from the perspective of the student of popular culture, the question: What is
postmodernism?
Finally, what all these definitions have in common is the insistence that whatever
else popular culture is, it is definitely a culture that only emerged following industrial-
ization and urbanization. As Williams (1963) argues in the Foreword to Culture and
Society, The organising principle of this book is the discovery that the idea of culture,
and the word itself in its general modern uses, came into English thinking in the period
which we commonly describe as that of the Industrial Revolution (11). It is a
P-34
Popular culture as other 13
definition of culture and popular culture that depends on there being in place a cap-
italist market economy. This of course makes Britain the first country to produce
popular culture defined in this historically restricted way. There are other ways to
define popular culture, which do not depend on this particular history or these particu-
lar circumstances, but they are definitions that fall outside the range of the cultural
theorists and the cultural theory discussed in this book. The argument, which under-
pins this particular periodization of popular culture, is that the experience of industri-
alization and urbanization changed fundamentally the cultural relations within the
landscape of popular culture. Before industrialization and urbanization, Britain had
two cultures: a common culture which was shared, more or less, by all classes, and a
separate elite culture produced and consumed by the dominant classes in society (see
Burke, 1994; Storey, 2003). As a result of industrialization and urbanization, three
things happened, which together had the effect of redrawing the cultural map. First of
all, industrialization changed the relations between employees and employers. This
involved a shift from a relationship based on mutual obligation to one based solely on
the demands of what Thomas Carlyle calls the cash nexus (quoted in Morris, 1979:
22). Second, urbanization produced a residential separation of classes. For the first
time in British history there were whole sections of towns and cities inhabited only by
working men and women. Third, the panic engendered by the French Revolution the
fear that it might be imported into Britain encouraged successive governments to
enact a variety of repressive measures aimed at defeating radicalism. Political radical-
ism and trade unionism were not destroyed, but driven underground to organize
beyond the influence of middle-class interference and control. These three factors
combined to produce a cultural space outside of the paternalist considerations of
the earlier common culture. The result was the production of a cultural space for the
generation of a popular culture more or less outside the controlling influence of the
dominant classes. How this space was filled was a subject of some controversy for
the founding fathers of culturalism (see Chapter 3). Whatever we decide was its content,
the anxieties engendered by the new cultural space were directly responsible for the
emergence of the culture and civilization approach to popular culture (see Chapter 2).
Popular culture as other

What should be clear by now is that the term popular culture is not as definitionally
obvious as we might have first thought. A great deal of the difficulty arises from the
absent other which always haunts any definition we might use. It is never enough to
speak of popular culture; we have always to acknowledge that with which it is being
contrasted. And whichever of popular cultures others we employ, mass culture, high
culture, working-class culture, folk culture, etc., it will carry into the definition of
popular culture a specific theoretical and political inflection. There is, as Bennett
(1982a) indicates, no single or correct way of resolving these problems; only a series
P-35
of different solutions which have different implications and effects (86). The main
purpose of this book is to chart the many problems encountered, and the many solu-
tions suggested, in cultural theorys complex engagement with popular culture. As we
shall discover, there is a lot of ground between Arnolds view of popular culture as
anarchy and Dick Hebdiges (1988) claim that, In the West popular culture is no
longer marginal, still less subterranean. Most of the time and for most people it simply
is culture. Or, as Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (1987) notes, popular cultural forms have
moved so far towards centre stage in British cultural life that the separate existence of
a distinctive popular culture in an oppositional relation to high culture is now in ques-
tion (80). This of course makes an understanding of the range of ways of theorizing
popular culture all the more important.
This book, then, is about the theorizing that has brought us to our present state of
thinking on popular culture. It is about how the changing terrain of popular culture
has been explored and mapped by different cultural theorists and different theoretical
approaches. It is upon their shoulders that we stand when we think critically about
popular culture. The aim of this book is to introduce readers to the different ways in
which popular culture has been analysed and the different popular cultures that have
been articulated as a result of the process of analysis. For it must be remembered that
popular culture is not a historically fixed set of popular texts and practices, nor is it a
historically fixed conceptual category. The object under theoretical scrutiny is both his-
torically variable, and always in part constructed by the very act of theoretical engage-
ment. This is further complicated by the fact that different theoretical perspectives have
tended to focus on particular areas of the popular cultural landscape. The most com-
mon division is between the study of texts (popular fiction, television, pop music, etc.)
and lived cultures or practices (seaside holidays, youth subcultures, the celebration of
Christmas, etc.). The aim of this book, therefore, is to provide readers with a map of
the terrain to enable them to begin their own explorations, to begin their own map-
ping of the main theoretical and political debates that have characterized the study of
popular culture.
Further reading
Storey, John (ed.), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 4th edition, Harlow:
Pearson Education, 2009. This is the companion volume to this book. It contains
examples of most of the work discussed here. This book and the companion Reader
are supported by an interactive website (www.pearsoned.co.uk/storey). The website
has links to other useful sites and electronic resources.
Agger, Ben, Cultural Studies as Cultural Theory, London: Falmer Press, 1992. As the title
implies, this is a book about cultural studies written from a perspective sympathetic
to the Frankfurt School. It offers some useful commentary on popular culture, espe-
cially Chapter 2: Popular culture as serious business.
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Further reading 15
Allen, Robert C. (ed.), Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, London: Routledge, 1992.

Although this collection is specifically focused on television, it contains some excel-
lent essays of general interest to the student of popular culture.
Bennett, Tony, Colin Mercer and Janet Woollacott (eds), Popular Culture and Social
Relations, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986. An interesting collection of
essays, covering both theory and analysis.
Brooker, Peter, A Concise Glossary of Cultural Theory, London: Edward Arnold, 1999. A
brilliant glossary of the key terms in cultural theory.
Day, Gary (ed.), Readings in Popular Culture, London: Macmillan, 1990. A mixed col-
lection of essays, some interesting and useful, others too unsure about how seriously
to take popular culture.
Du Gay, Paul, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay and Keith Negus, Doing Cultural
Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, London: Sage, 1997. An excellent introduc-
tion to some of the key issues in cultural studies. Certainly worth reading for the
explanation of the circuit of culture.
Fiske, John, Reading the Popular, London: Unwin Hyman, 1989. A collection of essays
analysing different examples of popular culture.
Fiske, John, Understanding Popular Culture, London: Unwin Hyman, 1989. A clear pre-
sentation of his particular approach to the study of popular culture.
Goodall, Peter, High Culture, Popular Culture: The Long Debate, St Leonards: Allen &
Unwin, 1995. The book traces the debate between high and popular culture, with
particular, but not exclusive, reference to the Australian experience, from the eigh-
teenth century to the present day.
Milner, Andrew, Contemporary Cultural Studies, 2nd edn, London: UCL Press, 1994. A
useful introduction to contemporary cultural theory.
Mukerji, Chandra and Michael Schudson (eds), Rethinking Popular Culture, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991. A collection of essays, with an informed and
interesting introduction. The book is helpfully divided into sections on different
approaches to popular culture: historical, anthropological, sociological and cultural.
Naremore, James and Patrick Brantlinger, Modernity and Mass Culture, Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991. A useful and interesting collection
of essays on cultural theory and popular culture.
Storey, John, Inventing Popular Culture, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. An historical
account of the concept of popular culture.
Strinati, Dominic, An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture, London: Routledge,
1995. A clear and comprehensive introduction to theories of popular culture.
Tolson, Andrew, Mediations: Text and Discourse in Media Studies, London: Edward
Arnold, 1996. An excellent introduction to the study of popular media culture.
Turner, Graeme, British Cultural Studies, 2nd edn, London: Routledge, 1996. Still the
best introduction to British cultural studies.
Walton, David, Introducing Cultural Studies: Learning Through Practice, London: Sage,
2008. Another excellent introduction to cultural studies: useful, informative and
funny.
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501483
2013
ECS17110.1177/1367549413501483European Journal of Cultural StudiesIwabuchi
european journal of
Article
European Journal of Cultural Studies
De-westernisation,
2014, Vol. 17(1) 4457
The Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permissions:
inter-Asian referencing sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1367549413501483
and beyond ecs.sagepub.com
Koichi Iwabuchi
Monash University, Australia
Abstract
The necessity of de-westernising knowledge production has been widely advocated.
This is especially pertinent with media and cultural studies, due to the rise of East
Asian media cultures and their transnational circulation, hence a call for looking after
Europe. This article engages the issue by considering the possibility of inter-Asian
referencing and the next steps to be taken. Inter-Asian referencing is a significant
manoeuvre for making concepts and theories derived from Asian experiences
translocally relevant and shared, as well as developing a nuanced comprehension
of Asian experiences through reciprocal learning process. It is also significant for the
study of East Asian media culture, as it has become an integral part of production and
consumption of media culture in the region. The inter-Asian referencing project calls
for researchers working both inside and outside of Asia to collaborate to develop
the innovative production of knowledge and advance cross-border dialogue.
Keywords
Asia as method, cross-border dialogue, East Asian media culture connections, inter-
Asian referencing
De-westernisation and inter-Asian referencing

While the necessity of de-westernising academic production of knowledge in media and
cultural studies has been long advocated (e.g. Curran and Park, 2000), it seems to be
newly attracting academic attention. This has much to do with the latest rise of non-
western countries such as China and India, and some deep-seated issues of the de-
westernisation of academic knowledge reappearing. For example, a conference titled
Beyond Center and Periphery: (De-)westernization in International and Intercultural
Corresponding author:
Koichi Iwabuchi, Monash Asia Institute, Monash University, Building H, 5.94, 900 Dandenong
Road, Caulfield East, Victoria 3145, Australia.
Email: koichi.iwabuchi@monash.edu
P-55
Iwabuchi 45
Communication held in October 2011 at the University of Erfurt in Germany, stated the
purpose of the conference as follows:
As part of the globalization discourse, emerging research areas such as India, China, Africa or
Latin America, once deemed peripheral, have increasingly come into focus. However, the
available methods and analytical models turned out to be insufficient for explaining media use
or media effects in those regions. But does a genuinely non-western type of media and
communication research truly exist? Ironically, even the critical examination of western models
and the call for the de-westernisation of media studies have largely been voiced by western
researchers. And on the other hand, is the dominance of western theories and methodological
approaches primarily rooted in cultural imperialism or have these research paradigms evolved
and proven fruitful in many cases of international and intercultural communication studies?
After all, the paradigms emerging from the Euro-American space have been subjected to
critical analysis and improvement rather than outright rejection.
Being open and critical, the conference statement displays some important issues
regarding the de-westernisation of knowledge production. First, it underscores a
problematic that the prefix de- tends to indicate a rejection with either/or infer-
ence (Sabry, 2009). Indeed, it is unproductive and even absurd to think that the
application of theories derived from Euro-American experiences to non-western
contexts should be totally rejected. Theory has a translocal, if not universal, applica-
bility. However, being conceptualised based on the experiences and realities of a
particular location in a specific historical situation, theory always requires a subtle
spatio-temporal translation whenever we operationalise it to interpret and explain a
concrete phenomenon in a specific context. This is true even with the application of
theories to the context in which those theories were originally conceptualised, much
more with different socio-historical contexts. In this sense, it is incongruous to give
any spatial and geographical adjective to theory. There are no genuine western theo-
ries any more than Asian theories. It cannot be denied that theories derived from
some Euro-American experiences predominate knowledge production in the world,
and the boosting Anglophone hegemony in academia has pushed this tendency fur-
ther. If we look at the major theoretical references in them, we would never fail to
realise the weighty presence of academic concepts and theorisation by scholars
working in Euro-American contexts such as Stuart Hall, Michel Foucault, Judith
Butler, Edward Said, and so forth. However, this does not necessarily mean the
uncritical one-way application of western theories into other contexts. Rather, as
clearly shown by the recent development of media and cultural studies in non-west-
ern regions, they display a creative practice of the provincialisation of western theo-
ries through critical translation (Chakrabarty, 2000). Such a creative act of
appropriation and translation of theories derived from the experiences of western
societies work well in order to understand what is going on in non-western regions.
Moreover, it is helpful to refine and further develop theories derived from western
experiences, as well as to construct innovative theories derived from non-western
contexts, if combined well with a subtly nuanced examination of specific non-west-
ern experiences. This kind of engagement with western theories needs to be clearly
P-56
46 European Journal of Cultural Studies 17(1)
differentiated from an automatic one-way application of theories derived from Euro-

American experiences, or a parochial claim of establishing Asian theories vis--vis
western theories.
However, while a self-critical call to de-westernisation of knowledge production is
much made by various scholars over the world, provincialisation is not easy either, as we
are all implicated in a firmly structured, uneven binary of western theory and non-
western derivative experience, hence a call for de-westernisation, or looking after
Europe. Especially pressing is a question of reciprocal listening. What is at issue here is
how cultural studies scholars working in Euro-American contexts read works in other
contexts, while cultural studies scholars working in non-Euro-American contexts tend to
read regularly works in Euro-American contexts (such as the European Journal of
Cultural Studies) as a theoretical reference. In her critical discussion of the internation-
alisation of cultural studies, Raka Shome points out that even when non-western theo-
ries capture international attention, they still tend to be considered as a revisionary
moment for the original Euro-American ones, which implicitly re-iterates the otherness
of the international in relation to the US/UK axis of cultural studies (2009: 700). Thus a
turn to the ex-periphery often indicates underlying perception of a temporal gap in the
guise of appreciation of critical application of theories derived from western experiences
to non-western contexts. Or, as Thussu (2009) argues, academic institutions and research-
ers in western countries often deal with non-western cases as an alibi for their interna-
tionalising posture, without really earnest efforts to go beyond the existing West-centric
hierarchy in knowledge production. In this regard, attending to what happened to the rise
of the ex-periphery in the past would be beneficial. The rise of India, China, Africa or
Latin America is indeed a matter of immediacy now, but has a similar call for de-
westernisation been made regarding the rise of Japan, Hong Kong or Korea in the last 20
or 30 years? If so, what has been discussed, and whether and how have we not succeeded
in de-westernising the production of knowledge? A serious effort of historicisation would
rescue the current call for de-westernisation of knowledge production from becoming a
never-ending project, which eventually verifies the continuing hegemony of Euro-
American knowledge production
Both scholars working in Euro-American contexts and those in other contexts are all
responsible for reproducing this politics of not-listening. In respect of this, an identified
irony in the above statement, that the call for the de-westernisation of media studies
has largely been voiced by western researchers, suggests some intriguing points. It sug-
gests that scholars working in and on non-western contexts are as responsible for a poli-
tics of not-listening, as those scholars mostly read theories and research that have been
developed in western countries and uncritically apply them to non-western cases and
contexts. However, it also can be argued that the irony actually implies the disinclination
of scholars critically working in and on non-western contexts irrespective of their
nationality or ethnicity to engage in the existing framework of de-westernisation. They
might stay out of the fallacy of claiming pure non-western theory, as well as the struc-
tured predicament of engaging an imperative issue of how to learn from other experi-
ences in a reciprocal and dialogic manner. At the same time, we should not ignore the fact
that there have been many calls for de-westernisation by scholars working in non-west-
ern regions in the last decade or so (e.g. Erni and Chua, 2005). Moreover, there have been
P-57
Iwabuchi 47
some deliberate attempts and practices in the field of media and cultural studies research-
ers working in and on Asia without referring to the term de-westernisation. Here, a key
term is inter-Asian referencing.
Inter-Asian referencing aims to advance innovative knowledge production through
reciprocal learning from other Asian experiences. It is a self-critical, strategic call to
activate dialogue among previously internationally unattended scholarly works of Asian
regions (although still mostly limited to English language works, which is an imperative
issue beyond the scope of this article) to go beyond a globally structured, collusive dis-
inclination to seriously attend to non-western research. However, it is not a closed-
minded regionalism. In reworking the notion of Asia as method, which was advocated
by the Japanese thinker Yoshimi Takeuchi in the early 1960s,1 Chen offers a succinct
recapitulation of his idea: using Asia as an imaginary anchoring point can allow socie-
ties in Asia to become one anothers reference points, so that the understanding of the
self can be transformed and subjectivity rebuilt (2010: xv). This will lead to the con-
struction of an alternative horizon, perspective or method for posing a different set of
questions about world history (2010: xv). Hitherto under-explored, intra-regional or
inter-Asian comparison is considered highly meaningful for understanding modern tra-
jectories of Asian countries in a new critical light, as it is based on shared experiences of
forced modernisation and less hierarchical relationships than a prevailing WestAsia
comparison that is based on the assumed temporal distance between them. Given that
creative translation of theories derived from western experiences in a non-western con-
text still tends to be confined in a West/Rest paradigm, inter-Asian referencing strategi-
cally aims to go beyond this predicament by promoting dialogue among diverse voices
and perspectives derived and developed in Asian contexts. However, this is not to eluci-
date Asian modern experiences in an essentialist term, in contrast with and/or separate
from western and other non-western experiences and theories derived from them. By
re-embracing deep-seated western inflections a global scale, inspired inter-Asian com-
parison and referencing aims to refreshingly elucidate and theorise specific processes in
which the experiences of Asian modernisations have been formulated, whereby knowl-
edge production derived from Asian experiences leads to the articulation of visions and
values that are translocally relevant for transmuting not just Asian societies, but also
European societies and the world as a whole. As such, the idea of Asia as method and
inter-Asian referencing must be distinguished from parochial regionalism, as it neither
excludes researchers working in and on the contexts outside Asia, nor does it underesti-
mate the significance of transnational collaboration, including Europe. It can be consid-
ered a productive detour to provincialisation and the project of looking after Europe.
In the following I will discuss the possibilities of inter-Asian referencing and the next
steps to be taken, with a focus on the studies of East Asian media culture. Inter-Asian
referencing is significant, as it makes concepts and theories derived from Asian experi-
ences translocally relevant and shared, and engenders nuanced accounts of common and
different East Asian experiences. Inter-Asian referencing is also significant for the study
of East Asian media culture, as it has become an integral part of the production and con-
sumption of media culture in the region. As such, inter-Asian referencing is not just a
matter of academic theorisation, but is also peoples mundane practice of encountering
Asian neighbours and making reference to other Asian modernities. The project of
P-58
inter-Asian referencing, it will be suggested, calls for researchers working inside and
outside of Asia to collaborate to develop innovative knowledge production and advance
peoples cross-border dialogue.
East Asian media culture studies on the rise

Chens suggestion reflects, and is motivated by, an innovative project of inter-Asian
cultural studies in which he has played a central role with other colleagues. As another
key figure, Chua (2010), points out, one of the successfully developed fields in the pro-
ject is East Asian pop culture studies. Since the mid-1990s, the production capacity of
media cultures such as TV dramas, film and popular music has developed considerably
in East Asia. Furthermore, inter-Asian promotion and co-production of media cultures
have become commonplace by the collaboration and partnerships among media and cul-
tural industries. These developments are suggestive of a trend that media globalisation
enhances regionalisation. Whether it engenders an East-Asian identity is highly ques-
tionable, but we could safely say that a loose cultural geography has emerged, as most of
East Asian media cultures (except some cultures such as Japanese animation) are capital-
ised, circulating and consumed predominantly, if not exclusively, in East Asia (including
by migrants and people from the region living in diaspora). In examining socio-
historically contextualised experiences that intersect East Asia as a region, much research
has been seriously examining the cultural dynamics of production, circulation and con-
sumption that have been engendered under globalisation processes.2
Reflecting on this development, Chua (2010, 2011) proposes that cultural studies
scholars working in Asia should make conscious efforts to advance inter-Asian referenc-
ing in a more organised way on two levels. He contends that localised (re-)conceptualisa-
tion and theorisation in Asian contexts, with refined uses of local terminologies and
concepts rather than straightforwardly using English concepts, is required in the first
place. Inter-Asian referencing also renders such concepts not just unique to one particu-
lar (non-western) location, but translocally applicable and disseminated. One example he
refers to is Jungs (2011) conceptualisation of mugukjeok in the South Korean context
which, he believes, offers a more nuanced meaning of positive quality of mobility, of
being unbounded by nations than an English term such as transnational (Chua, 2011:
44). Jung develops the concept by referring to the notion of mukokuseki, which I have
conceptualised in the Japanese context elsewhere: mukokuseki literally means some-
thing or someone lacking any nationality, but also implies the erasure of racial or ethnic
characteristics or a context, which does not imprint a particular culture or country with
these features (Iwabuchi, 2002: 28). Such erasure is intentionally or unintentionally
made in the processes of cultural mixing and juxtaposition of multiple local and for-
eign elements.3 I used the Japanese concept to discuss how some Japanese animations
and videogames that did not much represent the tangible ethnocultural characteristics of
Japan had become well received in many parts of the world. Referring to my conceptu-
alisation of mukokuseki, Jung (2011) further develops the notion in her analysis of the
rise of Korean media culture by using a Korean equivalent term, mugukjeok. Jung expli-
cates the process of cultural mixing and transculturation of Koreanness (especially in
terms of masculinity) in South Korea, and discusses how it enhances the cross-border
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Iwabuchi 49
mobility of Korean media culture, including pop stars and films. Jungs inter-Asian ref-
erencing expands the notion of mukokuseki in two inter-related senses. First, it makes the
conceptualisation translocally relevant and applicable to wider ranges of media culture.
Second, and more significantly, it shows how attending to similar and different experi-
ences in East Asia generates a sophisticated understanding of the interaction between
transculturation and the cross-border mobility of media cultures, which in turn is to be
applied and developed further outside Korea (not limited to Asian regions). It is this
mutual learning process that makes inter-Asian referencing contribute to the innovative
production of knowledge.
In order to make such inter-Asian referencing more active and systematic, it is neces-
sary to historicise whether and how media culture production, circulation and consump-
tion have been materialising a cultural geography of East Asia. Cho (2011), who also
proposes the advancement of East Asian pop culture studies, argues that the historicisation
of East Asian pop culture in terms of colonial connections, as well as the influence of
Hong Kong and Japanese media culture on other parts of East Asia in the last 30 and 40
years, is crucial in order to comprehend fully the commonality and specificity of the cur-
rent popularity of Korean media cultures. Spatio-temporal comparison with other East
Asian media cultures and the examination of inter-Asian influences would urge us to
consider the Korean Wave, among other East Asian counterparts, as the iteration of East
Asian pop culture. Cho argues that the idea of iteration, which is repetition with a differ-
ence, is important to de-essentialise and radically pluralise the conception of region.
This idea is clearly expressed by Spivak (2008): different histories, languages and idioms
that come forth each time we try to add an s to the wish for a unified originary name
(quoted in Duara, 2010: 982). An idea of iteration urges us to make sense of the rise of
Korean media culture, not as a uniquely unique Korean phenomenon, but in terms of the
historicity as well as the multiplicity of East Asian pop culture (Cho, 2011: 388).
One issue that the historicisation of East Asian media culture would elucidate produc-
tively is cultural mixing and adaptation in terms of two associated processes: East Asian
media cultures negotiation with American counterparts, and the interchange between
East Asian media cultures. East Asian media cultures have long dexterously hybridised
in local elements while absorbing American cultural influences. The analysis of this pro-
cess is crucial to evade both an essentialist view of Asian values and traditions, and a
simplified view of American cultural domination. It shows at once the operation of
global power configurations in which Euro-American culture has played a central role,
and the active cultural translation practices in the non-West. Many studies have dis-
cussed how East Asian countries have subtly hybridised American media cultures in
terms of production techniques, representational genres and comparative consumption
(e.g. Iwabuchi, 2002; Lee, 1991; Shim, 2006), but a comprehensive examination of how
similar and different experiences of negotiation with American media culture in, for
example, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea have not been substantially conducted yet.
Instead, we still find a repeated statement that Asian media culture translate[s] western
or American culture to fit Asian tastes (Ryoo, 2009: 145). Such comparative analysis
needs to be developed as it would explicate the continuum of cultural mixing and adapta-
tion in East Asia, ranging from creative translation that produces something new, to
selective appropriation of western cultures, subtle reformulation of local cultures,
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eventual replication based on global mass culture formats, re-essentialisation of cultural

difference between the West and Asia and the nationalist discourse of the excellence of
cultural indigenisation.
Cultural mixing and adaptation has been happening also among East Asian media
cultures, especially in terms of the influences of Hong Kong, Japanese and, more recently,
Korean media cultures. This has become a conspicuous constituent of the production of
media culture in East Asia, as media culture markets in that region have become synchro-
nised and producers, directors, actors as well as capital from around the region have been
working across national borders. Remade versions of successful TV dramas and films of
other parts of East Asia are frequently produced, especially between Japanese, Korean,
Hong Kong and Taiwanese media texts; in addition, Japanese comic series often are
adapted for TV dramas and films outside Japan (regarding media co-production in East
Asia, see Moran and Keane, 2004; Jin and Lee, 2007). Intriguingly, analysis of the
dynamic processes of intertextual reworking, as well as inter-Asian cultural adaptation,
exposes both commonality and difference in the constitution and representation of East
Asian modernity.
A prominent example is Liuxing Huayuan (Meteor Garden), a Taiwanese TV drama
series that adopts a Japanese comic series. The drama series became very popular in
many parts of East and South-East Asia, so much so that Japanese and Korean versions
were produced later; most recently an unofficial Chinese version was produced. A
chain of adaptation of the same story of girls comic series (shojo manga), Hana yori
dango (Boys over Flowers), which has been widely read in East Asia, shows some kind
of regional shared-ness. It is a story about confrontation, friendship and love between
an ordinary female high school student and extraordinarily rich and good-looking four
male students. While the representation of beautiful boys in each version is a very
important factor for its popularity (Jung, 2010), the common motif also travels well
across East Asia and South-East Asia, as a shojo narrative. As Le argues, the shojo nar-
rative mostly revolves around the border crisis when shojo heroines symbolically
cross out of girlhood the heroines first love (2009: 35). It is an ambivalent and
resistant genre that narratively and stylistically defers incipient womanhood and its
attendant responsibilities by maintaining the open-ended possibility of adolescence
(2009: 82). However, inter-Asian adaptation of the shojo narrative also engenders
divergence. Among other aspects such as family relationships, Confucian values and
masculinity, an intriguing difference is discerned in representation of the adolescent
heroines agency. As the fanciful and nostalgic representation of female agency in the
negotiation with adolescent transition is a key to the genre, The shojo heroine is
always, in one way or another, active, agentive and engaged against both the villains
of her narrative and the social ills that created them (Le, 2009: 35). However, in the
Korean version of Boys over Flowers, the agency of young female being is, as Le
argues, overwhelmed by the spectacles of suffering which marks the heroines enun-
ciative passivity. This divergence from the original story and other two versions of the
drama series can be explained by the predominance of the melodramatic narrative in
South Korea, which has been historically constituted through its traumatic experiences
of Japanese colonialism, post-war turmoil and brutally compressed modernisation.
Nevertheless, despite the difference and inflection that are articulated in the countrys
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Iwabuchi 51
specific socio-historical context, each drama remains definitely Asian in its inflection
(Le, 2009: 115), as all versions share the imagery of the Asian modern that is narrated
through the experience of female adolescence. Inter-Asian adaptation work as a chan-
nel though which the intricate juxtaposition of specificity and commonality of East
Asian modernities is freshly articulated.
Inter-Asian mediated referencing as mundane practice

No less significantly, inter-Asian referencing has become an integral part of peoples
mundane experiences of consuming media cultures. Many studies have shown that
inter-Asian media culture consumption has brought about new kinds of cross-border
relationships: peoples perception of self and other (Asians) and their similarities and
differences self-reflexively, sympathetically and/or orientalisingly on a large scale
that has never been observed before (e.g. Chua and Iwabuchi, 2008; Iwabuchi, 2002,
2004; Kim, 2008). Cho (2011) further proposes to develop a systematic collation and
theorisation of various patterns of peoples experiences of mediated inter-Asian refer-
encing. For Cho (2011), this is to theorise East Asian sensibilities to clarify emerging
identities, consciousnesses and mentalities within its cultural geography in a way
akin to Williams idea of structure of feeling (2011: 393). While the term sensibili-
ties runs the risk of signifying an unnecessarily exclusive boundedness of East Asian
experiences, East Asian sensibilities should not be considered static or evenly shared,
but marked by its asymmetric but synchronous spatialities and its uneven but simulta-
neous temporalities (2011: 394). The mixed perception of spatio-temporal sameness
and difference, closeness and distance, and familiarity and strangeness, constitutes
such sensibilities. People in Asian countries have long tended to face the West to inter-
pret their own modern experiences, but the mediated encounter with other Asian
modernities through the consumption of TV dramas, film and popular music from
other parts of the region now offers people a wider repertoire for reflecting on their
own lives and societies in the light of other East Asian modernities.
For example, Lee argues that women in their twenties and thirties in Korea who hold
a collective desire to get away from fixed gender roles and to lead their own independent
lives (2008: 166167) found realistically empowering images in the self-determining
female characters represented in some Japanese TV dramas. In the case of Japan, the
consumption of East Asian media cultures often undermines a historically constituted idea
of Japans superiority over the rest of Asia (e.g. Iwabuchi, 2002, 2008). In their consump-
tion of Hong Kong media cultures, Japanese women of this particular age group identified
themselves with their characters and stories to recapture the vigour and energy that they
felt they had lost in Japan (Iwabuchi, 2002). Here, the sense of nostalgia expressed as such
marks a self-reflexive reception. Although the sense of nostalgia might reproduce Japans
historically constituted oriental orientalism towards other Asian societies, it also dis-
plays peoples appreciation of a different mode of Asian modernity based on an emerging
sense of coevalness, an appreciation of Hong Kongs present as a promising vision of
another form of Asian modernity which Japan has failed to achieve. Similarly, the con-
sumption of Korean TV dramas such as Winter Sonata drastically changed peoples previ-
ously negative images of South Korean society, culture and people, and even made them
self-critical of having a biased view of South Korea as a less modernised society (Iwabuchi,
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2008). A survey showed that about 60 percent of audiences of the drama came to have a
better image of South Korea, and that 40 percent of audiences are paying more attention
to media coverage of the JapanKorea political and historical relationship (Hayashi,
2004). No small number of them even started to learn what Japanese colonialism did in
the Korean peninsula, and realised how it still cast a shadow on the current situation.
The mediated encounter with other Asian modernities may make people in East Asia
mutually appreciate how common experiences of modernisation, urbanisation, westerni-
sation and globalisation are experienced similarly and differently in other East Asian
contexts. Thus significantly, inter-Asian referencing via East Asian media cultures has
brought about cross-border dialogue in the sense that it encourages people to critically
and self-reflexively reconsider their own life, society and culture as well as socio-histor-
ically constituted relations and perceptions with others. This emerging landscape of peo-
ples mundane experiences of inter-Asian referencing is reminiscent of Takeuchis sense
of pleasurable surprise that he perceived when he first visited China, a sense that moti-
vated his study of Chinese literature and eventually triggered the formulation of the idea
of Asia as method. While an encounter with people in Euro-American countries, he sup-
posed, would make him conscious of their superiority, he was very much impressed by
his realization that peoples thinking, feeling and experiences in China looked very
familiar and close (and different) to those in Japan, as both shared a catch-up positioning
and mentality of developmental temporality vis--vis their western counterparts. This
sense of pleasant surprise has pushed the development of academic research on media
cultures in East Asia in the last 20 years. However, this time, that sensibility was not only
derived from researchers self-critical observation of other Asian societies. Rather,
researchers, including myself, have witnessed how media culture connections prompt
many people in the region to perceive something similar and different in the composition
of modernities of other Asian societies. Thus the development of East Asian media cul-
ture connections does not display the possibility of inter-Asian referencing just as a
method to produce alternative academic knowledge, but as a historic opportunity of
engendering peoples cross-border dialogue as mundane practices, which inspired
researchers avidly document, interpret and problematise.
Inclusiveness of inter-Asian mediated dialogue

If we take the significance of inter-Asian referencing as a matter of the mundane promo-
tion of mediated transnational dialogue, it is also important to examine most systemati-
cally the insensibilities, disconnections, divides and antagonisms that have been
generated by East Asian media culture connectivity. This does not mean only how vast
numbers of people in the region remain indifferent to other East Asian media cultures, or
how political issues such as territorial disputes cast a shadow over the circulation of East
Asian media cultures. East Asian media culture circulation has activated the vicious cir-
cle of (cyber-)nationalism, as shown by the recent surge of the anti-Korean Wave and
anti-Japan movement (Liscutin, 2009). Furthermore, the rise of East Asian media cul-
tures does not fundamentally challenge West-centred power configurations; rather, it has
been formulated under and incorporated into imbalanced globalisation processes. This is
evident not just in how western cultural influences are already deeply inscribed in the
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Iwabuchi 53
specific formation of media cultures in East Asia, but also in how globally configured
power relations surpass a West/Asia binary and permeate both. While research on inter-
Asian media consumption has tended to be fascinated with the new ways in which media
culture has engendered self-reflexive dialogues, it is needed to give more attention to the
issue of marginalisation and non-sharing that is accompanied, and even engendered, by
the promotion of inter-Asian mediated referencing in a particular manner.
Elsewhere I have argued, mainly in the Japanese context, that global governance of
media culture connectivity and diversity has been generated through three interrelated
forces of marketisation, state policy of national branding and cultural internationalism
(Iwabuchi, 2010). Their interplay works to deter and limit cross-border dialogic con-
nections in East Asia, as it promotes market-oriented international diversity and con-
nections while suppressing other kinds. As the advancement of market-oriented
industrial partnerships has facilitated the formation of an inter-Asian pop culture net-
work, the kinds of media texts that are promoted to circulate are chiefly commercially
and ideologically hegemonic ones in each country, which do not represent sociocultur-
ally marginalised voices well within the nation. This predisposition is pushed also by
states promotion of brand nationalism, which aims to use media culture for the
enhancement of political and economic national interests in the international arena. It
keenly promotes the international marketisation of national culture while discounting
imperative questions of cultural diversity that is not justly recognised within the nation,
as well as international political economy issues such as the hierarchical structuring of
affective labour and the monopoly of copyright by media giants (Iwabuchi, 2012). The
two forces have been accompanied by the rise of cultural internationalism. It is often
argued that the growth of transnational connections does not displace the significance
of the national, but encourages its reworking (e.g. Hannerz, 1996). A case in point is that
the national has come to be taken for granted as the unit of global cultural encounter,
and that national cultures are mutually consumed in various internationalised cultural
occurrences. Since the 1990s we have witnessed a substantial increase in global media
spaces through satellite and cable broadcasting and the internet, as well as global media
events and gathering opportunities of sport events, film festivals, TV format trades,
food showcases and tourism. Through these events, cultures from many parts of the
world are exhibited, competing with each other and are mutually recognised as national
brands in the international arena (Urry, 2003).
In this context, inter-Asian mediated connections tend to enhance a particular kind of
internationalised cultural diversity and encounter in a way that exclusively highlights
national cultural boundaries. For example, as discussed previously, the popularity of
Korean media cultures in Japan has generated peoples self-reflexive perception of South
Korea, but it also has promoted a confused recognition of resident Koreans, most of whom
have been born and brought up in Japan, through the mirror of the present South Korea.
The recognition of Korean residents as fellow citizens living here with us is subsumed by
a recognition of them as those belonging to another nation over there. As an interna-
tional relationship of Japan and South Korea is much underlined, the historically consti-
tuted discrimination and identity distress that many resident Koreans have been
experiencing in Japan have not been well comprehended, and their differences have not
been fully recognised as those of citizens belonging to Japanese society (Iwabuchi, 2008).
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This raises a question about the analytical unit of inter-Asian referencing. Cho (2011)
argues that cautious usage of the term national culture would be necessary to the theorisa-
tion of East Asian pop culture. I agree that the idea of the nation is not necessarily suppres-
sive or even fascist enforcement that erases the diversity and multiplicity of different
locales (2011: 390). The nation-state is still a significant unit of analysis, as it exerts a
considerable institutional and affective power in the articulation of East Asian media cul-
ture connections. However, the cost of even a cautious deployment of methodological
nationalism should be taken seriously (see Wimmer and Shiller, 2002). We need to be
watchful of whether a nation-centred analysis of iteration and East Asian sensibilities might
lose sight of the ways in which highlighting national-territorial similarities, differences
and interactions works to dampen our attention to sociocultural marginalisation within and
across the nation. Theorisation of East Asian media culture connections would not be sat-
isfactory if it did not pay a critical attention to whether and how they interrelatedly chal-
lenge or generate inequality and marginalisation within a region and nation in terms of
class, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, sub-region, migration and/or diasporas, and dis-
courage cross-border dialogue. A nation-based inter-Asian comparison is useful to make
these enquiries as long as we fundamentally problematise the supposition of national cul-
ture as a unit of cultural connection and diversity. The discussion of de-westernisation
tends to overlook intra-regional and intra-national disconnection and disparity (Shome,
2009), and this also could be the case with the studies of East Asia media culture.
Conclusion
Transnational circulation and intersection of various flows of capital, media culture and
people interconnect East Asia both spatially and temporally, materially and imagina-
tively, and dialogically and antagonistically, in ways that highlight historically consti-
tuted relationships and regionally and globally shared emergent issues. Undoubtedly, the
rise of East-Asian media cultures and regional connections has become a significant field
of academic analysis which merits further development, since it contributes to enriching
our comprehension of cultural globalisation. However, as the phenomenon is no longer
emergent but has been increasingly incorporated into the dominant structure of global
power configuration, we need to rethink why East Asia pop culture matters and for
what purpose, and for whom inter-Asian referencing can be a useful method. Let us be
reminded of Chens argument that Asia as method ceases to look at Asia as object of
analysis (Chen, 2005: 141). Method in Asia as method suggests less a pure academic
methodology than a means by which to engender alternative modes of knowledge pro-
duction that enable us to tackle and transform the existing unequal composition of the
world that is, we researchers are urged to consider how to advance conjointly two kinds
of inter-Asian referencing in the studies of East Asian media culture connections: the
academic production of knowledge and the promotion of peoples mediated dialogue.
Hence I am with Duaras (2011) reservation with the idea of iteration (as discussed
by Spivak), that pluralising and de-essentialising our understanding of the region
called Asia does not turn our attention to interactions and reciprocal connectivity: we
need to recognize our interdependence and foster transnational consciousness in our
education and cultural institutions, not at the cost but for the cost of our national
P-65
Iwabuchi 55
attachments (2011: 982). Indeed, the practice of mutual learning from the experience
of other societies and of conversing over transnationally shared issues is a pressing
matter more than ever, so as to tackle together the violence of global capital, the rise of
various kinds of cultural nationalisms, intensifying transnational ethnocultural flows
and growing cultural diversity within the nation. Media culture connection in East Asia
has significantly enhanced cross-border dialogue, affectively, communicatively and
participatorily. Yet there is no guarantee that mutual listening and dialogue is enhanced
by itself. In a world of intensified, mediated interconnection, so many issues and
diverse voices are sharable but not necessarily or inevitably shared (Silverstone,
2006: 91). To be engaged with the politics of (non)shared-ness, a researchers role,
first and foremost, is to offer critical interpretations and analyses of complex processes
of mediated shared-ness and non-shared-ness in an intangible manner. Inter-Asian
comparison and referencing will be highly relevant for this. However, it should be
accompanied by a commitment to contriving how to make use of produced knowledge
for constructively coordinating the promotion of the sense of shared-ness and cross-
border dialogue among various social subjects. The issues that inter-Asian referencing
would highlight are not just limited to the transcendence of Euro-American dominance
and parochial regionalism or nativism in the production of knowledge. The pursuit of
its full potential requires not just taking inter-Asian referencing as a matter of aca-
demic research, but also of commitment to the advancement of peoples cross-border
dialogue as mundane practice. This is a project of envisioning and materialising East
Asia as a dialogic communicative space. It aims to transnationally extend our commit-
ment to the local by taking East Asia as a strategic anchoring point. As such, its scope
and relevance is cosmopolitan, expanding the regional well, and it will be achieved
meaningfully only by forming transnational collaborations beyond Asia and Europe.
So much needs to be done. We are too busy to look after Europe.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or
not-for-profit sectors.
Notes
1. For an English translation, see Takeuchi (2005). For more details of Takeuchis argument, see
Lo in this issue.
2. For example, in the English language academy, on regional cultural flows and connections,
see Berry etal. (2009) and Kim (2008). On Korean Wave phenomena, see Chua and Iwabuchi
(2008); on the popularity of Japanese media cultures, see Iwabuchi (2002, 2004); on the rise
of Chinese media cultures and markets, see Curtin (2007) and Fung (2008).
3. The term mukokuseki was first coined in the early 1960s to describe a new action film genre
in Japan that parodied Hollywood western films such as Shane.
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Biographical note
Koichi Iwabuchi is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Monash University, and Director
of the Monash Asia Institute. His research interests are media and cultural globalisation, multicul-
tural questions and cultural citizenship in East Asian contexts. His main English publications
include Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Duke
University Press, 2002); East Asian Pop Culture: Approaching the Korean Wave (ed. with Chua
Beng Huat, Hong Kong University Press, 2008); Uses of Media Culture, Usefulness of Media
Culture Studies: Beyond Brand Nationalism, into Public Dialogue (in M. Morris and M. Hjort,
eds, Creativity and Academic Activism, Hong Kong University Press and Duke University Press).
Iwabuchi is currently Chair of the Association for Cultural Typhoon.
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Cultural Studies
ISSN: 0950-2386 (Print) 1466-4348 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcus20
FIGHTING WOMEN IN CONTEMPORARY ASIAN

CINEMA
Jane Chi Hyun Park
To cite this article: Jane Chi Hyun Park (2013) FIGHTING WOMEN IN CONTEMPORARY ASIAN
CINEMA, Cultural Studies, 27:2, 242-256, DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2012.738670
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2012.738670
Published online: 15 Nov 2012.
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Jane Chi Hyun Park
FIGHTING WOMEN IN CONTEMPORARY

ASIAN CINEMA
The celebration of the inauthentic

in My Wife is a Gangster and Chocolate
This essay provides a comparative reading of the female protagonists in two action
films from Korea (My Wife is a Gangster) and Thailand (Chocolate), focusing on
how representations of their fighting abilities and non-feminine behavior rework
dominant masculine discourses of bodily and national authenticity in action
cinema. The first half of the essay looks at how Eun-jin, the heroine of MWG,
humorously critiques cinematic Korean soft femininity and hard masculinity,
the latter itself a transnational hybrid of indigenous codes of manhood and those
invoked in the action films of Hong Kong, Japan and the USA. It then proceeds to
consider how the cultural and ontological hybridity of heroine Zen in Chocolate
and her lack of conflict with a foreign other likewise revises existing notions of
national masculinity in Thai action cinema. The essay shows how both
protagonists diverge from conventional representations of fighting women insofar
as their sexuality is not emphasized but rather parodied or elided. It argues that
the films ultimately celebrate the heroines proficiency at mimicking Korean and
Thai forms of masculinity. In the process, the essay critiques the idea that aesthetic
imitation is linked to cultural inauthenticity an idea that has characterized the
nationalist discourses of the postcolonial West and the anticolonial non-West
and suggests unpacking this notion of masculine mimicry to expand existing
theoretical frameworks for understanding popular images of physically aggressive,
masculine women on screen.
Keywords Gender; body; action films; Korea; Thailand; orientalism
Introduction
In a Variety article, Mi Hui Kim (2001) hailed the emergence of an era of
female empowerment in South Korean cinema, citing the popularity of
movies released that year with strong women characters such as My Sassy Girl,
Cultural Studies Vol. 27, No. 2 March 2013, pp. 242256

ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online # 2013 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandfonline.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2012.738670
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F I G H T I N G WO M E N I N C O N T E M P O R AR Y AS I AN C I N E M A 243
Take Care of My Cat and One Fine Spring Day. Leading the list was My Wife is a
Gangster (dir. Cho Jin-gyu), a romantic comedy/action film about the exploits
of a female mob boss who marries a sweet and unsuspecting civil servant to
fulfil the wish of her dying sister.
According to producer Seo Sewon, the films appeal lies in its
exaggerated comic portrayal of a tough Korean woman on the big screen,
an image that had massive commercial appeal. Produced for $1.5 million, the
film grossed $30 million to lead the domestic box office in 2001. My Wife is a
Gangster (hereafter MWG) also caught the attention of Hollywood distributors
who bought the story rights the following year, sparking the Asian remake
craze in the USA. While plans for the American remake languished at
Miramax, two sequels, My Wife is a Gangster 2 (2003) and My Wife is a Gangster
3 (2006), performed well nationally and regionally, and at the time of this
writing, a Chinese remake of the original film is scheduled for simultaneous
release in 2012 in China and South Korea (KOBIZ 2011).
A couple of years after the debut of MWG in Korea, Prachya Pinkaews
Thai action films, Ong-bak: Muay Thai Warrior (2003) and Tom Yum Goong (a.k.a
The Protector, 2005), introduced the phenomenal kickboxing skills of Tony Jaa
to international audiences. Along with his kinetic performances, Jaas roles as
innocent young men from the countryside trying to recover indigenous
artifacts from urban and foreign foes recalled the masculine, muscular
nationalism embodied by Bruce Lee in the 1970s. In 2008, Prachya tweaked
this martial arts formula in his third film, Chocolate, by replacing the underdog
hero with an adolescent heroine much as MWG had tweaked the gangster
formula by showcasing a woman gangster. As the autistic daughter of a
Japanese yakuza member and a Thai gangsters moll, Zen is able to perfectly
mimic the martial arts moves of students at the Muay Thai academy next door
and her heroes, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and Tony Jaa, on television.
In this essay, I look at how the gender and fighting abilities of the
protagonists in MWG and Chocolate are represented in Western reviews,
interviews, DVD extras and other materials accessible to English-speaking
audiences. In particular, I focus on how these token female characters rework
dominant masculine discourses of bodily and national authenticity in action
cinema.
I begin by showing the ways in which the representation of Eun-jin, the
heroine of MWG, humorously critiques cinematic Korean soft femininity and
hard masculinity, the latter itself a transnational hybrid of indigenous codes of
manhood and those invoked in the action films of Hong Kong, Japan and the
USA. I then go on to consider how the cultural and ontological hybridity of
Zen in Chocolate and her lack of conflict with a foreign other likewise seems to
revise existing notions of national masculinity in Thai action cinema. Whereas
Eun-jin performs her gender critique by embodying the simultaneously
frightening and comic figure of the dominatrix, Zen does so by executing the
technologized moves of a special teenager. The men who support them, as
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244 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S
friends, underlings, family and love interests, similarly complicate hard

nationalist modes of masculinity by self-reflexively exaggerating those modes
and/or by displaying alternative, softer masculinities.
Linking my investigation of MWG and Chocolate is an interest in how the
protagonists authenticity as fighters is based on their facility at imitating male
models. Their performances diverge from most representations of fighting
women by comically highlighting (seemingly abnormal) female sexuality in the
case of MWG and eliding it completely in the case of Chocolate. Besides, these
films unabashedly celebrate rather than denigrate the heroines proficiency at
mimicking Korean and Thai forms of masculinity. In the process, they upturn
the idea that aesthetic imitation is linked to cultural inauthenticity, an idea that
has characterized the nationalist discourses of both the postcolonial West and
the anticolonial non-West. In other words, the embodied performances of
these characters, as deliberately un-feminine and technologized women, show
how imitation can be deployed as a potentially critical and creative form of
intervention within these discourses as a form of ambivalent mimicry (Bhabha
1994, pp. 8592).
In the following readings, I attempt to work through these ideas and
consider if and how the female protagonists in MWG and Chocolate can expand
existing theoretical frameworks for understanding popular images of physically
aggressive, masculine women on screen. The first section discusses MWG
within overviews of representations of gender in the action genre broadly and
Korean action/gangster films specifically. The second section builds on and
expands points from the first through an analysis of the primary fighting scenes
in Chocolate, focusing on tropes of disability and techno-orientalism.
Gender hybridity and the spectre of the dominatrix

In her analysis of Ripley, the heroine in Alien, Elizabeth Hills, points out the
limitation of feminist psychoanalytic approaches, which, based on the idea of
woman as lack, can only recognize active female protagonists as imitative and
eroticized figurative males (2005). Drawing on Deleuzian notions of
assemblage and becoming, Hills suggests instead that such protagonists are
transgressive and transformative in their ability to confound binaristic
logic . . . access[ing] a range of emotions, skills and abilities which have
traditionally been defined as either masculine or feminine (2005, p. 39).
Jeffrey Brown goes further to argue that the gender hybridity of action
heroines, encapsulated in what he calls the spectre of the dominatrix, is also
the major source of their power. As Brown puts it, The really transgressive
potential of the action heroine may be that, as with the dominatrix, she mocks
masculinity as she enacts it . . . that is, the [gender] boundaries are confounded
because they are combined (2004, p. 69).
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In her performance of feminized gangster masculinity, Eun-jin embodies

the spectre of the dominatrix in her behaviour more than her appearance. She
constantly swears; smokes and drinks; glares her opponents down; quickly
resorts to violence to get what she wants; and verbally and physically abuses
her underlings who respectfully call her Sir. At the same time, with her slight
build, short, feminine haircut and designer suits, she looks more like a stylish
executive than a mob boss. The incongruity initially confuses a rookie gangster
who calls her an arrogant bitch when he first meets her, not realizing she is
the legendary Big Brother that his immediate superior Romeo has just been
extolling.
Explicitly dominatrix tendencies also appear in Eun-jin after she is married.
For instance, she forces her husband, Su-il, to keep having sex with her so that
she can make her sister happy by getting pregnant. The first of these awkward
attempts leads to increasingly comic scenarios of the couple copulating in
various public spaces. Eun-jin always initiates these scenes in which she is
forcefully on top accompanied by Su-ils hilarious agonized reaction shots. The
heroines increasing sexual aggressiveness contrasts with her initial inexperi-
ence; however, much like the typical male gangster, she remains emotionally
unavailable to her attention-starved husband throughout most of the film.
Reworking action
In her combination of physical attractiveness and deadly fighting ability, Eun-
jins character draws on the figures of tough super heroines in Western action
films from La Femme Nikita (1990) to The Matrix (1999) as well as American
television shows such as Xena, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dark Angel. At the
same time, she is also clearly influenced by their East Asian counterparts, most
notably the balletic young heroines of Chinese wuxia pian and the cyborgian
battling beauties and cross-dressing girl knights of Japanese manga and anime
(Arons 2001, Driscoll 2007, Orbaugh 2007). In particular, according to
Meaghan Morris, a key precedent for the glamorous, androgynous look of Eun-
jin is Sister 13 (Sandra Ng Kwang-yu), a lesbian gangster in the popular Hong
Kong film series, Young and Dangerous, which ran from the mid-1990s to 2000
(personal correspondence, June 15, 2011).
Finally, the role of Eun-jin as a tough but ultimately kind female character
wedded to her work has local antecedents in such Korean romantic comedies
as A Wedding Story (1992), Corset (1996) and Art Museum by the Zoo (1998) as
well as domestic gangster films. While the former genre was primarily shaped
by American romcoms, the latter was influenced by a number of transnational
genres, including Hollywood gangster movies, Japanese swordplay and yakuza
films, and Hong Kong martial arts and action movies (Kim 2005, pp. 100
102, Cho 2010, pp. 6366). The styles associated with all of these action
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genres appear in the three major fighting sequences that punctuate the film.
For example, Eun-jins first encounter with the Japanese fighter Naman of the
rival White Shark gang in the only extended fight sequence in the middle of the
film alludes to similar scenes in Akira Kurosawas early film, Sugata Sanshiro
(1943), and the first of the Lone Wolf and Cub series, Sword of Vengeance (1972),
both of which feature a duel between opponents in a windblown grassy field.
However, here the hero is a petite Korean woman who, after being
stabbed by her Japanese nemesis, musters the strength to push him off a cliff
from which he returns and tries to strangle her. She throws him off again, and
then gets on top of him, plants a knife next to his head and grinds the heel of
her boot into his crotch. The gesture playfully harks back to the common trope
of independence fighters in early Korean action films or Hwalkuk which were
influenced by Japanese Shimpa theatre and linked on- and off-screen to the
marginalized masculinity of poor and working-class men (Kim 2005, p. 99).
The tongue-in-cheek critique of colonialism also happens at the level of genre:
the Korean heroine parodies cinematic codes of Japanese masculine honour
when she literally castrates her opponent rather than doing so metaphorically,
by stabbing or beheading him.
Eun-jins climactic fight in the warehouse where she tries to avenge
Romeos death and the final scene of the film in which Su-il has joined the gang
likewise reference another major influence of the Korean gangster genre
Hong Kong martial arts and action films. Such successful contemporary Korean
gangster films as Nowhere to Hide (1999), Friend (2001) and a Bittersweet Life
(2005) resemble their Hong Kong counterparts in the heavy incorporation of
melodrama, emphasis on loyalty and righteousness and tragic endings. Women
also remain peripheral; however, as Jinhee Choi notes, romantic plots occur
more often, and there is considerable ambivalence over the use of gangster
codes to represent virility an ambivalence that is strongly expressed through
parody in the cycle of gangster comedies, which includes MWG (2010, p. 70).
To examine this form of parody more closely, I will now go on to look at the
only scene in the film in which Eun-jin attempts, with considerable difficulty,
to perform femininity.
Reworking romantic comedy

MWG highlights a strong female protagonist who seems to reverse the
traditional role of women in the gangster film as marginal narrative devices
used to cement central male homosocial relationships. In sharp contrast, the
men play subservient roles.
As noted earlier, the heroine is characterized as a stoic, unsmiling leader
who exhibits a hard masculinity somewhat belied by her stylishly
androgynous feminine appearance. Romeo introduces her as the legendary
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Big Brother in a flashback of how she entered the gang when she rescued one of
its members. Almost immediately afterward, Eun-jin receives a phone call, and
we get another flashback this time highly melodramatic of the protagonist
and her older sister Yu-jin being orphaned and then separated as children. The
heroines tough shell is broken only in the tearful reunion with Yu-jin whose
dying wish is to see her little sister happily married.
Eun-jin methodically starts hunting for a husband. Her underlings register
her at an elite matchmaking agency, and Romeos beautician girlfriend, the
tacky, ultra-femme Sherry, is brought in to perform a makeover on Eun-jin.
Sherry points out Eun-jins scaly crocodile skin, applies face lotion and puts
her hair in pink rollers. She also teaches her eigyo (girly charm), demonstrating
how to seduce men by fake crying, whining helplessly in a nasal voice and
shaking her breasts. Eun-jin tries to imitate her and fails at which point Romeo
takes over, perfectly repeating Sherrys performance of femininity. For the
first time in the film Eun-jin laughs, loudly and horrifically, followed nervously
by her henchmen whom she abruptly orders to leave the room.
The camera cuts to Eun-jin getting out of a car to meet her date and his
parents, wearing a long permed wig and dressed like Sherry in a tight, short
red dress. It then pans up her body in a deliberate parody of similar after
shots in Hollywood films from My Fair Lady (1964) to Miss Congeniality (2000)
and any number of contemporary makeover television shows. While the
typical after shot reveals the transformation of the unattractive woman into a
beauty, this one makes Eun-jin look comically monstrous: her dress clings in all
the wrong places; she slouches, glares and holds her handbag awkwardly.
Later, after the date unsurprisingly fails, a man yells at her for smoking in
public. Only when she gets out and takes a sledgehammer to his car does she
seem to have regained her sense of self. Eun-jin proceeds to fight the man,
kicking him with her stilettos and is rescued by her future husband who
assumes she is being attacked.
If the male gangsters in the film critique the genres codes of virility by
humorously exaggerating its sexism, Su-il presents a soft and sensitive
masculinity, also exaggerated in touches such as quoting lines from The Bridges
of Madison County, performing domestic tasks and being overly concerned with
pleasing his wife. When he finally discovers what Eun-jin does, he begs her to
get out of the business. Until this point, the film has felt more like a romantic
comedy than a gangster film insofar as the first three-fourths of the narrative
focuses on Eun-jins humorous attempts to masquerade as a properly feminine
wife in order to please Yu-jin, her only biological family. It deviates sharply,
however, in the final third of the film after her sister dies, Su-il discovers his
wifes secret and Romeo is killed an event that sparks Eun-jins loyalty to
her work family, the gang.
During the final fight in the warehouse, she pleads with the castrated
Naman to kick her anywhere but in the stomach because she is pregnant. He
responds by kicking her harder and making her miscarry. This re-masculinizes
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Eun-jin and renders her capacity for motherhood incompatible with her role as
a fighter. Su-il avenges his wifes miscarriage, an act that masculinizes him and
leads him to join her gang. Eun-jin remains the leader, however; as second-in-
command, Su-il now has the power to hand his wife her sword in combat. The
film ends in a freeze frame of the heroine lunging at an unseen opponent with
the sword raised and her mouth open in a scream hardly an image of proper
or contained femininity.
Masculinist nationalism: the fighting country bumpkin

Similar images of the unruly fighting woman punctuate Chocolate, which, much
like MWG, exemplifies the formal, cultural and commercial ways in which
national cinemas draw on and contribute to the development of transnational
genres, styles and narratives. In the decade between the screening of the first
Thai film at Cannes, Wisit Sasanatiengs comedy-western, Tears of the Black
Tiger, in 2001 and the awarding of the Palme dOr to Apichatpong
Weerasethakuls Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives in 2010,
filmmaking has become an increasingly important part of the Thai cultural
industry, used to support growing nationalism at home and to promote the
idea of Amazing Thailand to foreign tourists (Lewis 2003, Harrison 2005).
In particular, popular sports films such as The Iron Ladies (2000), The Iron
Ladies II (2003) and Beautiful Boxer (2003) on the one hand, and Ong-bak, Tom
Yum Goong, and Chocolate on the other, managed to appeal to both domestic and
international audiences. The first three films are all based on true stories of
transsexual (kathoey) athletes members of the winning 1996 national
volleyball team and a Muay Thai boxer-turned-entertainer, respectively. The
sympathetic representations of kathoey protagonists in these films appealed to
local viewers who claimed them as national underdogs after the economic
crash of 1997, and to Western viewers who saw in them examples to support
what Peter Jackson has called the myth of a Thai gay paradise (Jackson 1999,
pp. 226230).
The second set of films also falls within the sports genre but appeals to
audiences beyond queer, art house markets. It does so through the martial arts
formula that Bruce Lee made famous in which a chaste, heterosexual underdog
represents the nation with his disciplined muscular masculinity. According to
Leon Hunt, Ong-bak enthralled international fans with its revival of the cult of
the real, which many of these fans felt traditional Hong Kong martial arts
movies had lost through the digitalization of action stars and sequences (2005,
p. 71).
Ironically, the transnational appeal of authentic stunts in the Tony Jaa films
lies alongside their thematic emphasis on a particular notion of national
authenticity embodied by the male protagonists. Jaas morally pure, country
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bumpkin characters leave their rural villages for cosmopolitan cities, in search of
local cultural objects that have been stolen by westernized Thais, foreigners and
kathoey to sell in the international marketplace (Harrison 2005, Kitiarsa 2007). In
Ong-bak, Ting travels to Bangkok to retrieve the head of the Buddha statue from
the local temple, and in Tom Yum Goong, Kham travels to Sydney to retrieve the
familys pet elephant. By regaining the object in the first film and killing the
perpetrators who have literally consumed it in the second, these films restore
order in the dominant cultural narrative of Thai nationalism which Rachel
Harrison describes as firmly located in the Thai countryside, and with the
functioning family unit. . . . in stark contrast . . . [to] the spiritual depravity of city
life, often epitomized by the broken home it provokes (2005, p. 334).
Hybrid transnationalism: the fighting female otaku

Chocolate deviates from this narrative in several ways. Perhaps most
significantly, all of the action in the film is set in Bangkok, so there is no
clear division between an idealized, culturally homogenous rural past and a
dystopic, culturally hybrid urban future. Played by then 24-year-old ingenue
JeeJa Yanin, the heroine does not go on a physical journey to restore any sense
of natural cultural order. Instead, she herself is the unnatural product of
ethnic miscegenation between criminals with a name Zen that seems to
articulate and transcend her culturally hybrid status. Furthermore, her
motivation to fight does not stem from a sense of filial duty to a local
(national) community, but rather from an instinctive love for her mother who
is dying of cancer. Zen does not fight for the recovery of national honor stolen
by foreigners but, in a more humiliating posture, for the money to pay her
mothers medical bills money that the local businessmen may or may not
actually owe her.
Significantly, the only character who travels is Zens father Masashi who
goes back to Japan at the beginning of the film and returns to Bangkok towards
the end both times at his wife Zins request. This characters strange
disjunctive presence in the film is further accentuated by his voice-over,
spoken in Japanese, which bookends the narrative and awkwardly sets him up
as interlocutor for his daughter. The opening montage is intercut with circling
close-ups of Zin and Masashi and sepia-toned flashbacks of Masashi as a peculiar
child himself with his fascination for the abnormal. A close-up of his hand
caressing an imperfection on the face of his toy robot cuts to a close-up of Zins
face with a scar above her left eye, the wound that draws Masashi to her and
foreshadows the mysterious, robotic disability of their future child together.
Zens Japanese heritage and the ways in which her autism is expressed in the
film suggest to me a reading of this character as a new kind of action heroine,
which I call the fighting female otaku. More specifically, her disability is linked to
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obsessive fandom of media texts, the failure to distinguish between these texts
and reality and an inability to communicate clearly traits that define the otaku, a
socially marginalized subcultural identity in Japan, usually gendered male and
loosely translated as geek. Elsewhere I have suggested a connection between the
increasingly transnational figure of the otaku exemplified in the USA, for
instance, not only by fans of Japanese and Asian popular culture but also by youth
who interact more with media than with people and the figure of the
orientalized television child that Marshall McLuhan theorized in the mid-1960s
(Park 2010, pp. 8385). All of these figures come together in Zen whose
voracious consumption of bad media objects TV and video games and bad
food (she is also addicted to M&Ms) is ultimately validated in her transformation
into a kawaii martial arts fighting machine.
The female otaku, much like the girl geek, is a rare figure in popular media
because we still live in a patriarchal system where women continue to be
judged and to judge themselves on the merits of their appearance.
Furthermore, the beauty standards for fighting female characters with whom
the audience is supposed to identify often are set higher in order to offset the
perceived masculinity of their actions. Given this, the scarcity of female otaku
and girl geeks may be due to a continuing need in popular culture for such
characters to be shown experiencing a conflict between their gender identity
(expressed through their sexuality and/or femininity) and their desire or ability
to fight. Indeed, this conflict is almost always present, whether subtly assumed
or explicitly expressed, in the character development of the contemporary
global action heroines mentioned earlier.
In large part due to her disability, Zens gender difference is elided in the
film; even her role as a disadvantaged underdog remains, for the most part, un-
gendered with characters referring to her as kid rather than girl. In fact,
this gender difference is highlighted only in the promotional materials and
reviews of the film. Nonetheless, it was at the core of the films development:
foreign distributors asked Pinkaew to direct a film to follow in the commercial
footsteps of his first two martial arts movies, but with a female lead. Pinakew
set about looking for a sexy and exotic Thai version of Zhang Ziyi, but in the
end decided to cast the petite Yanin who, according to the director, . . . has no
sex appeal at all. So we had to come up with something to compensate for
that, namely, the novelty of a mild-mannered girl doing butterfly kicks to
defeat her enemies. Yanin was the first woman in two decades to win a
leading role in a Thai action film; like her character, she came from an
underprivileged background and took up martial arts to contribute to her
familys income when her father was diagnosed with cancer (Mak 2008).
Towards that end, it is not Zens gender and sexuality but instead her filial
duty and fighting skills that the film celebrates. What fascinates the viewer is the
incongruous process through which she learns to fight passively and virtually;
she then executes her moves in physically aggressive ways on dismissive
and unsuspecting adult men who are disarmed by her pure, childlike
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qualities qualities closely associated with autism. The fact that she is neither
stupid nor a child denaturalizes the idea of childhood as a linear temporal
progression into normal adulthood and perhaps by extension, the normalized
narrative of Western modernity itself as teleological and progressive.
Beyond imitation: autism, techno-orientalism and alternative

modernities
In this section, I want to expand on this association of autism with non-
normative childhood in cinema and then discuss how Zen fits some of these
stereotypes and also moves beyond them, especially in the evolution of her
martial arts skills.
It is clear that Zen exhibits many of the physical characteristics that have
been used to represent autism on screen. This is undoubtedly due in part to
Yanins six months of researching autism which, along with reading scholarship
on the condition and two days playing with kids at an autistic school, included
studying the performances of Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man (1988) and Tom
Hanks in Forrest Gump (1994) (Frater 2008). Zen rocks back and forth, gazes
vacantly into space, communicates in grunts and short phrases and needs the
presence of familiar objects her doll, rocking chair and a constant supply of
chocolate all linked to significant moments of early bonding with her
mother. Most importantly, like other autistic characters in the movies, she is
endearingly quirky and has special powers, in this case, supernaturally quick
reflexes and a quick mind that can memorize and perform stylized movements.
Yet Zen also diverges from common depictions of autistic characters in
Hollywood films. First, in contrast to the formula of being abandoned by or
having to leave her family, she is shown in a loving and supportive, if
unconventional, family unit made up of her devoted single mother Zin and her
young uncle Moom who becomes her chief caretaker when Zin becomes ill
(Baker 2008, pp. 233234). Second, it is Zens reciprocal unconditional love
for her mother, expressed physically throughout the film, that motivates her to
become an active subject, using her special skills to beat up the men whose
money can pay her mothers hospital bills.
Third, unlike other autistic characters whose powers are represented as
being innate, the film shows Zen in the process of learning how to fight by
repeating the moves of the Muay Thai students; by watching and re-watching
action sequences in movies; and by practicing fighting moves virtually through
video games (Baker 2008, p. 237). Indeed, her obsession with watching fight
sequences on TV and trying to learn moves from this medium places her in the
same company as a number of other aspiring youth in martial arts films who
initially lack teachers, including The Karate Kid (1984), The Last Dragon (1985),
Bulletproof Monk (2003) and The Forbidden Kingdom (2008), among others.
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Furthermore, these moves do not remain static, but evolve and get more
complicated with every fight. This is apparent in the progression of the fight
sequences. During her first fight at the ice factory an homage to the Bruce
Lee film, The Big Boss/Fists of Fury (1972), which was filmed in Thailand we
get a brief glimpse of her mental processes after two men push her down. She
looks up and sees double, then one of the men flicking his nose. This morphs
into images of her sick mother, the greedy factory boss and finally Tony Jaa.
The screen blacks out for a second before she gets up and assumes a side-
fighting stance that cross-fades into a scene in Ong-bak where Jaa assumes the
same stance. She begins whooping like Bruce Lee before administering blows
to the men around her in slow motion. Even after the camera speeds up, the
action continues to be relatively tame, with the men methodically approaching
her one by one. She eventually beats everyone up and takes the bosss bag of
money home to a surprised Moom.
The second fight is set in a chocolate distribution factory, shot with a warm
yellow filter which matches the colours of her smart new outfit a floral shirt
and khaki cargo pants, reminiscent of both Tokyo street style and the
traditional Thai outfits worn by royal women in film epics such as Suriyothai
(2001). Zen easily catches a bag of money being tossed among the employees
and kicks the head employee who has been put in charge of getting rid of her
and Moom. She then goes on to dispatch the others by using objects at hand as
weapons, including a chair, lockers and cabinets, much like Jackie Chan. Here
we see her improvising on the moves she has learned in order to fit the needs
of each situation.
The stakes continue to be raised in the third fight, set in a filthy meat
packing plant where Zen has to conquer her irrational fear of flies. Her moves
get increasingly complicated as she fights deftly on stacked blocks and even
more violently dispatches her opponents, manoeuvring her body so that their
backs get caught on meat hooks and their heads land on axes. After learning
about Zens actions, Zin realizes they are in danger and sends Moom to the
local sushi restaurant with a letter asking her husband Masashi to return.
Subsequent scenes of Moom getting shot and a yakuza friend in a shootout with
gangster kathoey are intercut with stereotypical scenes of Masashi in Japan,
bowing to older kimono-clad men in a traditional house and talking on his
mobile phone as a sleek bullet train hurls past.
The family reunites at the restaurant in the bloody, climactic fight scene,
described by a Reuters critic as a campy travesty of Kill Bill in which Zen
rips through a phalanx of enemies fusing an innovative mix of Muay Thai and
capoeira styles with her own weird brand of autistic (more like epileptic)
frenzy (Lee 2009). Intercut between Zins violent quarrel with Thai mob boss
and former lover No. 8, who shoots her in the leg and Moom in the stomach,
Zen engages in a fight with No. 8s youthful underling that spills out onto the
roof. There she easily defeats a group of gangster girls and then comes back
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into the restaurant to confront her most challenging opponent yet, a youth
named Thomas with an unnamed neurological disorder.
Wearing thick-rimmed glasses and dressed in an Adidas tracksuit, Thomas
slowly approaches Zen with jerky, robotic movements, most noticeably a tic in
his neck and his left arm. The two circle each other. Thomas is ruthlessly
machine-like while Zen is curious and cautious. Neither shows any facial
expression. Thomas proceeds to beat up Zen with his own unique version of
capoeira. Zen sustains the blows but learns from them. This is shown through her
Point of view (POV), signalled again by the slow motion blurring of her
opponents attack this time Thomass arm movements which Zen imitates
perfectly. She eventually defeats Thomas by improvising on his own moves.
Western critics were confused about how to interpret this scene. James
Verniere in the Boston Herald mused, A scene in which Zen goes up against a
young, epileptic boxer, picking up his style as they fight and turning it against
him, is either the most tasteless thing I have ever seen or the most delightfully
bizarre (Verniere 2009). Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian likewise pondered,
Is it radical or offensive? I really dont know. It certainly got my attention
(Bradshaw 2008). The confusion that characterized most critical responses to
this scene underscores the unique ways in which this film deviates from
conventional, Western modes of depicting people with disabilities either in
stereotypically comic roles or in dramatic ones that play on audiences
sentimentality.
After Zen defeats Thomas, her father appears, shooting No. 8s underlings
with a gun before drawing his samurai sword, symbolically embodying a
cultural hybrid of the West and the East. In a standoff with No. 8, Zin places
herself between her lover and ex-lover, sacrificing her life for Masashis. At
this point, their daughter takes her fathers sword, and assumes his legacy,
pursuing No. 8 to a building outside where she fights him on various ledges, a
scene that echoes the lateral movements of the video game, Donkey Kong, and
finally kills him. The sequence ends with Zen and her family on the roof: her
father with whom she has been reunited, her dead mother and Moom softly
groaning in pain in the background.
As David Morley and Kevin Robins have discussed, the figure of the otaku
comes to stand for the ambivalences and contradictions in techno-orientalism,
the notion of Japan and the Newly Industrialized Countries coming to
dominate an increasingly mechanized global future (1995, pp. 147173). As a
female fighting otaku, Zen represents an interesting aspect of this future the
melding of developed (Japan) and developing (Thailand) Asian modernities.
This collaboration references the West, but indirectly, as a kind of economic
and cultural structuring absence which is reflected in the films intertexual
allusions to the reciprocal influences between Hong Kong and Hollywood
cinemas. Meanwhile, the spectre of global capitalism is implicitly critiqued in
the story through the backdrop of corrupt businesses that are clearly not
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benefiting the local community and of the psychic and physical violence that is
internalized by the Thai characters rather than projected onto foreign others.
At the same time, it is courted through the potential of Thailands cultural
and economic collaboration with Japan. The final scene, in which father and
daughter walk towards the horizon, in a liminal, nationally non-specific space,
with windmills to the left and the ocean to the right, signifies a move into an
unknown but optimistic future. Yet it is telling that the two sympathetic
characters most closely linked to Thailand are nowhere in sight: Zin, who as
bad woman and good mother embodies the contradictions that characterize the
countrys role in the global economy and Moom, the sweet and resourceful
street kid whose soft, potentially queer masculinity seems to offer a version of
Thai national identity that cannot yet be imagined in this genre.
Conclusion
Unique to their national cinemas, MWG and Chocolate also are unique in their
divergence from most representations of women in contemporary action
cinema. Unlike anime and wuxia pian films, the stories are not set in fantastic or
futuristic landscapes. And unlike their Western counterparts, neither of the
protagonists is explicitly sexualized, except briefly for Eun-jin in the makeover
and sex scenes, which again comically highlight her lack of conventional
femininity and sex appeal.
The heroines fighting skills are foregrounded over their psychological
motivations or interiority. Distance between the protagonists and other
characters as well as with the audience is maintained through this focus on
physical action rather than narrative or character development. In other words,
the model of identification underlying psychoanalytic film theory and theories of
representation does not hold here as the audience never gets emotional access to
these female characters. One is autistic and the other, woodenly stoic.
Both protagonists are also figurative girls, unable or unwilling to become
mothers. Rather than functioning as symbols of biological and cultural
reproduction the role that female bodies historically have served in
nationalist discourse here the heroines playfully imitate and one-up the hard
masculinity of the traditional male action hero. In so doing, they critique
through action and movement the patriarchal structures of that discourse as
well as the genres that sustain it.
Besides, it is telling that both Eun-jin and Zen fight and make self-sacrifices
for women in their family, not for men. Meanwhile, male characters,
exemplified by the father and uncle in Chocolate, and the husband in MWG,
present sensitive, softer masculinities that complement the hard masculinities
of the women. The pleasurable and possibly subversive elements of both films,
then, lie in their ability to break open stereotypes of conventional masculinity
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and femininity from within the stereotypes themselves, through a kind of

kinetic mimicry that, in certain moments of violent, balletic movement, seems
to transcend models of representation, gendered, national or otherwise,
altogether.
Notes on contributor
Jane Chi Hyun Park is a senior lecturer in the Department of Gender and
Cultural Studies and the United States Studies Centre at the University of
Sydney. Her research and teaching are concerned with the social uses of media
technologies, the cultural impact of minority representations and transnational
flows of popular film, music and television. Her recent book, Yellow Future:
Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema (2010), examines the ideological role of East
Asian imagery in Hollywood films.
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Gender, Globalization Body & Society
18(2) 5881
The Author(s) 2012
and Aesthetic Surgery Reprints and permission:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
in South Korea DOI: 10.1177/1357034X12440828
bod.sagepub.com
Ruth Holliday
University of Leeds
Joanna Elfving-Hwang
University of Frankfurt
Abstract
This article explores the unusually high levels of cosmetic surgery in South Korea for
both women and men. We argue that existing explanations, which draw on feminist
and postcolonial positions, presenting cosmetic surgery as pertinent only to female
and non-western bodies found lacking by patriarchal and racist/imperialist economies,
miss important cultural influences. In particular, focus on western cultural hegemony
misses the influence in Korea of national identity discourses and traditional Korean
beliefs and practices such as physiognomy. We show how these beliefs provide a more
gendered as opposed to feminist analysis, which allows space for discussion of mens
surgeries. Finally, we critique the accepted notion of the western body, especially its
position in some literature as a more unobtainable ideal for non-western than for
western women. We argue that this body has little in common with actual western
womens bodies, and more in common with a globalized image, embodying idealized
elements from many different cultures.
Keywords
cosmetic surgery, gender, globalization, Korea, physiognomy
South Koreans alleged obsession with cosmetic surgery regularly

hits headlines both in Asia and the West because of its reportedly
high take-up rate by both women and men. While statistics on the
numbers of people who undergo aesthetic surgery in Korea are not
entirely reliable since most surgeries take place at private clinics
and the industry in Korea (as elsewhere) is poorly regulated the
Corresponding author:
Ruth Holliday
Email: r.holliday@leeds.ac.uk
http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/
P-85
Holliday and Elfving-Hwang 59
numbers seem significant (Yang, 2007). The most recent official

statistics put the percentage of Koreans undergoing cosmetic surgery
in 2008 at around 20 percent.1 However, the actual number is likely
to be considerably higher as only a fraction of surgeries are actually
recorded. Clinics offering discounts for cash transactions, though
common, are rarely documented. Moreover, other surveys consis-
tently estimate significantly higher rates, and in 2008 alone, around
30 percent of women between the ages of 20 and 50 underwent some
form of more or less invasive cosmetic treatment (Fackler, 2009).
Cosmetic surgery and skin treatment clinics are now commonplace
in urban shopping malls, viewed much like nail and beauty salons
in the UK, and providing procedures such as laser removal of
blemishes to walk-in customers.
While aesthetic surgery continues to be generally understood as a
feminine practice, Korean men are also having aesthetic surgery in
increasingly significant numbers. The Korean Association for Plastic
Surgeons estimates this number to stand at around 15 percent of men
in 2010, and a recent survey conducted by a Korean employment
website found that 44 percent of male college students were contem-
plating some form of aesthetic surgery (Kang and Cho, 2009). Again,
these numbers are estimates, but give some idea of the scale of mens
participation (similar estimates in the UK and US, for example, quote
men as less than 10 percent of clients, although statistics for men are
particularly unreliable in the West see Holliday and Cairnie, 2007).
Cosmetic surgery, then, is a significant social issue, and one that per-
plexes both academics and policy makers in Korea not to mention
the media, who generate many column inches of sensational stories
on this issue.
Existing research in Korea frames cosmetic surgery primarily in
two ways either as an undesired effect of western cultural influence
or as a feminized issue evidencing womens continued subjection to
patriarchy. However, our research questions these simplistic expla-
nations. We will show that the meanings and practices of aesthetic
surgery represent a process of negotiation between multiple dis-
courses concerning national identity, globalized and regionalized
standards of beauty, official and non-official religion, traditional
beliefs and practices (in some instances historically imported from
some other place), as well as the symbolic practices of coming of age,
caring for the self, marking social status and seeking success. All
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60 Body & Society 18(2)
these considerations frequently intersect with and occasionally

contradict each other. We argue that foregrounding cosmetic surgery
as only a feminine or culturally imperialist practice is a key weakness
of the existing literature and produces only partial accounts of
national cosmetic practices. The data on which this article is based
have been scavenged (see Halberstam, 1998) from newspaper and
magazine articles, cosmetic surgery websites (both clinic advertise-
ments and discussion sites), official (government and professional
bodies) statistics, and from conversations and personal experiences
as well as from the existing literature.
Types of Surgery
The term cosmetic surgery (songhyong susul) is used in Korea to
refer to invasive practices, rather than common quick fixes such
as laser removal of facial blemishes or Botox injections to reduce
wrinkles or to shrink the jaw muscle, creating a desirable V-shaped
face (Jin, 2005). The most popular cosmetic surgeries in South Korea
are eyelid surgeries (blepharoplasties) and nose jobs (rhinoplasties),
although jaw reshaping performed using oscillating saws to reduce
the angular prominence of the mandible (J.-G. Lee, 2007) is becom-
ing increasingly popular (and affordable). Blepharoplasty refers to the
creation of a visible palpebral fold to the eyelid where one is not
already visible (Sheng, 2000), but also more generally to the widening
of the eye or lifting of the eyelid. There are three main surgical tech-
niques to create a double-lid appearance: the suture, the partial-
incision and the full-incision technique (Lam and Kim, 2003). The aim
of the procedure is to give more prominence to the upper eyelid, or a
wider gaze, without making the eye appear unnatural. Rhinoplasty
typically involves implanting silicone, or autogenous cartilages or
bone harvested from the septum or rib, to augment the tip and dorsum
of the nose, constructing a desirable pointy (as opposed to wide and
flat) tip of the nose (Jin and Won, 2009). Breast augmentations and
liposuction are also common.
With the exception of breast augmentation, all these enhancements
are consumed both by women and men. Currently, young men in their
twenties seek a softer image, mimicking the image of boy-heroes in
popular Korean manhwa and Japanese manga cartoons and anime. This
look has become increasingly prevalent since the late 1990s when
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popular boy bands began to sport the bish onen look already popular in
Japan (see Maliangkay, 2010). These so-called kkonminam (literally,
beautiful flower boys) looks are epitomized in the highly popular
TV drama series Boys Over Flowers (Kkot-poda namja, broadcast on
KBS, 2009). The soft image, for these men, includes a less angular
jaw, double eyelids and a prominent nose tip, while augmenting
pectoral and bicep muscles to give their bodies definition. The aim
is therefore to create a muscular but smooth (hairless) body with boyish
facial features. For men in their thirties and forties, noble (sometimes
called royal) cosmetics are more popular. Under this umbrella
undesirable facial features, such as sunken foreheads, are corrected
by inserting implants to the front and back of the skull (M.-A. Lee,
2007).
Attitudes towards Cosmetic Surgery in Korea

While the global financial crisis recently hit the cosmetic surgery indus-
try in Korea, the government sought to protect this important source of
GDP by temporarily allowing its citizens to claim tax credit for the cost
of cosmetic surgery (Digital Chosun Ilbo, 2007). The decision was
undoubtedly partly motivated by a desire to gauge the income sources
of medical institutions, but is equally indicative of the value of the aes-
thetic surgery market to the national interest. This was even more evi-
dent in 2008 when 642 million was invested in advertising Korea as a
leading destination for aesthetic surgery tourism (Fifield, 2008). Ara
Wilson (2011: 135) argues that in Thailand medical tourism is similarly
valued as a national(ist) asset, as transnational movements of bodies
securing exported medical services in Thailand reconstitute the nation
as the territorial locus for patients and economy. In 2007 the late Pres-
ident Roh Moo-hyun had double eyelid surgery (albeit claiming it was
for medical reasons). However, despite a recent tax levy on non-
essential cosmetic surgeries (Suh and Jung, 2010), the industry contin-
ues, by and large, to be unregulated.2
While the government seems undecided on the benefits of
cosmetic surgery, and the womens rights movements in Korea are
very clear about its negative implications, public attitudes to
aesthetic surgery in Korea have become increasingly positive. In
general, cosmetic surgery is perceived as a worthwhile and under-
standable investment in the body, rather than a sign of vanity (as it
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is often understood in the West). A recent survey found that seven out
of ten people do not object to cosmetic surgery, with an even higher
percentage indicating they would have surgery if money was no
obstacle (Yang, 2007). However, new distinctions are also being
drawn between natural and surgical beauty, so that surgically
created beauty must erase its processes of construction to emulate
natural, non made-up beauty (ssaengol), which is still recognized
as superior (Kim, 2009). For example, South Korean celebrities tend
to deny they have had surgery, yet their features have shown subtle
enhancing changes over time. Successful surgery with no expense
spared should look natural, where natural is importantly defined as
enhancing Korean features. Interestingly, unsuccessful surgeries are
often defined as producing an unnaturally Western appearance or,
of course, marking the traces of their interventions. Only the well-off
can afford the services of the best clinics, hence the natural (Korean)
look emerges as a sign of affluence and middle-class status.
While there is broad acknowledgement in both media reporting
and clinical research that surgery is a painful practice, clinic websites
play down the negative after-effects, and play up the positive benefits
with before and after photos. Typically, cosmetic surgery proce-
dures are marketed much like a visit to a health spa in the UK; cus-
tomers are encouraged to book a day having double-eyelid surgery
with a friend. Sanitized and entertaining representations of cosmetic
surgery in films such as The 200 Pound Beauty (Minyo-nun kwer-
owo; Kim, 2006) and comedy drama series Before and After Cos-
metic Surgery Clinic (Bipo & aeputo songhyong wegwa; MBC,
2008) serve to romanticize the practice with extremely rare refer-
ences to procedures gone wrong or the painful recoveries, although
the devastating effects of bad surgeries are occasionally reported in
the media. In fact, feminist organizations represent practically the
only opposition to cosmetic surgery in Korea, but their opposition
has in practice been limited to prosecuting cosmetic surgery clinics
for illegal advertising in womens magazines.3
Gendering (Western) Cosmetic Surgery

A number of studies have attempted to explain the high incidence of
aesthetic surgery in Korea by emphasizing traditional patriarchal
culture. In doing so, they often draw heavily on key feminist writers
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from the West (but in so doing frequently ignore the specific charac-
teristics of Korean cosmetic surgery and mens surgeries). While
this feminist work tends to disagree on whether women strive to
achieve beautiful bodies (Bordo, 1993, 1997) or normal bodies
(Davis, 1995, 2003), there is general agreement that aesthetic surgery
exists within a misogynistic (beauty) culture, and only really affects
women, and exceptionally a small proportion of deviant (feminized)
men. Drawing on official statistics in the West claiming just 10
percent of patients are men, Kathy Davis (2003) argues that men will
never be aesthetic surgery patients in significant numbers due to gen-
dered assumptions (active male surgeon and passive female patient).
Morgan (1991: 30) produces a higher figure of male clients (3040
percent), but still omits men from her discussion. Locating cosmetic
surgery in normalization, then, Davis worries that anyone is a
potential candidate for surgery (since no one is normal), and that
surgery becomes a choice rather than a need. Unlike Bordo
(1997), she emphasizes womens choice and agency in improving
their bodies/lives. However, in linking such choices to pain the
psychic pain of having the wrong body and the physical pain of sur-
gery while she counters the construction of women as selfish con-
sumers, she repositions them as victims. Here we see a repetition of
the structureagency dichotomy used in public health care (in which
Davis research was conducted), where those who represent them-
selves as agents are characterized as misguided, apolitical and self-
ish, and those who admit to being victims are considered deserving of
surgery. However, for Bordo, all choices are ultimately produced by
the beauty industry itself:
the rhetoric of choice and self-determination and the breezy analogies
comparing cosmetic surgery to fashion accessorizing . . . efface not
only the inequalities of privilege, money, and time that prohibit most
people from indulging in these practices, but also the desperation that
characterizes the lives of those who do. (1997: 337)
More recently, young women in the private health care market have
been characterized as highly demanding consumers of cosmetic sur-
gery. These clients decentre the role of the surgeon in making both
technical and aesthetic judgements, albeit positioned as part of a
makeover culture in which becoming has become significantly
more important than the end result (Jones, 2008). Middle-class
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women in the US position cosmetic surgery as a reward for hard work

and thrift, as well as looking after ones body through healthy diet and
exercise. Thus, cosmetic surgery facilitates the manifestation of the
carefully tended body in which other significant investments have also
been made (Gimlin, 2007). To paraphrase Margrit Shildrick (2008),
the makeover does not just simply represent alteration to the body but
also improvement to the self, such that the subject of the surgical
makeover both stands back and comments on the new appearance of
her old self and claims to be a different person, brought into being
by the surgical cut.
Mens procedures are still rarely mentioned in the cosmetic
surgery literature, perhaps because official statistics in the UK and
US continue to hide mens treatments by excluding cosmetic dentis-
try and hair transplants. Figures on breast reductions the second
most popular surgery in the UK and US are frequently assumed
to apply only to women, despite Millers (2005) claim that over
80 percent of these surgeries are actually performed on men. The few
articles specifically on mens cosmetic surgeries position them as
either part of the crisis of masculinity (Atkinson, 2008) or the meter-
osexual consumer-subject (Miller, 2005). Holliday and Cairnie
(2007) have argued that while there is little evidence that masculinity
precludes men from engaging in cosmetic surgery since surgeries
can provide significant body capital for men in the areas of both
employment and relationships some do offer more instrumental
explanations than women; looking younger at work to remain compet-
itive, for instance (see also Elliott, 2008).
A further concern for Davis (2003: 7) is that one ideal a white,
Western model becomes the norm to which everyone, explicitly or
implicitly, aspires. While research into aesthetic surgery on the
white western body has tended to prioritize gender as an explanatory
category, studies of aesthetic surgery on the non-white body can
largely be characterized as gender-neutral investigations of ethnic
cosmetic surgery (Davis, 2003; Gilman, 2000; Kaw, 1997). Ethnic
cosmetic surgery usually portrays minority ethnic populations in
western host nations as subject to racism, and frames aesthetic
surgery, as Eugenia Kaw (1997: 75) does, as an attempt to escape
persisting racial prejudice that correlates to their stereotyped genetic
physical features (despite strong insistence from Kaws own respon-
dents that they were not trying to look western, but to avoid looking
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sleepy). Thus, white cosmetic surgery has emerged as (only) a

gender issue, excluding the theoretical intervention of race, while
non-white cosmetic surgery has frequently failed to engage with
gendered experiences. Whiteness is thereby constituted as a natural
category for all white people against which all non-white people
unfavourably compare.
In addition, feminist approaches to cosmetic surgery and accounts
of ethnic cosmetic surgery tend to foreground different surgical
procedures. While accounts of white cosmetic surgery tend to focus
on breast augmentations, tummy tucks and anti-ageing facial surgery
as attempts to normalize womens bodies to unrealistic feminine
ideals, ethnic cosmetic surgery studies highlight (gender-neutral)
double-eyelid surgeries, nose re-shaping and skin lightening as
attempts to approach a white norm and avoid racism. Interestingly,
then, two sets of studies emerge focused on differently gendered
populations, with ethnic cosmetic surgery studies including men
(but not a gendered analysis) and feminist cosmetic surgery studies
excluding men (and a raced analysis).4 Each approach draws on
particular surgeries while ignoring others, such that practices like
tanning, collagen enhanced lips and buttock augmentations popular
procedures which cannot be explained through whitening or
idealized femininity discourses are rarely discussed (except see
Holliday and Sanchez Taylor, 2006).
Another problem with ethnic cosmetic surgery approaches is that
they have tended to present minority ethnic populations as static,
existing only in relation to a host culture. Such studies have ignored
the distinct cosmetic surgery procedures popular in different national
contexts, as well as patterns of migration and ongoing connections
with cultures of origin through cross-national connections facilitated
by cheap airfares, the internet and cable and satellite TV (for more on
this see Body & Societys 2011 special issue on medical migrations
Roberts et al., 2011). This means that many expatriate communities
are routinely in contact with the culture of their country of origin
even if they have never actually visited it and it therefore seems
likely that aesthetic preferences are drawn as much from these
connections as from a host nations aesthetic ideals. In researching
cosmetic surgery in Korea, a further problem of ethnic cosmetic
surgery studies which focus on Asian-Americans is that their results
have been generalized to apply to countries of origin; that is,
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Koreans in Korea. Accordingly, what are seen as whitening prac-

tices in the West are also presented as westernizing practices in the
East without much consideration of localized discourses that inter-
sect with more globalized practices of cosmetic surgery. Explanation
of Korean cosmetic surgery only in terms of westernization seems
unlikely given Koreas strong sense of nationalism, as well as its
national relationship with other regional powers, for example Japan
(we will return to this later). Presently, then, the same procedure may
be explained differently for different ethnic groups. A breast
augmentation for an ethnically Korean woman can be (and has been)
explained as whitening or westernizing (depending on where she is
located), the popularity of breast augmentation implying that
Koreans have naturally smaller breasts than white women; whereas
the same procedure on a white woman is routinely explained as fem-
inizing and not related to race. However, since breast augmentation
is the most popular procedure in the West does that not, by the same
logic, imply that white women must also have naturally small
breasts? If Korean women are whitening, why not white women?
Or, if we reject the hypothesis that all non-western surgeries imply
perceived racial deficiency in comparison with the white body,
how do we explain procedures like calf trimming or cheekbone shav-
ing, extremely popular in Korea but not in other places? We will now
briefly review the work of key writers on cosmetic surgery in Korea
specifically, enquiring whether this work can help to answer these
(and other) questions.
Gendering and Westernizing Cosmetic Surgery in Korea

Studies in Korea typically position cosmetic surgery as conformity to
patriarchal versions of femininity in order to maximize womens
chances of success in marriage and the economy. Some see womens
desire for aesthetic surgery as a continuation of pre-modern virtuous
femininity that required (upper-class) women to adhere to a strict
Neo-Confucian decorum. Under Neo-Confucianism, men were
expected to transcend their bodies (learning, philosophy) to become
superior, while womens success, bound to the intimate and the
domestic, was rooted in their ability to mimic a concealed and defer-
ential ideal, defined by virginity or maternity. Taeyon Kim (2003),
for example, argues that Neo-Confucian ethics continues to inform
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rigid gender scripts positioning men as subjects and women as

subjectless bodies in need of control and protection.5 She asserts
that under consumer capitalism Korean womens bodies have
entered the public sphere, no longer hidden away but now available
for scrutiny and consumption. Thus, visibility produces women as
object[s] for alteration (2003: 106) evidenced in Koreas high rates
of cosmetic surgery. Kim locates cosmetic surgery in the Neo-
Confucian culture of conformity, where the unity of the whole is
more important than the individuality of the one, producing beauty
as a new requirement of decorum for women (2003: 1067); Woo
(2004: 53) notes that in this climate women are obsessed with their
appearance.
Park Sang Uns (2007) essay on dieting and embodiment instead
deploys the Korean foundation myth to show how contemporary dis-
courses of womens value continue to emphasize self-sacrifice. Park
argues that Korean femininity promotes suffering for the greater
good, evidenced in womens willingness to endure pain for beauty:
Just as the [she-]bear in the [Korean foundation] myth had to over-
come the pain of staying in a dark cave and eating only mugwort and
garlic in order to become a human being, todays bear-women must
undergo the pain of dieting and plastic surgery in order to become
beautiful women with bodies that are considered normal and socially
acceptable. (Park, 2007: 46)
Park also points out, linking patriarchal national culture with

western-influenced globalization, that todays bear-woman is the
Western female (2007: 47) something the average Korean women
can hardly attain (2007: 55). Kim (2003) also positions Eurasian
beauty as the Korean ideal since a 1994 legal change permitting the
use of non-Korean models in Korean advertising. For Cho (2009),
technology conspires with patriarchal aesthetic standards and neolib-
eral consumer capitalism to increase womens human capital in the
marriage market and workplace.
Unlike the rather passive figures presented by Kim, Park and Cho,
however, Woos (2004) women emerge as highly informed, active
agents in their engagements with cosmetic surgeons. Cosmetic surgery
is positioned in tandem with significant gains for Korean women in
education and careers. Woo shows how womens bodies have moved
from a limited maternal role to an active, pleasure-seeking one, and
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how beauty brings not only gratification but also a degree of status in
contemporary Korean society. She is careful to point out that womens
aesthetic surgeries are voluntary and empowering. However, she sees
this empowerment ultimately as a trap, the benefits of one surgical
procedure creating desire for another, producing women as surgery
addicts: having internalized patriarchal and westernized beauty stan-
dards, they helplessly accept the logic of technological capital that
makes women constantly examine their bodies in a negative and
pathological light (2004: 789):
As a non-white race, Korean womens bodies were branded as inferior
and flawed and the images of white women conveyed through mass
media in such forums as Miss Universe competitions and Hollywood
movies presented a beauty ideal that Korean women felt obliged to
pursue. (2004: 60)
Woo shows how many employers try to enforce specific height and
weight restrictions for women graduates and how womens bodies
are used to sell products and symbolize desire within Korean con-
sumer capitalism. However, in supporting these claims she draws
mainly on highly gendered, classed and embodied occupations such
as toumi (young women who sell products in department stores and
in the street), and flight attendants. There is much in Woos article
that adds to the discussion of aesthetic surgery in Korea (and else-
where); however, despite mentioning the increase in mens cosmetic
surgery and alluding in a footnote to the significance of physiog-
nomy, her analysis remains rooted narrowly in patriarchal and west-
ern systems of beauty and neoliberalism. In grounding their
arguments only in patriarchies be they Neo-Confucian, western
or technological all these writers fail to adequately explain not only
mens cosmetic surgeries, but all Korean cosmetic surgeries, since
gender is clearly not the only cultural mechanism at work here.
Other Colonizations
National identity politics in South Korea are complex, and cannot be
understood without reference to the Japanese colonial period (1910
45). This period witnessed the imposition of western-style moderni-
zation in Korea via a colonizing Japanese culture, which emphasized
its own superiority over backward Korea (Pai, 2000). Predictably,
then, since liberation in 1945, much effort has gone into highlighting
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the un-Japaneseness of the Korean people. In particular, immediately

after the colonial period, nationalistic discourses mobilized the West as
a way of rejecting Japan as the self-declared bearer of civilization. For
example Na Se-jin, writing in 1964, distinguishes the Korean from the
Japanese thus:
The Korean is of medium to tall height, among many races of the
world. The neck is thin and long, and because of the superior devel-
opment of the Koreans body and muscular structure, the posture is
straight and erect. The calf is long, and since every part of the bodys
measurements are very even, the Korean resembles the well-
proportioned stature of the Europeans and Americans [rather than the
Japanese]. (quoted in Pai, 2000: 260)
The western body, then, was mobilized in defiance of Japanese stan-

dards of beauty as anti-colonial discourse. While in contemporary
Korea particular forms of Japanese popular culture are embraced and
emulated (sometimes themselves imported from elsewhere), the
postwar situation highlights how appearances faces and bodies
have been deployed in political and local struggles through complex
interplays of sameness and difference.
Following liberation in 1945, the Korean War and Koreas subse-
quent division in 1953, South Korea endured a series of dictatorships
and rapid industrialization, quickly transforming from an agrarian to
an industrialized nation with an insatiable need for labour. During
this period, official discourses made sense of a divided (South)
Korean national identity by emphasizing the traditional, pre-
colonial national culture of the elite pre-colonial yangban class (and
the Choson dynasty in particular). These values were generalized to
represent authentic Koreanness for all (Elfving-Hwang, 2010). Pre-
dictably, this precipitated a return to traditional gender discourses
that associated women with the nurturing maternal body. Here again,
the body emerges as a site for negotiating and reinforcing national
identity.
Physiognomy
Related to this, many Koreans re-embraced traditional forms of divi-
nation, such as astrology and physiognomy, which were seen as
authentic elements of Korean culture (Kim, 2005). This enduring
belief is exemplified in the widely discussed case of President Chun
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Doo Hwan (19808) whose mother had prayed for 100 days for a son
before conceiving. It is said that she met a wandering monk who told
her she had the face of a mother who would give birth to a successful
son if only she had less protruding teeth. She promptly smashed her
teeth out with a rock, her son subsequently becoming president.6 The
story undoubtedly underlines the importance of non-official religious
practices in Korea, explaning how Chun Doo Hwans mother altered
the fate of her son by altering her own appearance. Indigenous folk
religions and practices have undergone a revival during the past three
decades and physiognomy, as a prominent form of Korean divina-
tion, has been enthusiastically embraced. Around half of all Koreans
believe that one can read a persons character by looking at their
face (Kim, 2005). With the growing affluence of Korean society, the
inauspicious face, previously having doomed its bearer to a lifetime
of bad luck, can now be fixed.
Although it has traditionally been considered disrespectful to
ones ancestors (who bequeath ones body) to alter physical appear-
ance (Kim, 2009; Shin, 2002), physiognomic surgery (gwansang
susul) is gaining popularity as Korean customers seek auspicious
faces in addition to beautiful ones (Im, 2009). Many who consider
undergoing aesthetic surgery consult a physiognomist beforehand,
and aesthetic surgeons and physiognomists work closely together
making mutual recommendations to clients (Jeffreys, 2007). This
practice has little to do with enhancing the subjects appearance in
line with accepted (western) beauty models. For example, a common
procedure removes moles or blemishes from under the eyes, since
these are seen to resemble tears a sign of sorrows to come (Lee,
2006). While not everyone believes in physiognomy, having a lucky
face, right face or best face reduces the risk of leaving an
unfavourable impression and can be of great importance in many
practical ways.
Many young men and women seek to attain an oljjang (literally:
best face). The common practice of seeking approval from stran-
gers of the results of surgical procedures highlights the importance
of having the right face. Individuals post before and after photos
on internet chatroom sites7 soliciting evaluations from other mem-
bers. As Featherstone (2010) explains, writing about the West, the
portrait photograph, posed and then, perhaps, Photoshopped, cannot
be separated from the imago. The image is related to the imagination
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and represents not what is there, but what one imagines one could or
should be. The photographic portrait, then, is never individual but
embodies cultural ideals. Cosmetic surgery enables these cultural
ideals to become (to a certain extent) a reality. This raises questions
about whether Korean aesthetic surgery is simply a desire to wester-
nize, or whether it represents a continuation of older traditions of
altering appearance for success or, more probably, some negotiation
between these two.
Blepharoplasty in particular has often been explained in terms of
westernization. However, it is worth remembering that while many
Koreans already have a double eyelid, many westerners undergo ble-
pharoplasties too. Wider eyes signal youth, energy and alertness.
Korean women have used temporary eyelid tapes and glues for
decades, most usually justified as easing the application of make-
up. Eye surgery is seen as a more convenient permanent fix (the
surgery takes 10 to 20 minutes depending on technique) which saves
time and allows greater participation in sports and swimming, for
example. Blepharoplasties (like breast augmentations) appear to
have originated in Japan (the first performed by a surgeon named
Mikamo in 1896) and were originally used to treat children born with
one single and one double eyelid (Miller, 2006). East Asians tend to
have more adipose fat in the eyelid than Caucasians, and men and
women who have too much fat removed are seen negatively as arti-
ficially western. Wider eyes may be desirable, but they must be wider
Korean eyes, not western ones. The most important aim of cosmetic
surgery is to create a natural look that enhances the body without
losing the Koreanness of the subject who undergoes surgery.
However, Koreanness in the context of blepharoplasty is also in a
state of flux, and wide eyes also have another, more gendered mean-
ing. Some of the features most commonly sought through aesthetic
surgery today would have been considered undesirable in the past.
For instance, Korean physiognomy has traditionally characterized
round eyes for women as suggesting lasciviousness, yet round eyes
are currently desirable, while a large moon face has historically
connoted fertility and therefore value for women, yet women are now
having their faces narrowed. Under consumer capitalism, huge shifts
have occurred in Korean womens roles, for the urban middle classes
at least. Most young, educated women are now working, delaying
marriage and having only one child in order to preserve their careers.
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For Bordo (1993), writing in and about the West in the early 1990s,
similar shifts resulted in a hard (muscular, toned) body as the ideal
for women. Rather than positioning this body as an attempt to simply
emulate advertising, Bordo shows how the hard body connotes
strength and independence, making womens bodies unremarkable
in the masculine workplace. She also shows how the battle against
fat on hips and breasts signified a hatred of the material body that
represented a purely maternal, domestic destiny. Holliday and
Sanchez Taylor (2006) have shown that the surgically enhanced
particularly breast-augmented body connotes sexual self-
determination for women who reject the necessity to masculinize
their bodies to fit male norms. In the same way, Korean women seem
to be divorcing themselves from this maternal body the moon face
traditionally so associated with fecundity and embracing signs of
overt sexuality, such as wide eyes, thereby rejecting patriarchal mod-
els of propriety. Thus, while beliefs informed by physiognomy
clearly have some part to play, the definition of what is and is not
auspicious appears to be in flux and open to contestation. Unlike
Woo, then, we do not see Korean cosmetic surgery as a westernizing
trap, but as a way of expressing sexual (and marriage) self-
determination and occupation of the public sphere.
Gendering Korean Cosmetic Surgery

While studies on Korea deploy both feminist and postcolonial
approaches, they still fail to gender cosmetic surgery, accounting for
mens practices. This is particularly significant given the large num-
bers of men in South Korea engaging with cosmetic surgery, and
demonstrates feminisms hegemony in accounts of aesthetic surgery
and popular discourses which situate it as a womans issue (see
Fraser, 2003). Feminist assertions like Kims (2005), about the
subjectivity of men and subjectlessness of women, are extremely
problematic from a Foucauldian perspective, which asserts that we
are all men and women alike subjects not of ourselves, but of
discourses. Neither women nor men can stand outside language and
culture and the power relations that produce our understandings of
the world and our positions within it; men are just differently posi-
tioned within it (Grosz, 1994). It seems, then, that Korean men are
also easily interpellated by the cosmetic surgery industry through dis-
courses like physiognomy that, while producing differently gendered
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associations, apply equally to women and men. In Korea, two differ-

ently gendered constructions of cosmetic surgery exist: kyorhon son-
ghyong (marriage cosmetic surgery) and chigop songhyong
(employment cosmetic surgery). Having the right face can be cru-
cial in marrying well. The right face can also be a determining
factor in gaining employment in a Korean job market where nearly
80 percent of young people now attend further education college
or university, and this is an issue of great importance for both men
and women. The right face is one with no inauspicious features and
one that connotes youth, vitality and upper-class looks. Since a
photograph is a requirement of all job applications, and physiognomy
is often used to evaluate candidates where qualifications and experi-
ence are equal, an employee with friendly (insangi choun) facial
features will always be preferred, given the importance of social
bonding in the workplace. Cosmetic surgery is thus a practical issue
in an extremely competitive (and in some occupations ageist) job
market, chigop songhyong making the difference between success
and failure in getting a job. Recruitment agency JobKorea found that
80 percent of recruitment executives considered the physical appear-
ance of a candidate important, and a 2006 study found that there
was a perception among high school students that appearance would
often be considered of greater importance than abilities and skills in
hiring decisions (Jung and Lee, 2006). While this pressure is inevita-
bly greater for women than for men, physiognomy and the extreme
emphasis put on appearance means that men cannot escape it
altogether.
However, there is also some evidence to suggest that since the late
1990s, beauty ideals for women and men are also converging in what
Sun Jung (2010) describes as a complex cultural deconstruction of
male and female, embodied by the feminine-looking kkonminam
men. According to Jung, the kkonminam are thought to be able to sat-
isfy complex human (especially female) desires because they possess
both feminine and masculine attributes. The growing popularity of
the kkonminam in popular culture certainly seems to reflect a desire
to break with earlier idealized masculinities which relied on tradi-
tional militarized images. Korean womens increasing economic
self-sufficiency and reluctance to marry early, as well as a skewed
gender ratio are perhaps making women more choosy when selecting
a partner. Young men appear to be acquiescing in feminine desire for
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a more caring and not hard masculinity. The beautiful kkonminams

softer features signify a break from the cool, detached businessman
men who are more interested in satisfying their colleagues than
their partners and whose self-worth is associated with long working
hours (Korean men work some of the longest hours in the developed
world). The kkonminam look thus emerges as part of a wider anxiety
about normative masculinity in contemporary Korea, and, impor-
tantly, does not carry the connotations of gay sexuality that it does
in the West. As a result, Korean men in their twenties and thirties are
more predisposed to cosmetic surgery than Western men, particularly
since good looks are so equated with success, because the fast pace of
contemporary Korean urban life demands quick fixes to any per-
ceived problems with ones body, and because feminization
through cosmetic surgery does not carry the same risks to sexual
identity that it does in the West. This is evidenced in the prevalence
of walk-in cosmetic surgery clinics in large shopping malls, as well
as the affordability and ease of obtaining minor operations, such as
mole and skin blemish removals. Moreover, cosmetic treatments and
caring for ones appearance are becoming increasingly associated
with a new kind of contemporary masculinity that is gaining in value
across East Asia, popularized by boy bands and popular actors with
apan-Asian fan base.
Conclusion: Locating Korean Cosmetic Surgery

Cosmetic surgery in South Korea is typically equated in both media
discourses and academic writing with a desire to appear western.
On the surface it does appear that Koreans prefer western features
like wider, double-eyelid eyes, more prominent noses and bigger
breasts. While undoubtedly influenced by globalized beauty ideals,
we argue, attempts to improve the Asian subject do not erase eth-
nicity (McCurdy and Lam, 2005). Westernphilia initially seems
to have constituted as much a rejection of Japanese colonial influence
as an embrace of western beauty norms. Explanations that rely on
womens surgeries as responses to a male preference for Caucasian
physical features are simplistic, positioning women as objects in a
patriarchal economy. More sophisticated approaches position
women as negotiating with beauty discourses to gain agency (Cho,
2009; Woo, 2004). The modern Korean woman is said to have
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exchanged virtuous (maternal, domestic) femininity for a slim,

well-toned body and beautiful face which offers clear gains in both
work and marriage (Kim, 2003; Park, 2007). However, critics ulti-
mately argue that aesthetic surgery is a trap, making profits by pro-
moting western beauty that requires surgery for Koreans to achieve
(Woo, 2004). Yet cosmetic surgery is also a consumption practice
generating meaning for people who engage in it that is not adequately
explained by these writers.
We would suggest that many instances of apparent westernization
can be related to a strong sense of indigenous identity. The existing
literature has a tendency to reify globally mediatized bodies as west-
ern, but the globalized body is already mixed and bears little resem-
blance to actual women in either the West or the East. Rather, the
western body links to idealized (and, of course, exceptional) char-
acteristics in many countries. Paler (than average) skin, for instance,
in almost every country, has historically signified distance from
(agricultural) labour, representing high-class status. Western bodies
now mark status through tanning associated with leisure time and
foreign holidays. Positioning blepharoplasty as westernization
ignores the fact that wide eyes have local significations such as
youthfulness and active desire, and that western women also routi-
nely undertake similar surgeries. Claiming Korean women want to
look western denies the constructed nature of western beauty and that
western beauty has been valued because it entered Korea fitting pre-
existing notions of class and status. Such claims position western
cultural borrowings as appropriation and non-western ones as coloni-
zation while ignoring the fact that all modern nations actively appro-
priate, reject, hybridize or acquiesce in elements of transcultural
influences that circulate through the globalized media, cheap travel
and migrations. Taking on a bit of the other signifies access to these
resources, a cosmopolitan identity informed by global, not just local
knowledge. To deny this grants westerners agency and creativity in
their identities while fixing non-westerners to traditional authentic
identities (a similar point is made by Miller, 2006, about Japan).
Neo-Confucian ethics in Korea advocated conformity as a virtue
that measured social success by approximation to an elite class image
(Deuchler, 1992), which can still be seen in the extremely limited
range of beauty ideals promoted in the media. This may explain the
desirability of the look which celebrates smooth features and the
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extreme popularity of the BB (blemish blocker) cream, which is

used to smooth and whiten the skin. In addition, the belief that char-
acter can be read from facial features has a very real influence on
social and career success, with physiognomy often indistinguishable
from employment cosmetics. Young men and women seem equally
subject to these beliefs and practices.
Feminist constructions of men as subjects and women as subject-
less objects can only endure if we ignore mens cosmetic surgeries.
Feminist positions fail to account for the impact of feminine desire
in an economy where middle-class women now hold considerable
economic power and are increasingly reluctant to marry. Neo-
Confucianism may have addressed women as subjectless bodies but
consumer capitalism addresses women and men as subjects, albeit
subjects of consumerism. Neo-Confucianism also emphasizes care
of mens bodies as well as their minds (far from the rational disem-
bodied men of the West), which may explain Korean mens predis-
position to aesthetic surgery. The emergence of the kkonminam
men (via Japan) offers men a new way to care for the self, their
reworked bodies alluding to a new flexibility within relationships
which acknowledges feminine desire.
What emerges from this discussion is a complicated picture of
Korean cosmetic surgery where negotiation between globalized and
national standards of beauty, official and non-official religious and
traditional discourses and practices and national identity, as well as
symbolic practices of coming of age, caring for the self, marking
social status and seeking success, all play a part. In reality, then, aes-
thetic surgery in Korea is influenced by a number of different, some-
times contradictory yet often intersecting factors, implicated in both
the (often cited) prevalence of surgery and the (rarely discussed)
types of surgeries practised, and resists explanations that rely only
on feminist or postcolonial readings.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank David Bell, Flemming Christiansen and the
anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of
this paper, as well as audiences at the Association for Korean Studies
in Europe Conference in Leiden, Cosmetic Cultures, Appearance
Matters, and the White Rose East-Asia network for their generous
feedback.
P-103
Notes
1. See: www.nationmaster.com
2. In Korea there is no single body regulating medical malpractice.
Citizens may file a civil lawsuit under the Rules of Civil Proce-
dure. Medical malpractice cases can also be reported to the Korea
Consumer Agency or to Consolidation for Medical Consumers.
However, the first successful case against a cosmetic surgery
clinic was not until 2007 (Bae, 2007).
3. It is actually against the law to advertise surgical procedures
through the use of images in Korea for other than education
purposes.
4. Except research on vaginal surgeries (labiaplasties and vaginal
tightening), which tends to compare the surgeries of white women
in the West with those of black women undergoing FGM (female
genital mutilation) in countries in the global South and Africa.
5. Neo-Confucianism was the official philosophy of Korea for more
than five centuries during the Choson dynasty (13921910).
6. Chun Doo Hwan turned out to be a violent and repressive leader,
perhaps as a result of the violent conditions under which his
fortune was made!
7. Such as www.cafe.daum.net
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Ruth Holliday is Professor of Gender and Culture at the University of
Leeds and has written and presented extensively on aesthetic surgery,
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Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific
Issue 37, March 2015
Rethinking Yaoi on the Regional and Global Scale

Alan Williams
1. Yaoi is a genre of storytelling featuring male-male eroticism and romance whose

primary audience is girls and women. The genre began in amateur manga (comics),
or djinshi, culture in 1970s Japan. Today, yaoi has grown into a global phenomenon
that is particularly popular in East Asia where, since the late 1990s, it has garnered
millions of fans. In Sinophone contexts, yaoi is called danmei (), which is the
Mandarin reading of what in Japanese is read as tanbi[1] or aesthetic
indulgence/intoxication by beauty. In China, danmei currently takes the form of
chiefly online fan fiction on nomadic websites whose creators outwit regulators'
abilities to censor them.[2] Yanrui Xu and Ling Yang trace the origin of mainland
danmei to the year 1998, its continued growth drawing heavily on bootleg Japanese
yaoi.[3] Danmei in Taiwan and Hong Kong, as well as yaoi in Japan, South Korea
and beyond have, since the 1990s, expanded from comics into films, novels, online
serials and a swath of other media forms and commodities. In this essay, I will stick
with the terms yaoi and danmei rather than use the more universal and commercial
term 'boys' love' or 'BL'[4] so as to maintain an historical throughline between the
1970s and 80s Japanese djinshi predecessors and the post-1990s glocal media.
2. Yaoi/danmei takes the form of usually unintentional feminist-queer social critique, but
always includes intentional titillating entertainment. In today's context of national
cultures competing for soft powerwhat Koichi Iwabuchi has called 'brand
nationalism': for example, 'cool Japan,' Hallyu (the Korean wave)the genre
performs a particular kind of affective work: that of queer stylisation. Through the
creation and consumption of media featuring speculative male-male kinship, fans re-
imagine in unique ways hegemonic gender roles in the realms of sex, marriage,
family, career and public life. When the media is read across borders, fans engage in
explicit or implicit comparisons of restrictive heteropatriarchies. Such comparisons
result from a characteristic of twenty-first century modernity: a global bellwether of
'equality' by way of civil rights and/or other measures for women and sexual
minorities.[5] Yaoi/danmei is a lucrative technology that alleviates 'trapped' feelings
spurred by heteropatriarchy via moe, a kind of animalistic affect. The extent to which
yaoi/danmei, however, draws from and contributes to brand nationalism, thereby
fuelling a kind of chronopolitics, is a central concern of this essay. Scholars must
contend with the probability that feminist-queer commodities play a part in the
uneven power dynamics of multinational capital and its representational effects. As
Iwabuchi explains, brand nationalism is a problem because nation-states are
'strengthen[ing] their alliances with multinational corporations to enhance national
interests,' which results in a continued '(re)production of cultural asymmetry' in the
global marketplace.[6]
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3. Yaoi/danmei distribution in East Asia follows the pattern that Chua Beng Huat has
observed in his formulation of a post-1990s 'East Asian popular culture sphere':[7] an
'uneven flow of Japanese and Korean products into [Chinese contexts] with
relatively little reciprocity of imports of Chinese languages products into the former
two countries.'[8] This asymmetry is greatly a result of post-1970s Japanese and
post-1990s Korean transnationalism. Of course, one cannot blame Japan for the lack
of Chinese feminist-queer exports given the reality of mainland censorship. Yet,
rather than fall prey to the teleological notion that China must therefore be 'trapped in
the past,' one should think carefully about the relationship of feminist-queer
commodities to capital and the 'modern' nation-state today.
4. For this, Jasbir Puar's notion of 'homonationalism' is useful. The word generally
refers to the now-strong link between LGBT politics and the US state particularly. US
power, even if waning, still tethers most societies to a global economy. Puar
succinctly captures the intersection of multinational capital, teleological thinking (for
example, the global bellwether of equality), and queer-feminist commodification when
she writes: 'Freedom from gender and sexual norms' intersects nicely with the 'self-
possessed speaking subject, untethered by hegemony enabled by the stylization
offerings of capitalism, rationally choosing modern individualism over the ensnaring
bonds of family.'[9] What this quote demonstrates is that nation-states do not need to
necessarily adopt the logic of rights to prove their modern status, so much as provide
social and commercial space for queer and feminist stylisation. This dynamic best
describes Japan, a country where, say, marriage rights for sexual minorities is barely
on the public's radar and whose gender equality tends to be ranked abysmally, but
for whom feminist-queer commodities are highly exported.[10] One result of these
exports is a conflation of the nation's mediascape with its ideoscape among overseas
consumers.
5. For instance, Tricia Fermin observes how in industrialising Philippines, the

consumption of yaoi from Japan is not free of a perception of Japan as more modern.
[11] A presumption emerges that if feminist-queer media like yaoi is so widely
available and exported, then Japan itself must also be so queer-friendly and
antisexist. Fran Martin, in her study of the Taiwanese danmei community, also
observes a kind of teleological thinking, describing her informants as constructing an
'imagined geography' based on Japan's speculative manga worlds against which a
real-life Taiwan is compared.[12] Importantly then, Japan's real-world sex/gender
scene need not be held in utopian esteem for the country's modern status to be
signified; only that yaoi-speculationa kind of feminist-queer radicalismbe sourced
there.
6. In mainland China, many fans uphold Mori Mari (19031987), daughter of the famed
Japanese novelist Mori gai, as the 'mother' of danmei, despite the fact that almost
all of Mori's work (especially those with same-sex themes) remains untranslated into
Chinese.[13] Mori has been deemed the progenitor of yaoi among Japanese
scholars; her 1961 novella Koibitotachi no mori (A Lovers' Forest) is often considered
the first yaoi.[14] Although Mori's pedestal as 'mother' transcends national
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boundaries in the name of queer love at a time when Japanese/Chinese relations are
increasingly tense, and thus does a kind of critical transnational feminist work, at the
same time, the origin story does curious chronopolitical work for the Japanese
nation-stateeven while mainland danmei fans turn to Chinese history for their
storytelling purposes.
7. Since danmei risks censorship on the mainland, brand nationalism might seem less
applicable a term; still, mainland danmei fans deploy intra-nationalist approaches that
intersect with the global bellwether. For example, according to Xiqing Zheng, fans
sometimes maintain a sense of elitism as they traffic in feminist and queer critique.
Zheng alerted me to a motto among fans in the early 2000s, taken from a famous
online forum called Lucifer: (A fangirl has the
responsibility to be more civilised/cultured than others).[15] As Lisa Rofel has
explored, the spread of Chinese feminist-queer identities and storytelling in recent
decades stems in large part from an impression that the ability to express one's
desires and personal affairs is part and parcel of post-socialist modernisation,[16] or
bringing China 'into the future.' John Wei writes of a triangulation among Japan,
China and the West: the 'deep-rooted traditional preference for youthful male
delicacy [in China is] intermingled with the kawaii [cute] aesthetics borrowed from
modern Japanese manga and anime,' but also the 'imagined universe full of
superhero masculinity, advanced technology, and science fiction spectacle a
signature of (post)industrial American modernity,' which some mainland fans prefer.
These fans 'break away from the Japanese cuteness to pursue modernization in
its original Western form rather than through the medium of a Westernized and
modernized Japan.'[17]
8. A contrasting and negative impression for yaoi emerges where one might expect.
Jessica Bauwens-Sugimoto explores superficial readings by some US fans of
'slash'[18] fiction who claim that Japanese yaoi is 'more misogynist, more
homophobic, and occasionally more racist'in essence, inferiorto US feminist-
queer storytelling due to Japan's 'greater sexual oppressiveness.' For these readers,
the hybridisation of yaoi with US same-sex fictions amounts to a kind of
'pollution.'[19] Like homonationalism itself, all the above readings find roots in older
forms of power: the Philippines is 'behind' Japan, Taiwan and China 'arrive' via Japan
and the West, and, as seen from the US, Japan is still not 'there' yet. In Puar's
formulation of homonationalism as a white logic, and indeed in Edward Said's
formulation of Orientalism, Japan emerges as a kind of 'terrorist other' to a global
sexual order: its mediascape polluted by both heteropatriarchy and perverse excess
('too queer' = 'not queer enough'), to include even alleged paedophilia (lolicon and
shotacon).[20] Mark McLelland has written on the Japanese response to international
pressure to curb perceived excess; he focuses on the 2010 Tokyo debate on
whether or not to ban the depiction of non-existent youth in sexual situations, a
common topos in yaoi.[21] Such content, assuredly harmless, is already illegal in a
number of western countries.
9. Taking the above framework that concerns an emergent conjoining of brand

nationalism with homonationalism in East Asia, for the rest of this essay I will explore
globalising yaoi/danmei in three directions. First, I will focus on the genre's 'origin,'
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then its feminism, and then its moe, or affect. Finally, I will conclude with a short case
study on the 2004 Taiwanese film Formula 17.[22]
Theorising yaoi's origin
10. In her study of the Japanese manga industry, Sharon Kinsella observed that male-
male fictions for girls and women emerged nearly simultaneously in industrialised
societies in the 1970s. Kinsella names Japan, the US and Britain principally, and
suggests that this co-emergence points to how 'these women have undergone
similar social and sexual experiences.'[23] One shared experience is a 1970s
change in print technologies that enabled individual writers and artists to share their
work outside local heteropatriarchal gazes (not unlike how print technologies in
general enabled nation-states to form imagined communities). A noteworthy venue
for this sharing is the copyright-free space Comiket, the binannual djinshi
convention held in Tokyo since 1975 that today draws half-a-million people. In
today's digital age, print-on-demand technologies and online serialisation have
opened up increased venues for profit and community-building, circumventing
barriers in places where yaoi/danmei either breaks the law or is heavily regulated (for
example, China, Singapore, Indonesia).
11. The near simultaneous emergence of yaoi-like texts on three continents begs the
question of the complicated relationship between globalisation and queer cultural
formations. Peter Jackson has usefully re-raised the significance of industrialisation
and modernisation vis--vis global queering, because of the fact that 'Japan and
Siam [now Thailand] both remained independent throughout the colonial era, [and]
significantly, it is in these two countries, which escaped direct colonization and self-
modernized, that Asia's first modern homosexual communities emerged.'[24]
Jackson suggests that discussions regarding global queering be 'pushed back' to
before the post-Cold war era and the rise of the internet, even before 1970s
multinational capital, because the question is not 'how Asian societies borrowed
'preexisting' Western queer cultural patterns' but rather 'why sexual cultures in parts
of Asia and the West both underwent dramatic transformations in similar, but also
distinctive, ways over much the same period of the twentieth century.'[25] Japan's
colonial enterprise and postwar invitation to the Cold War-era table for industrialised
democracies (exclusive to Japan, the US, and Western Europe) often relegates the
nation in scholarly discourse to a status of 'more or less part of the West,' although in
truth, twentieth-century Japan was like the West, but not of it.[26] Conversely, China,
as David Eng puts it following Rofel, gives rise to 'discrepant modernities' born from
the mainland's 'nineteenth-century exclusion from Euro-American modernity and
Mao's twentieth-century communist victory.'[27] ('Discrepant' does not mean
'alternative,' as the latter would amount to, as Howard Chiang suggests,
'self-/Orientalism' or an over-localization of Chinese gender and sexual discourse,
and a forgetting of the near-global reach by the 1920s of what Michel Foucault called
scientia sexualis.[28]) I include this meta-level conversation in Asian queer studies
because it informs my understanding of yaoi/danmei, including the likelihood that
yaoi and danmei are subtly different phenomena, as opposed to danmei as a mere
'copy' of yaoi.
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12. For a necessary transepochal approach in thinking through yaoi's emergence, Keith
Vincent's theorisation of 'two-timing' queer Japanese narratives of the first half of the
twentieth-century is a useful point of departure. Vincent analyses Sseki Natsume's
1914 novel Kokoro as a striking example of not only a forward-looking temporality for
Japanese heteropatriarchy, but also a backward-looking, perverse and nostalgic
temporality for the 'premodern'that is, the Tokugawa era (16031868) when Japan
was relatively isolated, before the empire and the global spread of scientia sexualis
that pathologised same-sex sexual relations.[29] Vincent contends that as the
twentieth century progressed, Japanese queer narratives became 'stuck' in a space
between sexologised homosexuality (hentai seiyoku, or perversion) and invisibility
whereby same-sex sexual relations (for example, nanshoku, shud) were deemed a
premodern remnant to be discarded. Vincent shows how Mishima Yukio's 1949 novel
Confessions of a Mask exemplifies this mid-twentieth-century dialectical space.[30]
13. For yaoi, situated in the second half of the twentieth century, I veer from Vincent in a
deployment of the 'postmodern,' revisiting the term as it was taken up in Japan in the
1980s. Azuma Hiroki reminds of how in the 1980s, at the height of the Japanese
economy, great popular and scholarly interest arose toward the concept of
postmodernity, which was seen as important to conceptualising that particular
moment of Nihonjinron, or Japaneseness. Alongside claims that Japan had finally
'overcome modernity' or severed its reliance on comparing itself to the West (via,
notably, a frontrunner status in the computerisation of knowledge[31]), the Japanese
media sometimes portrayed the isolationist Tokugawa period as 'already
postmodern.' That is to say, Japan was 'postmodern before it was modern.' As
Azuma writes, this notion served the interests of nationalism, to 'forget [the] defeat [of
WWII] and remain oblivious to the [continued] impact of Americanization.'[32] To be
clear, postmodernity did little to end the violence of modernity, either in Japan or
elsewhere; still, within this 1980s economic and social context, a genre like yaoi
could establish a commercial foothold after a 1970s birth in underground djinshi
markets, because heteropatriarchy had become a 'modern' remnant to be shed.
Yaoi's feminist-queer narratives gained popularity as they proliferated against the
grain of an ever-disappearing norm, and at the centre of the narratives were
bishnen or gender-bending 'beautiful boys.' As Greg Pflugfelder writes, 'fixing our
gaze on the bishnen' is in effect assuming the characteristic stance of Tokugawa
discourse on male-male sexuality;[33] however, to follow Marilyn Ivy, the bishnen is
likely phantasmatic.[34]
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Figure 1. Merged timelines from Hiroki Azuma illustrate the global transition from
'modernity' to 'postmodernity.' The light grey curve indicates the transition by the end
of the Cold War (communism-vs.-capitalism as the last 'grand narrative'); the dark
grey curve indicates the fall of Japanese grand narratives particularly. Azuma,
following the work of sociologist sawa Masachi, divides postwar Japanese
narratives into three eras: the Era of Ideals (194570), the Era of Fiction (1970
1995), andAzuma's addition: the Era of Animals (2000onward). Given that
heteropatriarchy qualifies as a 'grand narrative,' I have overlaid Keith Vincent's 2012
theorisation of two-timing 'pre/modern' queer Japanese narratives (the lower
arrowed line). My addition for yaoi-like texts is also two-timing, but 'post/modern' (the
upper arrowed line).
Source: Azuma Hiroki, 'The animalization of Otaku culture,' trans. Yuriko Furuhata
and Marc Steinberg, Mechademia vol. 2 (2007): 17587, p. 179.
As an observation of yaoi's 'post/modern' form, consider how a common utterance in

the genrewhen a character claims that he is 'not gay, but just in love with a
man'has both homophobic (or modern) temporal undertones but also non-
identitarian (postmodern) ones. Consider too how yaoi fans often identify as
'straight/gay/lesbian' and so on, due to the preponderance of such labels in their
societies, but also have an attraction to yaoi that crosses identitarian borders.
Following Mizoguchi Akiko who identifies as both an 'out lesbian' and a 'person of
yaoi sexuality,'[35] I too identify as 'gay' out of habit, but the label has a rather dated
feel to it when compared to the circulation of desire in yaoi fandoms.
14. Other scholars have pushed on the boundaries of yaoi's origin. Jeffrey Angles argues
that the genre appears to 'partake of a palate of aesthetics created by early
twentieth-century [Japanese] writers who saw homoerotic appreciation of boyish
beauty as an intense aesthetic experience and a sign of deep, personal feelings that
could define one's experience as an individual.'[36] Angles' claim is practical in part
because of how it points to an earlier practice of individuation that is central to the
troubling nexus of late twentieth-century feminist and queer politics, capital and the
nation-state, or homonationalism. My sense is that the 1960s and 70s tanbi shsetsu
or male-male 'aetheticised novels' (yaoi's precursors) of Mori Mari and her
contemporaries do not only descend from earlier writings about beautiful boyishness,
per se, but to the tanbishugi or Japanese aestheticism movement altogether, of
which Mori gai was a participant.[37] Like the decadent literature (for example, the
work of Oscar Wilde) that emerged in the fin-de-sicle West as a pessimistic
response to the incursion of modern 'progress' that seemed to both endorse but also
strip away individuality, tanbishugi arose in response to Japan's rapid modernisation.
It was a literary space in which any number of personal indulgences could maintain
merit even as modern discourse insisted they disappear.
15. Same-sex sexuality under scientia sexualis in both Japan and the West was/is
maligned not only for an unnaturalness or immaturity, but also for being unnecessary
for the re/productive nation-state (still significant given Japan's population woes).
Same-sex sexuality was 'decadent' in that it was thought aligned with bourgeois
excessnot simply a remnant of the premodern, but a consequence of the modern
gone awry. Pre- and postwar Japanese Marxists were torn in their readings of
tanbishugi, as some felt the texts simply lavished in individualised and self-absorbed
excess (erotic, or otherwise) and did not aspire to the same anti-modern ideals that
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western fin-de-sicle literature did; conversely, others felt the texts provided a
sensible escape from the strictures of modern life.[38] The same debate could be
overlayed onto yaoi/danmei today, since the texts both work for individualist
materialism that feeds into brand nationalism yet are also queer/feminist sanctuaries.
Establishing a link between yaoi and tanbishugi moves a focus away from same-sex
sexuality as anti-modern (the rise of homonationalism proves that it is not), instead
reading yaoi's 'decadence' on a long line of historical ruptures.
16. James Welker has documented that when yaoi emerged in the 1970s, some fans,
particularly queer women, consumed images of 'homo men in Japan as well as
abroad.'[39] Welker's foregrounding of globalisation usefully disrupts the idea of
yaoi's origin as entirely Japanese. He points to how early yaoi, such as Takemiya
Keiko's 1976 Kaze to ki no uta (Song of Wind and Trees) (often deemed the first yaoi
in manga form), tended to hearken to 'fantastic worlds of the European past' so as to
cast off 1970s' Japanese mores.[40] Welker contends that the genre for many
readers was not merely an 'escape or a straightforward critique of [local] patriarchal
romance paradigms but rather [a] part of a larger sphere of consumption of
images of male homosexuality.'[41] His argument is a critique of the problematic
tendency to categorically divorce female-driven fantasy from real-world male
homosocial worlds, a practice Welker traces to before the 1992 yaoi rons (dispute,
or critical debate) that concerned whether the genre was appropriating queer men.
[42]
17. Rather than posit an origin, Aoyama Tomoko emphasises how the genre grants the
ability to 'change elite homosexual, homosocial and misogynistic literature into a
more inclusive, egalitarian narrative/fantasy' through mediums such as parody and
pastiche.[43] Like Vincent, Aoyama usefully follows twentieth-century perspectives
regarding Sseki's widely-read 1914 novel, Kokoro, which are worth revisiting here.
Scholarly readings in 1950s' Japan and the US deemed the central male-male
relationship between Sensei and K to demonstrate the fall of Meiji-era homosociality,
conceived as non-erotic.[44] Then, in 1969, the influential psychoanalyst Doi Takeo
read the novel's central relationship as one of latent homosexuality, a kind of
sickness in Sensei that sexology could fix;[45] later 'gay' readings put a positive spin
on a homosexuality conceived as obvious in the text. Aoyama cites Stephen Dodd
who writes that, because of the likely practice of same-sex relationships in elite
schools during the Meiji era, the 'contemporary readers of Kokoro must have been
sensitive to the homoerotic elements implicit in the text.'[46] Yet another approach is
taken by Vincent in his theorisation of 'two-timing' pre/modern narration that follows
the dialectical historicism of queer theorist Eve Sedgwick. What might be considered
as against all of these readings, Aoyama writes of a mid-1990s anachronistic
declaration of Kokoro as 'boys' love' or yaoi. I would categorise this as a
'post/modern' reading, since it demonstrates both a concern with the history of the
text (the declaration was made in a pedagogical context), but also with speculative
romance and eroticism for enjoyment and styleas if consuming, as Aoyama says, a
different text.
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Yaoi's feminism
18. If yaoi/danmei is in cahoots with 'brand homonationalism,' is the genre feminist only
on the local level because fans cannot be expected to concern themselves with
cultural asymmetry and multinational capital?
19. In fact, to label yaoi 'feminist' is to remind that 'discrepant modernities' (to
momentarily borrow Rofel's phrase) exist within the borders of nation-states along
such lines as sexual difference, language difference, racial difference, and so
onmodalities that have historically brought about failures of interpellation, or non-
integration into nation-state logics.[47] Such 'failure' tallies with what 1970s French
feminist psychoanalytic thinkers conceptualised as 'women's writing': texts distanced
from the phallocentric discourse that Julia Kristeva described as opening an
ultimately anti-colonial temporality of 'women's time.'[48] In his reading of Kristeva,
Homi Bhabha notes that the concept of 'women's time' is not only rooted in the
cultural particularities of French psychoanalysis, but also anti-colonialism because of
how the temporal borders of nation-states are shaped by the same processes of
signification that shape phallocentricity.[49] Takahara Eiri suggests that the figure of
the bishnen as taken up throughout twentieth-century Japanese literature and in
yaoi not only resists heteropatriarchy, but the phallocentricity of the modern subject;
[50] that is to suggest, the bishnen, phantasmatic as he may be, may yet potentially
retain anti-modern qualities, even if same-sex sexuality does not. In a perhaps
related theorisation, Nagaike Kazumi builds on Miyasako Chizuru by labelling yaoi
'hi-shjo' (anti-girl or non-girl) in that the genre refuses the shnen/shjo (boy/girl)
divide and the accompanying and often nation-building gender roles and media
practices inherent in the distinction.[51]
20. That yaoi continues to do local feminist work in Japan is evident in how the Japanese
phallocentric gaze pigeonholes the genre's producers and consumers as immature
'fujoshi' (rotten girls/women).[52] Fujoshi are expected to, and in many cases do,
outgrow the genre upon adulthood when they take on responsibilities such as a
career, spousehood and/or motherhood.[53] Meanwhile, the consumption of
yaoi/danmei on a regional scale by millions of fans and its hybridisation with local
feminist and queer cultures is a growing site of contradiction as 'mature' nations are
expected to abandon heteropatriarchy to meet the standards of the global equality
bellwether.
21. Importantly, the conception of fujoshi as 'immature' is to some extent a result of

1990s feminist framings. When yaoi first entered Japanese scholarly discourse, a
number of theorists posited it as a sign of phallocentrism. As the theories went,
patriarchy leads females to adopt imagined male subjectivities because patriarchy
often does not allow girls to comfortably express sexuality such that some adopt
Freudian penis-envy.[54] The exploration of inner desire through shnen'ai (double-
meaning: 'love of boys' and 'love between boys') was deemed safer and more
freeing. The queerness of yaoi was conceived as a temporary placeholder for what
would become 'normative' female sexuality in adulthood, and yaoi characters were
assumed to be basically 'girls with penises.'[55] Although born from a critique of
patriarchy, what this penis-envy theory buttressed is a discernment among the
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Japanese public that yaoi is a tolerable, even welcome public good in shjo (girls')
culture because it provides the necessary skills to move girls from 'passive' to 'active'
sexuality; yet, in josei (women's) culture and among women who consume shjo, it is
a mark of immaturity and/or perversity.
Figure 2. A movement of 'maturity' in yaoi.
Wataru and Yuichi go from unspeakable attraction to comfortable

enough with themselves that they kiss in front of Yuichi's young niece
as a way of showing her that neither of them can marry her when she
grows up as she had hoped.
The niece represents a young reader grappling with her self-

actualisation as a sexual being, learning that the process is one of
individuation. Yuichi comments to her: 'See? Us big boys are reeaally
good friends, so there's no way that either of us can marry Takano (the
niece's name).'
Takano tells her mother on the next page: 'You know what? The big
boys, they were smooching.'
The mother has the final line of the story: 'Oh my! But it's certainly
possible '
Source. Satoru Kannagi and Hotaru Odagiri, Only the Ring Finger
Knows, Carson, CA: Digital Manga, 2004.
22. More recent scholarship reads to me what seems a kind of essential queerness into
yaoi that respects the continued consumption of the genre in adulthood, the multitude
of gender performances within the texts, and breaks down the hetero/homo binary,
giving voice to fans of various genders and sexualities. As if to put an end to the
penis-envy theory, Nagaike argues that yaoi fans are not viewing the characters in
the sense of a Freudian subject/object dichotomy; rather, female and sometimes
male desire is overlaid onto fictional male bodies, resulting in identification.[56]
Nagaike employs Melanie Klein's psychoanalytic notion of 'projective identification'
whereby the 'other' (as opposed to a 'boy') is enlisted in the restitution of an anxious
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ego.[57] Notably, projective identification might be read alongside Scott McCloud's
thesis that the medium of comics invites readers to identify with the 'other' via the
necessity to close the gap between panels.[58] Valrie Cools suggests that
Japanese manga embrace this phenomenological quality especially, which has
contributed to manga's worldwide popularity.[59]
23. Nevertheless, any 'essential queerness' cannot be left unexamined. The material
cultures of 'failed' subjects (women, queers, racial 'others') have, since the 1970s
and rise of multinational capital, been largely reintegrated into nation-state logics via
policies of cosmopolitanism over assimilation. For instance, consider yaoi's
commercialisation in Japan: interpellative failure provided an occasion for
entrepreneurialism. Once the mechanism for yaoi was commercially established,
girls and women could 'play sexuality'[60] and the genre became less explicitly anti-
hegemonic; once exported, it has contributed to brand nationalism. Fran Martin, in
her study of the Taiwanese danmei community, writes that the fandom in Taiwan
today sees an uneven incorporation of feminist critique with an interlinked
relationship to 'social-realist tongzhi [gay] narratives'; she concludes that a 'specific
ideological stance' is perhaps less important than the 'broad social function' danmei
provides for its diverse fans.[61] (Martin admits that this is a change in her thinking
from an earlier conception of the fandom as a 'counterpublic'Michael Warner's
term.[62]) Mizoguchi Akiko's stance is similar for Japan: yaoi remains ideal feminist
praxis because there never was such a thing as clear-cut feminist activism.[63]
Indeed in China, the genre is anti-hegemonic in the sense that fans outfox the state.
However, even as yaoi/danmei reveals tensions between local heteropatriarchies
and stylised individualisms, scholars should not lose sight of such tensions as
symptoms of 'brand homonationalism.'
Yaoi's moe
24. Azuma has written extensively on the 'postmodern' as constituting a loss of interest
in grand narratives and an increased interest in stylised difference as taken up
through character commoditiesa rise of what he calls an 'Era of Animals.'[64] As
the producer of the regionally-popular 1990s TV drama Tokyo Love Story put it in
2001, viewers want beautiful people, beautiful clothes, good food and good
entertainment; a good plot is secondary.[65] Gabriella Lukcs has written on how the
shift from story-driven narratives to lifestyle-oriented narratives in 1990s Japanese
TV dramas served to redirect youth from growing inequality during Japan's [ongoing]
recessionary period.[66] A decadent aesthetics in the face of failed modern 'progress'
can be observed in yaoi as early as the 1970s djinshi, which tended to consist of
mere sexual images and permutations of bishnen with little coherent plot, resulting
in the coining of the genre: 'yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi' (no climax, no plot, no
meaning).[67]
25. Character commodities provide escapist and animalistic affect called moe. Moe is a
term that has spread across East Asia that describes the euphoric draw of cuteness,
beauty and eros as well as other appealing elements that the Japanese cultural
industry takes as defining features of its popular culture export logic. To describe
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moe as might Walter Benjamin, it is animalistic desirefrom mothering instincts to
the eroticthat provides an illusion of jetztzeit (the here-and-now) or the 'aura'
blasting open the homogenous, empty time of capital; yet, the affect is structured into
capital as a means of containing human difference.[68] Anne Allison has fittingly
named moe-inflected capital 'Pokmon capitalism,' whereby character commodities
serve 'the lifeline of human relationships relieve stress and reflect the 'inner
self'[69]; they are, in essence, 'therapy' against living in the throes of multinational
capital. Yaoi's use-value is in its queer stylisation potential: a disruption of local
heteropatriarchies, gender fluidity, attention to deep desire and cuteness/beauty,
comforting moe.
26. On the one hand, moe enables men and boys to get in touch with their 'feminine' side
since a concentration on character commodities distances males from the
performance of the masculinist nation-state.[70] Moe also works against compulsive
heterosexuality, to use Adrienne Rich's phrase, to the chagrin of those who have
conceived Japanese consumerism to amount to the public becoming non-
reproductive shjo.[71] On the other hand, as Azuma reminds, desire was never
satisfied with the physiological climax (see note 57 of this essay on Lacan); ordinarily
humans build intersubjective desire to resolve this insatiability, except moe 'closes
various lack-satisfaction circuits.'[72] Azuma notes of an initial impression that the
Japanese yaoi fandom seems 'more human' than male otaku or popular culture
fansthat is to say, fujoshi engage in more intersubjective sharing.[73] But the
younger generation (and this was stated by Azuma in 2001) is 'beginning to be
animalized.'[74] The above dynamic illustrates the political impasse of feminist/queer
desire alongside stylised individuation: capitalism may destroy hated social
hierarchies, but it also conditions the human psyche toward its own empty time (see
Benjamin above).
27. Patrick Galbraith usefully reads yaoi moe under the framework of Gilles Deleuze and
Flix Guattari's 'body without organs,' which is not simply a pun on the fact that yaoi
often features bishnen without phalluses.[75] Galbraith reads yaoi-speculation as a
space of unstructured feminist potential, not unlike Martin's claim that a 'broad social
function' is more important than a 'specific ideological stance.' Consider, too, how
Vincent pits Azuma's 'animalisation' (reducing it to a theory of cultural decline)
against Sait Tamaki's view for otaku (and yaoi) sexuality as subjectively productive.
[76] Each of these readings strikes me as overoptimistic when a proliferation of
identities, affects and performances is central to multinational capital today. Slavoj
iek argues that there are, in fact, two Deleuzesthe first asserts the subversive
potential of pre-subjective affects and immanent desire (whom iek labels the
'Guattarized' Deleuze), or the Delueze who might argue for modernity's potential
overcoming through 'postmodern' means.[77] The trouble iek finds with pre-
subjective affects, of which moe would undoubtedly be included, is that while their
self-organisation might seem to resist regimes of power (which is how 'affect' has
been navely deployed in many 'radical' Anglophone conversations), the affects are,
in fact, compatible with database/digital capitalism. In contrast, iek points to a
second Deleuze, before the influence of Guattari, who foregrounds the inertness of
the affects, offering instead a 'quasi-causality' that anchors the network of the
material, what iek calls 'organs without bodies.' This latter Deleuze might assert
how the violence of modernity persists notwithstanding 'postmodernity.' The
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application of this second option to yaoi amounts to a critical (and Nietzschean) push
against a simplification of yaoi moe as 'basically good' because of its generation of 'a
thousand tiny sexes,' to use Elizabeth Grosz's phrase.[78] Rather, as I have shown
by reading yaoi/danmei on the scale of the regional and global, the genre is in
dialectical conversation with late modern elements (for example, homonationalism,
brand nationalism), inherently doing 'evil' work, too.
Formula 17: A case study
28. To conclude this essay, I will explore the 2004 Taiwanese film Formula 17 (local title:
17-Year-Old's World), directed by then-24-year-old Chen Yin-jung. On international
fan lists, Formula 17 is regularly annotated as a 'yaoi,' 'danmei' or 'boys' love/BL' film.
The reason I choose it is because it was the highest-grossing homegrown Taiwanese
film of 2004 and travelled global film festival circuits. Its reception provides an
interesting case study for thinking about regional brand homonationalism in the mid-
2000s. Furthermore, since the mid-2000s, Taiwan has become the oft-cited most
liberal location in Asia, drawing tens of thousands during the island's annual LGBT
Pride events. Petrus Liu reminds us that Taiwan is paradoxically tolerant and
intolerant: the country's tolerance was, in part, designed by the state to distinguish
Taiwan from China, while the 2003 move to become the first Asian nation to legalise
same-sex marriage was 'nothing more than a political ruse.'[79]
29. For additional context, note that in 2005, Taiwanese director Ang Lee released a
somber same-sex love story about two cowboys in rural Wyoming: a filmic version of
Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain. The commercial success of Lee's film provided
an occasion for US pundits to comment on growing US tolerance of homosexuality in
relation to an alleged homophobia of other countries, such as China, where the
media celebrated Lee's Oscar win for best director despite Brokeback Mountain
never screening in Chinese theatres (bootleg versions were readily consumed,
however).[80] Meanwhile, in Taiwan, an affective opposite of Brokeback Mountain
saw popularity: Formula 17, a bubbly, same-sex romantic comedy populated by male
idols and their comical sidekicks flirting with same-sex sexuality. Formula 17 was a
low-budget production that did not see theatrical release in China.
30. Nor did the film see release in Singapore where it was banned. To justify the ban,
Singapore's regulators cited the film's 'illusion of a homosexual utopia, where
everyone, including passersby, is homosexual and no ills or problems are reflected
[the film] conveys the message that homosexuality is a normal and natural
progression of society.'[81] Interestingly, the following year, Singapore permitted
Brokeback Mountain because the US film did not 'promote or glamorize the
lifestyle.'[82] After a resubmission in 2004, the 2001 Hong Kong film Lan Yu (dir.
Stanley Kwan) was given a green light by Singapore's regulators for the same
reason'not promoting the lifestyle'despite the fact that the film has more explicit
sexual content than Formula 17.[83] In essence, Brokeback Mountain and Lan Yu
provide ample affective space for heteronormative kinship to remain a cherished
norm, whereas Formula 17 completely sidesteps it in favour of speculative queer
kinship.
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31. Formula 17 features a fantasy Taipei in which everyone is not only same-sex
attracted, but also male. A single child appears in a flashback, accompanied by his
fathera mother is intentionally absentedleaving the matter of reproduction
speculative. Although a speculative world where no females exist can seem the
ultimate sign of antifeminism, the film is actually indicative of its female consumer
base looking for a momentary escape from everyday gender norms and private
male-male activities on tantalising display. Formula 17's plot is formulaic: boy likes
boy, boy gets boy, boy loses boy, but retrieves boy in the end. In one scene, the
main character's best friend Yu enters a long-distance relationship with a white,
English-speaking tourist who asks Yu to learn to recite 'I love you' in multiple
languages. Their relationship crumbles as if resulting from Yu's failure to be
cosmopolitan enough. Yu becomes catatonically depressed, yet his misfortune is
played for laughs, as the film's central romance is between T'ien and Bai who are
fully localised.
32. Taipei is as much on display as T'ien and Bai, as if to express to the viewer that one
need go nowhere but Taipei to find the sappiest, most perfect love one could ever
dream of. As Brian Wu writes, the fact that such a utopia 'includes instantly
recognizable Taipei locations such as Warner Village, Ximending, and especially
Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall (the ultimate symbol of conservatism in Taiwan),
suggests a playful queering of Taipei.'[84] Local factors for Formula 17's commercial
success included Taiwan's inchoate film industry that is more amenable to untested
narratives; smart casting, cinematographic and marketing choices;[85] and Taiwan's
yet-to-be-decided nation-state status that facilitates cosmopolitan populism and
relatively greater flexibility in the regimes of gender and sexuality. As Wu writes, in
the global marketplace, Formula 17 served as an 'international spectacle (as
'authentic' Asian queer),' providing struggling Taiwanese cinema cultural capital.[86]
Figure 3. Bai and T'ien, first kiss.
Source. Formula 17, dir. Chen Yin-jung, Taiwan, 2004.
33. I would further argue that the popularly of films like Formula 17 and the continued
spread of yaoi/danmei is an indication of a transition concerning queer narration
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across broader East Asia. While regulators make it difficult to judge just how
profitable queer stylisation might be, the transition is evident from relatively 'liberal'
Taiwan to relatively 'conservative' South Korea. Jeeyoung Shin writes of the South
Korean context, where yaoi is also gaining popularity, and where films featuring
male-male romance such as The King and the Clown (2005) and No Regret (2006)
[87] were unexpected smash hits.[88] She aptly remarks that a 2001 model for
categorising queer East Asian films as proposed by Chris Berry is now defunct. Berry
contended that because the influence of Confucianism dominates East Asia, films
with queer themes that see mainstream success necessarily explore how same-sex
sexuality negotiates with heteronormative kinship (family dynamics, male-female
courtship, the nation), whereas less popular independent or experimental films offer
narratives of usually solitary existence apart from said kinship.[89] Berry's model
assumes queer sexuality to be a disruptive element, whereas increasingly popular
East Asian films with queer themes, particularly films infused with yaoi/danmei
sensibilities, demonstrate how great profit can lie in the feeling of non-normative
sexuality as not only constructive, but as an ideal point of departure.
34. As Huat notes in his reading of the East Asian popular culture sphere, the narrative
of 'neo-Confucianism' as the driving force of cross-border capital of the Asian Tigers
(Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, and the economic opening up of China,
all following regional frontrunner Japan) dissolved following the 1997 Asian financial
crisis. Today, East Asian national identities are underpinned by an accelerated
temporality that, 'unlike the Confucian identity that is supposed to seep quietly,
through years of implicit socialization [are now] a conscious ideological project
based on the commercial desire of capturing a larger audience and market.'[90] Yaoi
and danmei are important for imagining where this ideological project might lead as
brand homonationalism takes root in the region.
Notes
[1] Tanbi was a term used in the Japanese yaoi subculture in the 1970s and 80s for works that
used flowery language and uncommon kanji (requiring a high level of reader fluency). See next
section for a recommended link between tanbi and the twentieth-century Japanese aestheticism
or tanbishugi movement.
I would like to thank the following people for their input as I developed this paper: Carolyn Allen
(and company), Andrea Arai, Toshie Honda, Chris Lowy, Mark McHarry, Clark Sorenson, Alvin
Wong, and Xiqing Zheng.
[2] See Ting Lui, 'Conflicting discourses on boys' love and subcultural tactics in Mainland China
and Hong Kong,' Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific no. 20 (2009),
online: http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue20/liu.htm (accessed 1 September 2014).
[3] Yanrui Xu and Ling Yang, 'Forbidden love: incest, generational conflict, and the erotics of
power in Chinese BL fiction,' Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics vol. 4, no. 1 (2013): 3043,
p. 30. Xu and Yang note that confident fans today publish printed works in Taiwan given the
difficulty of publishing danmei on the mainland.
[4] A settling of the name for the genre into 'boys' love' or 'BL' as the result of 1990s commercial
investment I take from Saito Kumiko, 'Desire in subtext: gender, fandom, and women's male-
male homoerotic parodies in contemporary Japan,' Mechademia no. 6 (2011): 17191, p. 172.
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[5] As examples of this bellwether, consider US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's declaration
before the United Nations in 2009 that 'gay rights are human rights,' or French President Nicolas
Sarkozy's statement in 2011 that equality between men and women is a feature of the French
national character (an indictment against Arab and other immigrants who 'refuse' to assimilate).
The bellwether dictates that every society must 'catch up' to a standard set by the Euro-American
industrialised world or risk the wrath of exclusionary development and immigration policies,
and/or suffer a burden of feeling trapped 'in the past.' Russia's recent antigay swing might be
viewed, in part, as an assertion of anti-American power; so might China's reluctance to embrace
a Euro-American sexual order by way of censorship.
[6] See Iwabuchi Koichi, 'Undoing inter-national fandom in the age of brand nationalism,'
Mechademia no. 5 (2010): 8796, p. 92.
[7] See Chua Beng Huat, 'Conceptualizing an East Asian popular culture,' Inter-Asia Cultural
Studies vol. 5, no. 2 (2006): 20021.
[8] Chua Beng Huat, 'Engendering an East Asia pop culture research community,' Inter-Asia
Cultural Studies vol. 11, no. 2 (2010): 20206, p. 204.
[9] Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Durham: Duke
University Press, 2007, pp. 2223.
[10] Although I link homonationalism with yaoi/danmei in this essay, I should note that after a
panel presentation by Helen Hok-Sze Leung and Audrey Yue, 'Queer Asia as method,' Modern
Language Association, 11 January 2015, Vancouver, BC, Canada, I came under a distinct
impression of an already-present need to 'provincialize homonationalism' when thinking about
queerness in Asia.
[11] Tricia Fermin, 'Appropriating yaoi and boys love in the Philippines,' Electronic Journal of
Contemporary Japanese Studies vol. 13, no. 3 (2013), online:
http://www.japanesestudies.org.uk/ejcjs/vol13/iss3/fermin.html (accessed 1 September 2014).
[12] Fran Martin, 'Girls who love boys' love: Japanese homoerotic manga as trans-national
Taiwan culture,' Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 13, no. 3 (2012): 36583, p. 375.
[13] I thank Xiqing Zheng for her insights into danmei culture. Zheng's dissertation work at the
University of Washington is on danmei.
[14] For an English translation of Mori's A Lovers' Forest, see Nagaike Kazumi, Fantasies of
Cross-dressing: Japanese Women Write Male-male Erotica, Brill, Boston, 2012, pp. 13785.
[15] Zheng, personal communication, e-mail, 3 February 2014.
[16] See Lisa Rofel, Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture,
Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
[17] John Wei, 'Queer encounters between Iron Man and Chinese boys' love fandom,'
Transformative Works and Cultures no. 17, online:
http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/561/458 (accessed 1 December
2014).
[18] In the West, yaoi has regularly been compared with Anglophone 'slash,' or male-male parody
fiction, that also emerged in 1970s women's culture in response to frustrations with gender
normativity in popular media. For slash, see Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans &
Participatory Culture, New York: Routledge, 1992, pp. 185222. For slash and yaoi as co-
emergent, see Mark McLelland, 'Why are Japanese girls' comics full of boys bonking?'
Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media, vol. 10, no. 4 (2006), 114. Unlike yaoi, 'slash'
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cannot [yet] commercialise due to copyright law, whereas yaoi encompasses both parody and
'original'-character fictions and has, especially since the 1990s, acquired extensive investment
capital and distribution. Anglophone readers have an 'M/M' or 'male-male romance' genre that
features original characters; M/M was born in the 1990s and is sustained by online small presses.
[19] Jessica Bauwens-Sugimoto, 'Subverting masculinity, misogyny, and reproductive technology

in SEX PISTOLS,' Image & Narrative vol. 12, no. 1 (2011): 118, p. 2, online:
http://www.imageandnarrative.be/index.php/imagenarrative/article/view/123 (accessed 1
September 2014).
[20] I want to thank an anonymous reviewer for this insight.
[21] See Mark McLelland, 'Thought policing or the protection of youth? Debate in Japan over the
'non-existent youth bill,' International Journal of Comic Art (IJOCA) vol. 13, no. 1 (2011): 34867.
[22] Formula 17 (17), Dir. Chen Yin-jung, Strand Releasing, 2004.
[23] Sharon Kinsella, Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society,
Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2000, p. 126.
[24] Peter Jackson, 'Capitalism and global queering: national markets, parallels among sexual
cultures, and multiple queer modernities,' GLQ vol. 15, no. 3 (2009): 35795, p. 366.
[25] Jackson, 'Capitalism and global queering,' p. 365.
[26] When speaking of Japan's colonial mimicry, one can apply Homi Bhabha's phrase 'not
quite/not white.' Homi Bhabha, 'Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse,'
October vol. 28 (1984): 12533, p. 132.
[27] See David Eng, 'The queer space of China: Expressive desire in Stanley Kwan's Lan Yu,'
positions: east asia cultures critique vol. 18, no. 2 (2010): 45987. The phrase 'discrepant
modernities' is from Lisa Rofel's 2001 essay 'Discrepant modernities and their discontents,'
positions: east asia cultures critique vol. 9, no. 3 (2001): 63749.
[28] Howard Chiang, '(De)Provincializing China: Queer historicism and sinophone postcolonial
critique,' in Queer Sinophone Cultures, ed. Howard Chiang and Ari Larissa Heinrich, London:
Routledge, 2014, pp. 1951, p. 32.
[29] Keith Vincent, Two-timing Modernity: Homosocial Narrative in Modern Japanese Fiction,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2012.
[30] Vincent, Two-timing Modernity, p. 211, makes the case that the misogyny and often-deemed
internalised homophobia in the storytelling of the celebrated novelist Mishima Yukio is 'less the
stubborn remnants of a traditional culture than the affective precipitates of a modern homosocial
narrative frozen into immobility.' Mishima's 1949 debut novel Confessions of a Mask presents
same-sex attraction initially in a manner of childhood nonchalance; the narrator, who is often
assumed to resemble Mishima himself, feels troubled with his attractions only as he grows older
and exhibits disdain toward women. Vincent writes, that the problem for Mishima's narrator is not
that he is coming to terms with any kind of 'innate' orientation (a homo/hetero binary is lacking in
the text, and misogyny is certainly not innate); rather, he is coming to terms with his 'failure to
"graduate" from an earlier stage' (p. 179).
[31] See Marilyn Ivy, 'Critical texts, mass artifacts: The consumption of knowledge in postmodern
Japan,' in Postmodernism and Japan, ed. Masao Miyoshi and Harry Harootunian, Durham: Duke
University Press, 1989, pp. 2146.
[32] Azuma Hiroki, Otaku: Japan's Database Animals, trans. Jonathan Abel and Shion Kono,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009, p. 22.
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[33] Gregory Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse
16001950, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1999, p. 225.
[34] Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 241, writes about the process of Japan's need for tradition as an ever-
vanishing phantasm in the face of the modern: 'the very search to find authentic survivals of
premodern, prewestern Japanese authenticity is inescapably a modern endeavor, essentially
enfolded within the historical condition that it would seek to escape.'
[35] Mizoguchi Akiko, 'Theorizing comics/manga genre as a productive forum: yaoi and beyond,'
in Comics Worlds and the World of Comics: Towards Scholarship on a Global Scale, ed.
Jaqueline Berndt, Kyoto, Japan: International Manga Research Center, Kyoto Seika University,
2010, pp. 14570, p. 164.
[36] Jeffrey Angles, Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishnen Culture in Modernist Japanese
Literature, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, p. 245.
[37] I would like to thank Chris Lowy for opening my eyes to this link.
[38] Ikuho Amano, Decadent Literature in Twentieth-Century Japan, New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013, pp. 811.
[39] James Welker, 'Flower tribes and female desire: Complicating early female consumption of
male homosexuality in shjo manga,' Mechademia vol. 6 (2011): 21028, p. 211.
[40] James Welker, 'Beautiful, borrowed, and bent: Boys' love as girls' love in shjo manga,'
Signs vol. 31, no. 3 (2006): 84170, p. 857.
[41] Welker, 'Flower tribes and female desire,' p. 223.
[42] Welker, 'Flower tribes and female desire,' pp. 22324 n. 1. In 1992 Japan, concern over
appropriation played out during a dispute/debate published in the women's journal Choisir in
which a queer man named Sat Masaki claimed that yaoi fans were profitting from and reducing
queer males into unrealistic, masturbatory fantasy. Considerable response to Masaki followed,
taking various forms, such as 'yaoi was never meant for gays,' 'yaoi is liberating for women,' 'yaoi
is indeed pornography,' and 'manga that targets gays isn't realistic either.' Masaki compared yaoi
fans to 'dirty old men' who watch lesbian pornography, and described the genre as 'creating and
having a skewed image of gay men as beautiful and handsome, and regarding gay men who do
not fit that image and tend to "hide in the dark" as garbage.' (See Wim Lunsung, 'Yaoi Rons:
Discussing depictions of male homosexuality in Japanese girl's comics, gay comics and gay
pornography,' Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context no. 12 (2006),
paragraph 14, online: http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue12/lunsing.html (accessed 20 March
2015). For more discussion and analysis of the yaoi rons, see Keith Vincent, 'A Japanese
Electra and her queer progeny,' Mechademia no. 2 (2007): 6976; Mizoguchi Akiko, 'Reading
and Living Yaoi: Male-Male Fantasy Narratives as Women's Sexual Subculture in Japan,' Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Rochester, 2008, pp. 17989; and Mark John Isola, 'Yaoi and slash
fiction: Women writing, reading, and getting off?' in Boys' Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual
Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre, ed. Antonia Levy, Mark HcHarry and Dru
Pagliassotti, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011, pp. 8498, pp. 8691.
A similar concern of appropriation manifested as what might be deemed an 'M/M romance

dispute' in the US in 2009 and 2010. The Lambda Literary Foundation limited its awards to those
who identify as LGBT, a move perceived by many as a response to the influx of heterosexual
women on the scene writing high-quality male same-sex romance (see 'Lambda Literary
Foundation announces new guidelines for Lambda Literary Awards submissions,' Lambda
Literary Foundation blog, 29 August 2011, online:
http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/08/29/lambda-literary-foundation-announces-new-
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guidelines-for-lambda-literary-awards-submissions/ (accessed 1 September 2014). That
enforcement of the rule was short-lived speaks to how apprehension about appropriation has
fallen away in recent years as a result of increased integration of homosexuality into US state
and mainstream media logics (e.g., marriage rights, etc), or homonationalism. As what could be
read as a kind of conclusion to the yaoi rons in Japan, Mizoguchi Akiko, 'Theorizing
comics/manga genre as a productive forum: yaoi and beyond,' states that yaoi is now 'a few
steps ahead of reality in contemporary Japanese society in the direction of equal rights for
homosexual individuals' (p. 161); yet, for a country in which legislation for sexual minorities is
barely a public issue, what such rights might entail is yet to be seen.
[43] Aoyama Tomoko, 'BL (Boys' Love) literacy: subversion, resuscitation, and transformation of
the (father's) text,' U.S.-Japan Women's Journal vol. 43, no. 1 (2013): 6384, p. 77.
[44] Vincent, Two-timing modernity, p. 100.
[45] Aoyama, 'BL (boys' love) literacy,' p. 69.
[46] Stephen Dodd, 'The significance of bodies in Sseki's Kokoro,' Monumenta Nipponica vol.
53, no. 4 (1998): 47398, p. 495.
[47] See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Difference, Princeton, NJ, 2000, and what he calls the 'History 2s' that haunt the 'History 1' of
capital.
[48] Julia Kristeva, 'Women's time,' Signs vol. 7, no. 1 (1981): 1335.
[49] Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994. Bhabha finds, however,
'remarkable' Kristeva's insistence that a 'gendered sign' can hold together 'such exorbitant
historical times' (pp. 21920).
[50] Takahara Eiri, Muku no chikara: 'shnen' hysh bungakuron, Tokyo: Kdansha, 2003. Cited
in Vincent, Two-Timing Modernity, p. 8.
[51] Nagaike Kazumi, 'Matsuura Rieko's The Reverse Vision,' in Girl Reading Girl in Japan, ed.
Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley, Routledge, New York, 2010, pp. 10718; Nagaike,
Fantasies of Cross-dressing, p. 99.
[52] 'Fujoshi' (), or 'rotten girl,' first coined by the Japanese media in the 1990s and then
reclaimed by fans, is a homophonous pun on fujoshi (), meaning 'lady.' In China, fun (
) was adapted. A male version for yaoi consumersfudanshi, or 'rotten boy'came into use in
mid-2000s Japan.
[53] Patrick Galbraith, 'Fujoshi: Fantasy play and transgressive intimacy among 'rotten girls' in
contemporary Japan,' Signs vol. 37, no. 1 (2011): 21132, p. 228.
[54] Rebecca Sutter, 'Gender bending and exoticism in Japanese girls' comics,' Asian Studies
Review vol. 37, no.4 (2013): 54658, pp. 54850.
[55] For this view, see Matsui Midori, 'Little girls were little boys: Displaced femininity in the
representation of girls' comics,' in Feminism and the Politics of Difference ed. Sneja Gunew and
Anna Yeatman, St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1993, pp. 17796.
[56] Nagaike, Fantasies of Cross-dressing, pp. 3233.
[57] Nagaike, Fantasies of Cross-dressing, p. 15. To be clear, the anxious ego that yaoi quells is
not one of Freudian female 'lack,' or penis-envy. Rather, as per Lacanian psychoanalysis, desire
(in general) constantly emerges to quell the subject who is anxious from a 'lack of a lack,' or the
constant threat that the 'Other' (the 'mother') will engulf the subject. Borrowing from Martin
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Heidegger's notion of 'thrownness,' anxiety for Jacques Lacan is the temperament of all subjects
thrown into the world at infancy.
[58] Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, New York: HarperPerennial, 1994,
p. 36.
[59] Valrie Cools, 'The phenomenology of contemporary mainstream manga,' Image & Narrative
vol. 12, no. 1 (2011): 6382, online:
http://www.imageandnarrative.be/index.php/imagenarrative/article/view/126/97 (accessed 1
September 2014).
[60] Fujimoto Yukari as quoted in Aoyama Tomoko, 'Eureka discovers Culture Girls, Fujoshi, and
BL: Essay review of three issues of the Japanese Literary Magazine, Yuriika (Eureka),'
Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific no. 20 (2009), paragraph 15, online:
http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue20/aoyama.htm (accessed 1 September 2014).
[61] Martin, 'Girls who love boys' love,' pp. 372, 37475.
[62] See Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, New York: Zone Books, 2002.
[63] Mizoguchi, Reading and Living Yaoi, p. 380.
[64] Azuma, Otaku: Japan's Database Animals, p. 72.
[65] Huat, 'Conceptualizing an East Asian popular culture,' p. 206.
[66] Gabriella Lukcs, Scripted Affects, Branded Selves: Television, Subjectivity, and Capitalism
in 1990s Japan, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
[67] Some fans have joked that the early djinshi were comprised of only violent sex scenes, so
'yamete, oshiri ga itai' ['stop, my ass hurts!'] is a more suitable phrase for the acronym. Lunsung,
'Yaoi Rons,' paragraph 9.
[68] I turn to Walter Benjamin in my formulation of the materiality of moe, following Azuma,
Otaku: Japan's Database Animals, pp. 5859, who notes that database culture was alluded to by
Benjamin as early as his 1936 discussion of the 'loss of the aura' in an age of mechanical
reproduction; otaku consume 'derivatives' as much as 'originals,' seeing little distinction between
the two.
[69] Anne Allison, 'New-age fetishes, monsters, and friends: Pokmon in the age of millennial
capitalism,' in Japan after Japan, ed. Tomiko Yoda and Harry Harootunian, Durham: Duke
University Press, 2006, pp. 33157, p. 353.
[70] Honda Touru as summarised in Patrick Galbraith, 'Moe: Exploring virtual potential in post-
millennial Japan,' Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies vol. 9, no. 3 (2009),
online: http://www.japanesestudies.org.uk/articles/2009/Galbraith.html (accessed 1 September
2014).
[71] See John Treat, 'Yoshimoto Banana writes home: Shojo culture and the nostalgic subject,'
Journal of Japanese Studies vol. 19, no. 2 (1993): 35387, p. 363.
[72] Azuma, Otaku: Japan's Database Animals, pp. 8687.
[73] Azuma, Otaku: Japan's Database Animals, p. 137n63.
[74] Azuma, Otaku: Japan's Database Animals, p. 137n63.
[75] Galbraith, 'Moe: Exploring virtual potential in post-millennial Japan.'
P-147
[76] Keith Vincent, 'Translator's Introduction' to Sait Tamaki, Beautiful Fighting Girl, trans. Keith
Vincent and Dawn Lawson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, pp. xxivxxv.
[77] See Slavoj iek, Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences, New York:
Routledge, 2003.
[78] See Elizabeth Grosz, 'A thousand tiny sexes: Feminism and rhizomatics,' Topoi vol. 12 no. 2
(1993): 16779.
[79] Petrus Lui, 'Queer Marxism in Taiwan,' Inter-Asia Cultural Studies vol. 8, no. 4 (2007): 517
39, p. 520.
[80] 'Interview with Ang Lee,' CNN website, 26 October 2007, online:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/10/08/talkasia.anglee/ (accessed 1 September 2014).
[81] 'Socially conservative Singapore bans popular gay-oriented Taiwanese film,' Taiwan Times,
23 July 2004, online: http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2004/07/23/2003180053
(accessed 1 September 2014).
[82] 'Singapore censor passes Brokeback,' BBC News (website), 15 February 2006, online:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4716610.stm (accessed 1 September 2014).
[83] 'More action less cut,' Today (Singapore), 4 November 2005.
[84] Brian Wu, 'Formula 17: Mainstream in the margins,' in Chinese Films in Focus II, ed. Chris
Berry, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 12127, p. 124.
[85] Wu, 'Formula 17,' pp. 12223.
[86] Wu, 'Formula 17,' p. 126.
[87] The King and the Clown ( ), Dir. Lee Joon-ik, Cinema Service, 2005; No Regret (
), Dir. Lee Song-hee-il, CJ Entertainment, 2006.
[88] Jeeyoung Shin, 'Male homosexuality in The King and the Clown: Hybrid construction and
contested meanings,' The Journal of Korean Studies, vol. 18, no. 1 (2013): pp. 89114. Shin
writes of the rise of kkonminam (roughly translated, 'metrosexual') masculinity and the growing
popularity of Japanese yaoi as signs of the power and currency of women's consumerism in
today's South Korea. Regarding The King and the Clown, Shin writes of the fine line between
homosociality and homoeroticism in the film as it manifests in the space of namsadang (or all-
male travelling performance troupes from the Chosn period, similar to kabuki theatre in Japan
and the Peking opera in China). In a New York Times interview, Director Lee Joon-ik explained
that the tongsngae ('same-sex love') depicted in the King and the Clown was not 'homosexuality
defined by the West' (i.e., an 'orientation') but was contexualised within namsadang. Yet, as Shin
explains, namsadang never achieved the status of a respected art form in Korea; unlike kabuki or
Peking opera, its performers were not admired as talented artists.
Shin thus sees a cinematic influence between the trope of Peking opera, such as found in the
popular 1993 Chinese film Farewell, My Concubine (a film well-received in South Korea), and the
trope of namsadang in The King and the Clown. The concept of an all-male performance troupe
offered a speculative historical theme to bring queer kinship to a mainstream (read: relatively
conservative) South Korean audience. Shin writes that this Sinophone connection as well as the
growing popularity of Japanese yaoi demonstrate the importance of thinking regionally on matters
of queer East Asian cinema. My interest also lies in the use of speculative queer kinship as a
regional nation-building practice.
[89] See Chris Berry, 'Asian values, family values: Film, video, and lesbian and gay identities,'
P-148
Journal of Homosexuality vol. 40 nos 3/4 (2001): 21131.
[90] Huat, 'Conceptualizing an East Asian popular culture,' p. 217.
Published with the support of Gender and Cultural Studies, School of Culture,
History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National
University.
online: http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue37/williams.htm
Copyright
Page constructed by Carolyn Brewer.
Last modified: 7 January 2017 0901
P-149
Punk, pop and protest:
the birth and decline of political punk in Bandung
Joanna Pickles
Economic globalisation and technological advancement have enabled

popular cultures to circulate internationally, transmitted by the media,
the internet and culture industries. This cultural flow has in turn
generated both cultural fragmentation and cultural fusion. Indonesias
underground music scene has its origins in the cross-cultural
fertilisation arising from globalisation. Punk culture, in particular, owes
much of its global spread to the invention of new information
technologies and the growth of multinational corporations that
support the movement of ideas, images and products.
Evolving from the socio-economic context of England
during the mid to late seventies, punk became popular in Indonesia
almost two decades later. From the early 1990s onwards, major label
bands like the Sex Pistols, Rancid, and neo-punks such as Green Day,
had a growing following. The adoption of Western-origin popular
cultures has been labelled cultural homogenisation. This article
challenges that idea by considering how punk in Indonesia has enabled
the production of locality. Young Indonesians have used punk to
respond to the pressures of their political and cultural environment.
They have adapted punk collective identity and given punk style and
music their own meaning.
This article contributes to the study of music and identity as a
social force by examining the beginnings of activist punk culture in
Bandung during the early Reform era, specifically between 1998 and
2001. The Reform era is a historical category, the origins of which lie
in the civil unrest that led to the demise of the New Order
government. Its beginnings were generally viewed as a renaissance in
social and political thinking as the departure of President Soeharto
Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs, vol. 41, no. 2 (2007), pp. 22346.
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224 Pickles
triggered the widespread emergence of social movements that
struggled for change.
Eagerly exploring this expansion of ideological horizons, the
activist punks of Bandung were only one group within the broader
punk subculture. Their relationship with other members of the punk
subculture was restless. The terms radical punk, activist punk and the
punk movement are used here to differentiate punks with aspirations
for social change from other punks who did not share this worldview.
The terms punk subculture or punk scene have been applied to
describe the whole community, including both political and apolitical
factions. These terms are not used to indicate the greater authenticity
of one group over another. As Melucci (1994:124) warns people are
not what they are but who they choose to be.
The punk collective activity that spiked in Bandung during the
early Reform era was a new expression of punk culture in the city of
flowers. Within a few years the movement had begun to recede, falling
victim to a rising commercialism, growing apathy within the movement
and the life passage and progression to which youth cultures are
vulnerable. Punk activism in this period was not limited to Bandung,
but its growth and decline there was pronounced and worthy of
examination.
Punk: pop or what?
The spread of punk culture is one effect of the modern media
technologies that have facilitated communication and exchange around
the world. Likewise, it is no coincidence that a political punk culture
matured in Bandung at the same time as the mushrooming of cheap
internet cafes throughout the city. The internet provided young people
with instant access to the outside world. In this regard, Bandung punk
fits current definitions of popular culture, but is it appropriate to view
activist punk culture through the lenses of popular culture theory?
Many observers regard popular culture solely as a product of
commercial engineering, marketing and mass production, and in this
scenario, followers of popular culture trends do little more than ingest
the schemes of culture-industry chief executive officers. More recently
there has been considerable academic discourse qualifying the mass
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Punk, pop and protest 225
commodity model. In this paradigm popular culture adherents are
shown to exercise personal power in the choice to buy and also to
transform cultural products to suit their own personal styles. The
significant point here is that while capitalistic enterprises may try to
control the use of music, they cannot determine the meanings derived
by the audience (Lockard 1998:41). Consumer defiance of the concept
that popular culture is a top-down-only phenomenon manifests itself
in the utilisation of these cultural forms for personal and often political
expression.1
From the mid 1990s it became increasingly commonplace to
see dyed mohawks, patched pants and ex-military boots worn by a
wedge of Indonesian young people. Baulch (1996a) correlates the
development of Indonesias underground movement with the
alternative music revolution of 1996. In January 1996, The Foo
Fighters, Sonic Youth and Beastie Boys performed at the Jakarta Pop
Alternative Festival. A month later Green Day also performed in
Jakarta. Like other popular cultures, punk in Indonesia owes its
beginnings to the machinery of the mainstream music industry. It was
the commodification of punk that prepared the ground for a home-
grown punk rock subculture to grow.
This was a reversal of punk in the West which saw a fringe
music style being coopted to become the alternative mainstream.
Ironically, the major labels that spearheaded the popularisation of punk
would later become an enemy against which activist punks would unite
and channel their vexation. This, however, endorses Bennetts (1986)
thesis that popular cultures are sites of continual transformation and
negotiation where dominant and oppositional values and ideologies
meet. This definition of popular culture is a more appropriate
description of cultural processes in contemporary societies, for it
emphasises that power does not flow solely from above to below.
Punk concerts, for example, are moments of audience and
performer collaboration. Often almost as many people end up on stage
as in the energetic mosh pit below and so the divisions between the
performers and the audience are fluid; audience members jump on
stage then fling their bodies into the whirling pit, momentarily
becoming performers. Likewise, band members regularly jump off the
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226 Pickles
stage, in mid-performance, blurring the line between the band and the
audience. In pogo-ing the boards, punks exercise power in currents that
diverge in a multitude of directions.
The appropriation of punk culture by young people around
the world underlines that punk is not owned by a particular ethnic
group or tradition. Rather, it is open to the global mass. And in
Indonesia, punk has enabled young people to create a new vision of
social relationships not dictated by dominant social categories such as
class or occupation. University students, unemployed youths, school
students, workers and street kids hang out together as punks,
unbound by religious, ethnic, or class distinctions. New social relations
are enacted as members create close community networks outside the
family. It is through their community, not the family, that punks secure
their place in the modern world.
Like other popular cultures, punk is both produced and
consumed (Strinati 2000:251). Its rallying against the mainstream and
unique consumption patterns, however, modify standard definitions of
popular culture. Over the years punk-like styles have sporadically risen to
popularity on the catwalks of the haute couture fashion world. It is
arguable that this is an instance of the popularisation of one aspect of
punk identity. Unsurprisingly, this phenomenon was not something
embraced by Bandungs radical punks who united in opposition to
mainstream popular culture. To quote the Bandung zine,2 Kontaminasi
Propaganda (1) (1999:5) punk is and must be a revolutionary form, and if
you dont agree, now is the time to shift from your hardcore cassette
collection to glamorous pop CDs that are available at large record stores.
In fact several points of the punk ethic jar with accepted
definitions of popular culture. Popular culture products according to
Lockard (1998:9) are designed and made less from the creative drives
within the artist than for the tastes and needs of the audience. Punk
rock denies this statement. Its rough edges and maximum volume
elevate artistic expression over expertness. Thempak, vocalist for
Bandung hardcore (HC) punk band Jeruji (iron bar), a band renowned
for exhibiting raw anger and frustration, has acknowledged that Jerujis
loud music is representative of the energy that I want to put forward
(Ripple Mag (2) 2000:30).
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Punk music is accessible and cheap to produce, requiring only
a drum set, guitars and a strong loud vocalist. It does not require
training or education to produce punks notoriously loud thumping
drum beat, rapid-fire vocals and no-frills guitar riffs. Laing (1989:83)
has dubbed the sampling, distortion and feedback in punk rock as
rhetorical incompetence, meaning that punk amateurism is stylistic
rather than actual and that the underlying message to listeners is that
anyone can do-it-themselves and make a record.
This ethos of doing it for themselves and not the audience
instils individuals with the belief that they must initiate action in order
to inspire change. Implicit in this is rejection of the prevailing capitalist
system, the same system that has carried punk to many corners of the
world. This tension does not deny the classification of punk as a
popular culture. Instead, it highlights that popular culture is a diverse
realm of ongoing improvisation fashioned by individual and group
interaction with each other and their environment (Liddle 1997:4).
Youth and music in the New Order
The spread of Western-origin youth cultures has been posited as
indicative of the Westernisation. Interpretations of punk culture
throughout the world, however, contradict such a proposition. Epstein
(2001), for example, has shown that Korean punks, who largely direct
their criticism at the Korean formal education structures, do not
replicate the resistance and rebellion of monarchy and Establishment-
opposed punks in 1970s England. Similarly, radical punk in Bandung
was not simply a re-run of past movements in the West. Individuals
may have appropriated a cultural-form that originated from another
society, but this was then modified to suit local conditions and so new
meanings were given to borrowed icons. Radical punk in Bandung was
the response of certain Indonesian youths to their social, political and
economic surrounds. To understand why political punk rose to
prominence in the early days of the Reform era we first need to
examine the Establishment against which Bandungs political punks
voiced their protest.
The removal of young people from the sphere of political
activity during the New Order has been extensively studied. The terms
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228 Pickles
pemuda (youth) and generasi muda or angkatan muda (young generation)
stood for political concepts in Indonesias struggle for independence
from colonial rule (Anderson 1967). After Indonesia attained
independence, the image of heroic young freedom-fighters was used
by the anti-colonial state as a symbol around which the newly created
nation-state could rally. The vigorous participation of youth groups in
the revolution, however, also posed a problem for the advocates of the
new status quo. While youth was a good nationalist symbol, Ryter
(1998:58) argues that, too much emphasis on the role of pemuda left
open the possibility of an undesirable repeat performance. One way of
depoliticising youth was to change the terminology of the category
(Siegel 1986:224). In Jakarta during the late 1980s and early 1990s,
young people were not referred to as anak (children), murid (pupils),
mahasiswa (students), or revolutionary pemuda, but remaja (teenager). By
describing young people as remaja, their potential to become political
actors was restricted (Ryter 1998:58).
Incidents such as Malari, the anti Japanese riots of 15 January
1974, followed by student protests and mass arrests prior to the general
elections of 1978, justified the New Order bureaucracys dismantling
of the political infrastructure within institutions of higher learning.
Through the campus normalisation policy (NKK), university student
organisations were either disbanded or made reliant upon campus
bureaucracy. Fear tactics kept the policy fresh in the minds of would-
be activists (Heryanto 1993). In addition, New Order cultural policy
worked to strengthen, construct and promote a distinct facet of
Indonesian-ness as the hegemonic national identity. The Pancasila
the group of five principles at the philosophical base of the Indonesian
nation-state was the central tenet of New Order cultural policy.
Pancasila principles provided a blue print for behaviour, the defence of
which meant being Indonesian (Bourchier 1997:158). Through
promoting a national standard language, Soeharto asserted his
aspirations for orderliness and homogeneity upon the national
conscience (Hooker 1993:272).
Western-origin cultural forms were positioned as an enemy in
both the New Order and its predecessor the Old Order.3 Henschkel
(1994:55) notes that the West, whilst often seen as modern and
P-156
developed, was also viewed by the mass media as a source of
corruption and materialism. Many statements from high-ranking
government officials printed in news reports during this period
focussed on the incompatibility of heavy metal music with Indonesian
culture. Instead, the music of the people dangdut, was offered as the
citizen friendly alternative (Thompson 1993:5). Siegel (1986:216)
provides insightful commentary on the popularity of foreign music
styles in the face of sharp anti-West propaganda: the significance of
the West is that it is outside national boundaries and thus a
convenient source of what is not yet Indonesian, of what is new. This
sentiment is echoed in the testimony of young alternative rocker Bayu
a member of the Yogyakartan alternative rock band, I Hate Mondayz:
Western music gives us inspiration ... The climate overseas is like that.
If there is something new, its valued. Here, maybe not (Eddy 1997:70).
The New Order states manipulation of its peoples behaviour
involved the use of both passive and aggressive measures. The appeal
of punk to young Indonesians becomes understandable when
considered in reaction to this. Dissent in the form of subcultural
expression became urgent as the New Order prescribed norms by
informal non-legislative means. Placed in this context, punk style was
clearly a symbolic inversion of Pancasila regimentals. The disorder of
these youths showed up cracks in the attempts to control cultural
production and create cultural order (Sen and Hill 2000:164).
When asking how and why punks were attracted to punk rock,
the overwhelming majority of responses suggested that at first most
punks were attracted by the loud angry music and image. For radical
punks, over time a political awareness grew. In its embryonic stage
during the New Order, political aspirations were rarely expressed
overtly as the repressive nature of the government meant
characteristically punk, anti-establishment political views were best left
whispered rather than yelled. On a few occasions resistance against the
bureaucracy was spoken more blatantly. Due to the administrations
anxiety over crowds, military and police vigilantly monitored concerts
featuring loud and heavy music.
Yet even under that kind of surveillance, in 1996 a provocative
band from Yogyakartas still small punk community rose to the stage,
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230 Pickles
hanging behind them a banner painted with the name of their new
song, I Wanna Fresh President (in English). Ramet (1994:5) asserts
that such a symbiosis of alternative culture and alternative politics is
inevitable in systems that define culture in political terms. Thus, the
cultural activism that lay at the heart of the punk movement in the
Reform era, rose in response to the Indonesian nation-states
continuous intrusion into civil society. Policies enforced by tough
militarism resulted in the politicisation of culture, forcing everyday life
to become a field for political expression.
Punk and dis-Orderly
The subversive adoption of foreign fashion styles by Indonesian young
people is not unique to punks. Brenners article on the adoption of the
veil (jilbab) by young urban Muslim women against the wishes of
their parents and at the risk of receiving criticism from neighbours and
friends looks at a group of Indonesian youths drawing on foreign
cultural practices to express local concerns. Brenner sought to
understand why these women are drawn to adopting traditions from
abroad, a practice portrayed by the discourses of the New Order as
extremist.
At first, drawing a comparison between punk style and the
jilbab seems comical; however, certain similarities in the symbolic
meaning of these fashions are evident. Brenner (1996:677) shows that
the adoption of foreign fashion marks one as different. Punk style, as
a marginal practice, also elicits mainstream rejection and, because it is
culturally alien, the punk aesthetic in Indonesia is immediately
controversial. It therefore has immediate repercussions for an
individuals relationships with others in a community where conformity
has long been the order of the day. This statement was echoed in an
interview held with the vocalist of the Yogyakartan industrial punk
band Teknoshit:
As a result of Soeharto, and the New Order, society has been taught
to value appearance ... If there is someone with dreadlocks, body
piercings, tattoos, mohawks, wearing boots, they are viewed
suspiciously, they have to be watched carefully, controlled [People
think] this person is up to no good, they will make trouble.
P-158
Reports published in the mass media echo this sentiment. The tabloid
rag Adil (1999b:7) discussed the punk movement in Bandung in a feature
article on Bandungs Sea of Gangs. Its response to punk style was:
Respectable people would be scared to see this gang. Most would cross
the road rather than bump into them. Eeeek ... what kind of people are
these? said Nunung, a young mother from the outskirts of Bandung.
Brenner speculates that adoption of the jilbab is a symbolic rejection of
western models of modernity. Zipping on punk costume, on the other
hand, achieves quite the opposite effect. It suggests aspirations towards
the liberalism, participatory democracy, and individual autonomy that
have been long associated with punk movements in other parts of the
world. The debates of Bandungs activist punks, however, modify these
aspirations, with rejection of the greedy, hedonistic, individualistic and
capitalistic values also long connected with the West in Indonesian
discourse.
While the jilbab is donned to hide away hair, punks
provocatively manipulate their tresses. One popular hairstyle, widely
referred to by the local term durian, consists of the whole head of hair
being twisted into numerous dead straight spikes. Expert stylists manage
to momentarily defy gravity even with hair as long as 20cm. The durian
hairstyle confronts New Order requirements that school pupils hair be
neat and orderly and not extend beyond ear length. Through knotting
dreadlocks, twisting spikes, fixing mohawks and soaking strands in
vibrant colours, hair is transformed into a symbolic statement (Mercer
1987). When I asked a member of Bandung punk band Keparat
(bastard) why he had modified the strip of hair running over his scalp
from the base of his skull to the peak of his forehead to stand at
attention, dead straight and fluorescent pink, he responded by saying, I
wear a mohawk to create a reaction, so that people ask me why my hair
is this way. Then I tell them it is punk, and that punk for me is about
struggling for change changing society and changing perceptions.
The visual statement expressed through punk style contests
and ridicules the conventions of respectable society. The penetration
of civil society by the military during the New Order finds its response
in the punk movements subversion of bureaucratic and militaristic
systems.4 Punks appropriate icons of military uniforms, sturdy black
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232 Pickles
boots and khaki army pants. Turning uniform into costume, the
should-be neatly pressed pants are left unwashed and are often torn
on purpose. This visual statement is completed by the erratic
placement of coloured patches, screaming angry slogans, over the
ragged cloth. In symbolic terms the military order elevated by the state
is undermined.
Punk spectacularity also serves to reinforce the punk collective
identity; style functions to designate who are in and exclude those who
are out; style therefore helps to forge communal solidarity.
Body art is another borrowed cultural-form that has been
given local meaning. It is no longer uncommon to see full colour
images etched into skin or indelible words inscribed on young bodies.
By asserting a shared body art language an individual is linked to a
social group as an insider, as opposed to the non-tattooed stark naked
outsiders Baker (2000). The process of tattooing itself contributes to
this sense of solidarity as the person being tattooed renders a portion
of his or her body to a friend to permanently ink.
The popularity of tattooing among the current generation of
young people reflects dramatic changes in recent Indonesian history. In
Indonesia, tattoos are a sign of subversive powers (Marianto 2000:16).
Tattooing connotes the primitive and the tribal. By inscribing their skins
with tribal marks and motives, punks depict their identification with
sidelined indigenous groups, a position which necessarily rejects state
discourses of modernity and development. Furthermore, during the
New Order, the mass media regularly stereotyped tattoos as a mark of
criminality. With each new victim of the 1983 petrus (mysterious
shootings) assassinations, close-up photos usually featuring the tattooed
corpse appeared in the local paper (Bourchier 1990:186). The legacy of
this discourse continues to be delivered to the Indonesian public
through the numerous Cops-styled reality television programs such as
Buser, Sergap and Brutal Siang where cameras routinely zoom in on the
tattoos of criminals who have been caught red-handed. Despite, or
perhaps because of this history, body adornments, such as piercings and
tattoos, are an important part of being an Indonesian punk. Activist
punks used this art form with personal experience and knowledge of its
history and with the motive of changing normative values.5
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In the scenes literature, textural in-codes were used to disguise
identities. Individuals are referred to by their email addresses, chat room
names, or pseudonyms created for a particular purpose. In the zine Sub
Chaos, members of a Bandung anarcho-pop band that grew out of the
activist punk movement were referred to as Ebola, Tuberculosis and
AIDS. By metaphorically conceiving band members as diseases
spreading malady, the scene is contrived to cast a shadow over healthy
everyday life and social norms. These figurative masquerades, while
serving to shroud the identity of movement members from unwanted
surveillance, enforce the idea that punk is a fringe-dwelling secret society.
Language is also used by the punk subculture to claim cultural
territory and carve out cultural space for the community. Like most
young urban Indonesians, Bandungs punks mix a heady cocktail of
language, including Indonesian, English, slang and the local language,
Sundanese. In punk rock songs it is not uncommon for the thick and fast
drumbeats to disappear in sections, so that an oration can be heard and
understood. In a song entitled Destroy by punk rockers Blackboot, the
chanted lyrics in English fuck about your hair/ fuck about your jacket
... if you punx, fight hierarchy/ if you punx, destroy military are
interrupted by a forceful recitation, in Indonesian, which declares punk
a form of rebellion against the system, not just fashion and style
(Blackboot 2000).6 While the fast tempo of the song accents the gravity
of the songs message, the use of Indonesian recitatives ensures that
message is conveyed.
English lyrics remain popular due to the perception that English
is more expressive than standard Indonesian. English lyrics are
sometimes paraphrased in Indonesian on album covers to ensure that a
bands intent in performing a song is conveyed. The meaning of one
song, Disorder by Bandung punk band Keparat, is summarised by a
statement in Indonesian printed below the English lyrics: prove that
punk is more than just fashion, make it a threat to the oppressors. Use
of Indonesian here is out of necessity; its use does not signify respect for
the value systems disseminated within the New Orders language
development programs.
Spontaneously coined in-terms are also popular. For example,
the reasonably common slang word for cannabis, cimeng, was dubbed cir
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234 Pickles
by a group of punks sharing a joint one evening. Cir quickly spread and
became popular within the subculture where cannabis use is frequent.
Such creation of a new vocabulary enables members of the subculture
to establish alternative and exclusive communication. This ability to
understand the newest slang terms creates in-ness, while
simultaneously denying understanding to those on the out (Chambert-
Loir 1990:87).
Punk identity is neither stable through time nor in the present.
Like all identities, punk is relational. That said, being punk does not
necessarily prohibit the transition into other roles. I remember going to
celebrate Idul Fitri with a punk friend. Knocking on his door at 8 a.m.,
I was greeted by my friend still dressed in the male prayer clothes, a
checkered cotton sarong, the Islamic male headdress (peci) and a clean
pressed white shirt. My host shrugged off the disbelief my face must
have expressed. I had lived in close proximity to him for several
months and all through the fasting month, Ramadan, yet he had never
before exhibited signs of Islamic devotion. As we moved from house
to house paying our respects to neighbours, asking for forgiveness, he
explained to me that being a son, being a punk and being a Muslim
could coexist. The punk identity that determined so much of his
lifestyle did not prevent his movement into other roles and costumes.
Does the fact that identities are appropriated, adopted, may be
multiple and change through time imply false representation? I support
Lipsitzs (1994:16) belief that dilemmas of real as opposed to imagined,
or authentic versus false, are not appropriate for an outsider to enter
into. Nevertheless, the question of authenticity becomes pertinent
when asked by members of the movement itself.
While young women mobilised themselves across Indonesia to
adopt the jilbab, a similar situation does not appear to be occurring with
punk style. Of the few women who were active in the punk movement,
most felt it unnecessary to flaunt a punk image. The editor of the
femzine, Puncak Muak, describes how punk, for her, has nothing to do
with fashion, but rather revolves around lifestyle and personal outlook:
Many [people] laugh when they find out I am a punk ... Perhaps
because my hair isnt multi-coloured, it is straight, black and long. Or
maybe my clothing style is neat and girlish, not funky masculine. My
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piercings are only two, my left and right ears. I dont have a tattoo, I
have never smoked, never drunk and never taken pills. Crazy, so what
is it that makes me punk? My soul. My lifestyle. My thinking. All of these
are very punk (Puncak Muak 2001:1, emphasis in original).
Brenners discussion of young women appropriating the jilbab suggests
that women are willing to seek out foreign cultural-forms to construct
their identities. So what, then, precludes punk from being a desired
style for young women?
Murray (1991:4) asserts that the New Order borrowed from
Islamic imagery and elite class traditions to construct its vision of
womens roles in society. She reveals how this led to womens exclusion
from the public sphere; their roles were to be played out in the
domestic domain. To demonstrate this, Murray deconstructs the
Kodrat Wanita, the guiding principles of Dharma Wanita (Civil
Servants Wives Association) and the associated family welfare system
(PKK), which she argues functioned to entrench the dominant
gender belief system (Murray 1991:4). These principles describe the
state-sanctioned positions which women could assume: a wife and
companion, manager of the household, producer of the nations future
generation, mother, educator and citizen (Murray 1991:5).
In the same study, Murray reinforces the distinction between
what was allowable for men, in contrast with the limits placed on
women. Giving the example of youth communities in urban Jakarta,
Murray distinguishes the different social perceptions of male
brandalan (delinquency) as opposed to females conducting similar
behaviour:
Brandal behaviour is acceptable or fairly normal for unemployed or
underemployed males but not for females and I was often warned not
to associate with certain girls (Murray 1991:104).
The jilbab visually asserted devotion to Islam, a move deemed
provocative considering New Order sensitivity to Islamic revival. While
not denying the resistance implicit in this act, women adopting the
jilbab were still operating within the imagery and norms dictated by
gender roles as set by New Order. Their resistance can be seen as a
hyper-obedience to the dominant discourse. Punk lifestyle, on the
other hand, contradicts almost all norms set for women during the
P-163
236 Pickles
New Order: punk style is masculine jantan (bold), not the stereotypical
feminine lembut (meek); punk operates in the public sphere and not the
private; punk is symbolic of emotional frustration, not of feminine
restrain; and punk rejects the domesticity and hierarchy of the family
for life on the streets. For many females active in the punk scene,
resistance falls within the realm of what is culturally permissible.
Too punk to buy
Lifestyling, as coined by Gerke (2000:137) in reference to Indonesian
lower to middle classes, is the exhibition of middleclass-ness through
symbolic consumption by which Gerke means the display of an
unaffordable standard of living. Punk inverts this upwardly aspiring
practice described by Gerke. The group under study here pride
themselves in establishing alternative systems of consumption,
involving not only shopping and buying but also the selling, swapping,
making and pooling of goods. By changing themselves, Bandungs
activist punks believed they were taking the first step towards changing
society. Bandung punk corroborates Beng-Huats (2000:28) proposal
that, for youth in Asia, consumption can be a means of escape and
resistance to the domination of both their elders and often
authoritarian governments.
In fact, Baulch (1996b) perceives the spread and evolution of
punk rock and punk culture in Indonesia as largely due to the efforts
of scene members and local event organisers. In describing the
exhausting collective efforts required to get concerts like Bandungs
Underground II off the ground in 1996 she states that holding little
hope of attracting big bucks from sponsors the organising committee
mostly university students have pooled their time, labour and
money to get this gig off the ground (Baulch 1996b). For the activist
punks at least, if a concert was not independent then it was neither
truly punk nor worth going to. The zine Submissive Riot (3) (1998:1)
called for a boycott of the event, Sunday Ska, held on 9 August 1998.
The article declared to all readers that, real punks wouldnt spend a
cent to support this enterprise as the event was deemed to be a purely
money-making venture. For political punks, consumption choices
became a statement of authenticity.
P-164
Live shows are the moments where nearly all Indonesian punk
bands establish their identity and reputation. Recordings are generally
self-funded and therefore erratically produced, and as some bands may
never have the resources or inclination to hire out expensive recording
studios, their musical existence lives solely in moments captured on
stage and in rehearsals. When an album finally gets to a recording studio,
friends with artistic talents are often called upon to contribute through
designing album covers or making promotional posters. Punk albums
are bought either directly from the band or through community-based
distro (merchandise distribution stores) and cost recovery, rather than
profit, is the main purpose of sale. Zines announce to the wider
community the release of a new album. To borrow Gerkes thesis
(2000:147), consumption is thus one way in which group membership
is demonstrated as the production, distribution, reciprocation and
exchange of punk cultural products serve to strengthen bonds within
the community. These systems of alternative consumption dispel older
conceptions of consumption as a passive activity and emphasise the fact
that consumers actively negotiate their daily life.
Punk dress also reflects the subcultures fiercely independent
do-it-yourself ethic. A few years ago, it was not uncommon to see punks
wearing piercings that had been handcrafted out of plastic from a clear
Pepsodent toothbrush. The lower stem of the brush had been bevelled
into a thick, curved conical shape and then polished until smooth. The
jewellery was then inserted into place, using small rubber bands,
originally from watch parts, to prevent the piercing from slipping out
of the earlobe. The resemblance between such products and similar
body piercing jewellery that can cost as much as 25 Australian dollars
was remarkable, yet to make this version cost around Rp. 3000 (less than
fifty Australian cents).
Needless to say, constant compromise is inherent in opposing
the capitalist system, while being reliant upon that system for survival.
This contradiction was recognised and debated by activist punks. An
informally produced essay, Kontra Kultura Manifesto, states: It is not
possible for us in the Counter Culture Collective to chase after our goal
without simultaneously betraying this goal, when we challenge the
system, we replicate the system.
P-165
238 Pickles
Indeed the culture of making, swapping and selling
underpinned the growth and expansion of distro throughout Bandung.
These tiny stores began as street side stalls disseminating zines, selling
albums and a few items of clothing. Distro slowly developed into a
network of independent clothing and music stores, a few of which
achieved international success. Their lucrative and widespread
popularity was a contributing factor to the decline of the punk
movement as formerly active political punks became preoccupied with
the business of distro selling punk style and music to the next
generation of punks. This in turn creating strong rifts in the scene as
politically minded peers denigrated the move into capitalism.
Rocking the boat
The anticipation of radical change in a post-Soeharto Indonesia

inspired some of Bandungs punks to believe that they could rise up
against oppressive social structures and create new alternatives. They
no longer relied solely on hairstyles and spikes to express their
resistance to the social, political and economic systems that they
considered to be oppressive and unjust. Instead there were calls for a
new phase in Indonesian punk history with the formation of a
movement that extended beyond offering an alternative way of living
and making music to struggling collectively to inspire change:
This is the time to admit, that in whatever form we are punk, we hate
the current social order of society and we want a new world ... We will
make punk a threat again. (Kontaminasi Propaganda 1 1999:7)7
The popular empowerment that followed the fall of the New Order
encouraged the conviction that the social order could be contested.
Collectivity seemed the ideal way to work towards this revolution.
In order to legitimise efforts to raise consciousness within the
wider punk subculture, political punks used the histories of punk
movements in other parts of the world. The undated flier, Counter
Culture, circulated by Riotic Papers in Bandung, provides a potted
history of punk activism. It is a history that is told to highlight the
appropriateness of punk as a culture of resistance to the context of
Indonesia, as is succinctly depicted in the closing statement:
P-166
the concept of resistance which is offered by Punk/HC culture is very
relevant to be applied in Indonesia, remember an authoritarian system
is still in power in this country, and it is already the time for us as the
young generation to open our eyes, thoughts, hearts and ears to
struggle for what we believe in, and fight for what is right ... THIS IS
OUR TASK ... IT NEEDS CRITICAL ATTENTION ...... !!!!!!
Radical punks engaged in written and verbal dialogue to thrash out
their world-view. Members defended a range of left-wing ideologies.
Some supported the notion of creating an anarchist society. Others
described themselves as social democrats and others still looked to
socialism or communism as the solution for Indonesias inequities.
Their literature portrays Indonesias bureaucratic and economic
systems as discriminative, dehumanising, unjust and heavily influenced
by feudalistic notions of hierarchy. Their world vision promoted a
revolution in which the existing systems are replaced by leaderless,
egalitarian, participatory democracy a democracy based on
autonomous groups, linked by intricate networks of association and
mutual cooperation.
Riotic Records/Distro was the first Bandung-based group to
begin political agitation within the punk subculture. Riotic Papers, the
publications division of this group, produced Submissive Riot, the first
Bandung zine to focus primarily upon social and political issues,
rather than the music scene. The zine covered a wide range of issues,
from debates within the underground movement, to more far
reaching topics, such as the abuse of animal rights, corporate
oppression, and racism in Indonesia. Submissive Riot was first
produced in mid-1998, with editions published on a monthly basis for
roughly ten months.
As not all the founders of Riotic Records agreed with this new
political agenda, a rift emerged at Riotic which lead to the withdrawal
of the activist punks. As a result, the Anti-Fascist Front (FAF) was
conceived and established in May 1999 as the first Bandung punk
organisation with a political charter. A statement which was posted by
FAF on the A-Infos8 website described FAF as a revolutionary punk
organisation that mixed anarchist and socialist ideas (A-Infos, 1999, 13
May). FAF was short-lived but highly active. Members instigated
P-167
240 Pickles
collective action in the form of film screenings, discussions, strikes and
solidarity marches on a range of issues from rising fuel prices to state
military spending. FAF activities had the dual goals not only of raising
awareness within the punk community, but also of stimulating debate
and action within a broader social context.
FAF collaborated with political punks on a trans-local level
through the Nusantara Anti Fascist Network (JAF Nus). Ratified on
the final day of its first congress in Yogyakarta from 25 to 27 February
2000, JAF Nus was the result of an alliance of activist punk groups
from urban centres of Java. The founding members included AFRA
(Jakarta), RI Boots (Semarang), the Last Palm Community
(Yogyakarta), the Anti Oppression Front (BAP, Surabaya), the Forum
for Unified Concern (Fokber), Red n Anarchist Skin Heads (RASH,
Bandung), Freepass, Cilacap Against Oppression (CAP, Cilacap), and
FAF. JAF Nus was conceived to enable collectives, closely connected to
local concerns, to be linked into a national network of solidarity, with
the further aim of facilitating simultaneous collective actions
throughout the archipelago.
After only a year of activity, structural problems and the
emergence of informal hierarchies led to the collective decision for
FAF to disperse in mid-2000. Various groups and collectives formed in
the vacuum left by FAF, although none were to match FAF in the
breadth and scope of their activities. One such collective was the
Utopian Front, which described itself as a front of several libertarian
grass-roots organisations in Bandung. It placed itself within a network
of locally based movements, acting in solidarity, on global issues, like
holding demonstrations in conjunction with the anti-globalisation S26
(26 September 2000) protests in Prague. Through actions like this, it is
evident that the community imagined by Bandungs activist punks
stretched beyond national borders, an attribute Mato (1996) considers
to be common among social movements in the information age.
Activist punks continually redefined their collective identity in response
to an ever-changing socio-economic and political context. In other
words, acting punk refers to a script that will never be set and secured.
Over time the punk movement has felt an increase in military
surveillance and interest in their activities, and to make a point about
P-168
military surveillance, protest styles dramatically evolved. During a
demonstration about labour rights on 1 May 2001, hundreds of punks
from several different collectives gathered to hold a united march
through the streets of Bandung, eventually ending up at the citys
administrative centre, Gedung Sate.9 The protest created a provocative
scene as everyone participating in the action pulled on black balaclavas
or wrapped cloth around their faces to mask their identities. The
terror created by the military is reciprocated by a protest performance
containing terrorist-like iconography. The armed forces militancy was
answered by a peoples militancy, which was without structured
organisation, leadership or rigid order. In addition, the militarys
capacity to monitor and survey the action was undermined; the
protestors masked faces made it impossible to document exactly who
was participating in the action.
Recent interviews with members of the scene indicate a
gradual decline in punk activism in Bandung from its heyday with FAF
to a current state of low level simmering. Reasons given for this
reduced activity vary, but include: apathy resulting from
disappointment with the leadership of all four post-Soeharto
presidents and the lack of change in the Reform era; responsibility
brought on by new family pressures; falling out with other groups in
JAF-Nus; entanglement of members of the scene in the criminal
justice system; drug addiction; and general ennui with the repetitive
nature of the scene causing members to search for something new.
Punk culture empowers young people by enabling them to
create new identities, modern selves free from traditional divisions of
class and ethnicity. Given the systemic forces that reached into young
peoples personal lives during the New Order, the defence of identity
became an area of conflict. Bandungs radical punk movement arose
within this setting. When Indonesias activist punks produced and
displayed punk cultural products, they fought upon a symbolic terrain
to expose and challenge contemporary forms of power in a way not
possible for conventionally structured social movements. They seized
opportunities to express themselves and to challenge the system, be it
through performance, tattooing, hairstyles or clothing, by asserting that
punk is political and, as power is omnipresent, resistance can also be
P-169
242 Pickles
exercised in material, everyday struggles. They redefined consumption
patterns as a way of resisting the current social order.
The collective identity of Indonesias radical punks expressed
their localised resistance to the modern world. Punk activism in
Bandung signified that the previously accepted social order was under
question. Furthermore, their collectives represent that young people
were searching for new ways to structure society and inspire change.
Joanna Pickles is a post-graduate student in the Faculty of Asian Studies at the

Australian National University. Her email address is: joanna.pickles@anu.edu.au
Notes
1. See also Lipsitz (1994), Lockard (1998) and Weinstein (1994).
2. The term zine, a popular shortening of fanzine, refers to informally
published booklets. The zines of Bandungs activist punks generally contain
interviews with local bands, reviews of albums, opinion pieces, summaries
of influential leftwing intellectuals works such as Noam Chomsky and
Errico Malatesta and cartoons. This format for expression became
increasingly popular within the Bandung activist punk scene after the
production of the first politically-focussed punk zine Submissive Riot, in mid-
1998; however, Baulch (1996b:32) notes that zines have been part of the
underground music scene in Bandung since at least 1996.
3. In the 1959 Political Manifesto, Soekarno criticised the popularity of
Western rock in Indonesias youth, stating that such music was anti-
nationalist. His contempt for rock led to the incarceration of the Koeswoyo
Brothers (an Indonesian Band playing music similar to the Everly Brothers).
Sen and Hill (2000:167) conclude that the Koeswoyo Brothers turned a
combination of apolitical lyrics and rock tunes copied from the West into a
symbol of political radicalism. In contrast to bad Western musical forms,
suitable Indonesian musical genres were promoted. (See also Farrams
article in this issue.)
P-170
4. Murray (1993:36), in her study of urban Jakartan youth subcultures
describes a similar phenomenon: the terms and acronyms used in
military/bureaucratic discourse are parodied. For example the
commander of a group of perek (loose girls) is called danrek (komandan
perek).
5. The vocalist from one of Yogyakartas longest standing political punk bands
and a skilled tattoo artist in his own right, described watching family
members attempting to remove their tattoos with hot irons, a result of their
fear of falling victim to a mysterious gunman.
6. Blackboot were formed in Yogyakarta, though several of the bands
members were from Bandung and had close links to the Bandung political
punk scene.
7. Literature from abroad was translated and published to stimulate debate
within the Indonesian punk movement. For example the first edition of
Bandung zine Kontaminasi Propaganda (1) (1999, 47) includes a translated
excerpt from the book Making a punk threat again: best cuts of Profane
Existence (19891993) a compilation of column pieces and articles from
the long running American political punk zine Profane Existence.
8. A-Infos is an anarchist Internet news service.
9. The local popular name for the regional government building in Bandung.
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ASIA2004: POPULAR CULTURE IN ASIA

Topic 1: Introduction: What Is (Asian) Popular Culture and Why It Matters...........................1

Topic 2: How to Read (Asian) Popular Culture.23

Topic 4: What Is East Asian Popular Culture Anyway?.....................................................................55

Topic 5: Gender in Asian Popular Culture69

Turner, Graeme. Understanding Celebrity. SAGE Publications: 2004, pp. 3-27.

Topic 8: Articulating Sexualities through Asian Popular Culture129

Topic 9: Asian Popular Culture as Protest?............................................................................................151

Topic 10: Reverse Flows: Popular Culture Out of Asia.175

Topic 11: Soft Power? Popular Culture as Cultural Diplomacy193

A second definition suggests a certain masking, distortion, or concealment. Ideology

Table 1.1 Popular culture as inferior culture.

Popular press Quality press

The compromise equilibrium of hegemony can also be employed to analyse differ-

This is of course to make popular culture a profoundly political concept.

Popular culture as other

Allen, Robert C. (ed.), Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, London: Routledge, 1992.

European Journal of Cultural Studies

De-westernisation and inter-Asian referencing

differentiated from an automatic one-way application of theories derived from Euro-

East Asian media culture studies on the rise

eventual replication based on global mass culture formats, re-essentialisation of cultural

Inter-Asian mediated referencing as mundane practice

Inclusiveness of inter-Asian mediated dialogue

Chakrabarty D (2000) Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference.

ISSN: 0950-2386 (Print) 1466-4348 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcus20

FIGHTING WOMEN IN CONTEMPORARY ASIAN

Jane Chi Hyun Park

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2012.738670

Published online: 15 Nov 2012.

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FIGHTING WOMEN IN CONTEMPORARY

The celebration of the inauthentic

Keywords Gender; body; action films; Korea; Thailand; orientalism

Cultural Studies Vol. 27, No. 2 March 2013, pp. 242256

friends, underlings, family and love interests, similarly complicate hard

Gender hybridity and the spectre of the dominatrix

In her performance of feminized gangster masculinity, Eun-jin embodies

Reworking romantic comedy

Masculinist nationalism: the fighting country bumpkin

Hybrid transnationalism: the fighting female otaku

Beyond imitation: autism, techno-orientalism and alternative

and femininity from within the stereotypes themselves, through a kind of

South Koreans alleged obsession with cosmetic surgery regularly

numbers seem significant (Yang, 2007). The most recent official

these considerations frequently intersect with and occasionally

Attitudes towards Cosmetic Surgery in Korea

Gendering (Western) Cosmetic Surgery

women in the US position cosmetic surgery as a reward for hard work

sleepy). Thus, white cosmetic surgery has emerged as (only) a

Koreans in Korea. Accordingly, what are seen as whitening prac-

Gendering and Westernizing Cosmetic Surgery in Korea

rigid gender scripts positioning men as subjects and women as

Park also points out, linking patriarchal national culture with

the un-Japaneseness of the Korean people. In particular, immediately

The western body, then, was mobilized in defiance of Japanese stan-

Gendering Korean Cosmetic Surgery

associations, apply equally to women and men. In Korea, two differ-

a more caring and not hard masculinity. The beautiful kkonminams

Conclusion: Locating Korean Cosmetic Surgery