Korean Masculinities and Transcultural Consumption

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Sun Jung: Korean Masculinities and Transcultural

Consumption: Yonsama, Rain, Oldboy, K-Pop
Idols. 221 pp. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University
Press, 2011. ISBN 978 988 8028 66 5 (hardback),
978 988 8028 67 2 (paperback).
Keith Howard
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies / Volume 74 / Issue 03 / October 2011, pp
528 - 530
DOI: 10.1017/S0041977X11000723, Published online: 13 October 2011
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0041977X11000723
How to cite this article:

Keith Howard (2011). Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 74, pp
528-530 doi:10.1017/S0041977X11000723
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528 REVIEWS
SUN JUNG:
Korean Masculinities and Transcultural Consumption: Yonsama, Rain,
Oldboy, K-Pop Idols.
221 pp. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011. ISBN 978 988
8028 66 5 (hardback), 978 988 8028 67 2 (paperback).
doi:10.1017/S0041977X11000723
This volume will likely appeal to two distinct readerships: the cultural studies frater-
nity, intrigued by the main title, and those interested in Korean popular culture and
the rise of hallyu, the Korea Wave. The former will revel in the theoretical concen-
tration, which is at its most dense in the opening chapter, while the latter will zoom in
on the discussion of specific cultural productions. Within the latter, Yonsama stands
for Bae Yong-Joon and the drama “Winter Sonata”, Rain (Pi, the stage name of Jung
Ji-Hoon) for pop music, and Park Chan-Wook’s Oldboy (2003) for film. Oldboy won
the Grand Prix at the Cannes International Film Festival in 2004, and was praised by
the jury president, Quentin Tarantino. The concepts of masculinity shift from “soft”
in the case of Bae Yong-Joon to “global” with Rain and “postmodern” in “Oldboy”,
while a second thematic thread is superimposed to consider concepts of “glocaliza-
tion”, regionalization and globalization, within which Bae’s Japanese fans broaden to
become Rain’s Asian and the Euro-American fans of Oldboy.
Chapter 1 opens with a summary of the situation, detailing how hallyu began
with the “han/hal-” Chinese character for “wave” and became the “han/hal-” for
Korea, and with the TV drama “Sarangi muŏtkille/What is Love”, screened on
Chinese Central Television in June 1997. Hallyu grew with films – Shiri (1999),
My Sassy Girl (2001) and My Wife is a Gangster (2001) and with singers such as
BoA (who, although mentioned before “Winter Sonata”, arrived on the scene
much later, after the unmentioned CLON and H.O.T. had risen to popularity in
Taiwan and China). Jung moves away from Homi Bhabha’s concept of hybridity
towards Koichi Iwabuchi’s notion of the “culturally odorless” non-nationality of
Japanese popular culture, a notion Jung renders in Korean as “mugukjeok”. She use-
fully distinguishes mugukjeok from Hollywood and American shallow internationa-
lized culture, as a “transcultural hybridity . . . which is not only influenced by
odorless global elements, but also by traditional (national) elements” (p. 3). By
doing so, she emphasizes that Korean cultural production is similar but different,
thereby silencing critics who argue Korean pop is a mimetic copy of
Euro-American pop, but also setting up a discussion of how non-Korean masculi-
nities – metrosexual, cute, and cool – have been absorbed into a hybridized version.
And, through this, she arrives at “transculturalism”, which Wolfgang Welsch a dec-
ade ago contrasted with the classical concept of single cultures and with other con-
temporary accounts of interculturality and multiculturality.
The theory framed within Chapter 1, verging at times on a literature survey, moves
through Appadurai, Meyrowitz, Alasuutari, Drottner, Livingstone, Chua Beng Huat
and many more, touching on cultural studies, anthropology, reception studies
and consumerism, before arriving on masculinity. Masculinity is cast within three
stereotypical images of Korea taken from Moon Seung-Sook: as patriarchal and
authoritarian, as the gentleman scholar, and as military and aggressive (p. 26).
These three, Jung finds, coexist as heterogeneous and contradictory masculinities
but also stand alone as manufactured images. Hence, in chapter 2, Bae Yong-Joon
embodies soft masculinity, soft-spoken and polite, bespectacled, and wearing a
scarf tied in myriad different ways. He creates a postcolonial image of nostalgia
REVIEWS 529
and retrospection – a “kind of consumption of the simulacrum of Japan’s past” –

which has great impact on Japanese women. His fans reject alternative images that
are presented in, for example, a photo album where he is stripped to the waist,
and in the Korean film take on Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Untold Scandal, where
he is filmed naked in coitus. Here, soft masculinity is a “transcultural amalgamation”
of South Korea’s gentleman scholar (influenced by Chinese Confucianism), of
Japanese bishōnen (pretty boy) masculinity and of the global metrosexual.
The pop icon Rain, the focus of chapter 3, to Jung symbolizes a compressed ver-
sion of the second thematic thread, interpreted within regional pop-consumerism
and bought into by the Asian “new rich”. Rain presents a global masculinity through
his muscle-clad tanned body, and on stage, stripped to the waist, is an embodiment
of cool. Korea promotes his global ambition, making much of his Madison Square
Gardens concert and his role in the Hollywood film Speed Racer. However, Jung
notes his “world tours” are Asian-centred and, initially, he was part of a glocaliza-
tion process, taking American cultural forms under the guidance of his local man-
agement company and repackaging them for South Korean audiences. Over time,
he broke through to a regionalized identity after acting in a KBS TV drama in
2003, building his fan base with his third album, “It’s Raining”; here, Jung uses
the words of Singaporean fans to interpret. With his fourth album, produced in
2006, he entered a globalized phase, securing his role as a generic pan-Asian
male idol in the blockbuster Speed Racer, where he lacked nationality or ethnicity.
In sum, then, Rain epitomizes the desire for Korean popular culture to be global, but
within this he, as global metrosexual, meets the gentleman scholar while simul-
taneously as the cute boy-from-next-door, he revels in a cool macho side.
Jung turns, in chapter 4, to Oldboy, interpreting the hero, Dae-Soo, as savage but
cool, lacking humanity as he seeks revenge. It is a film characteristic, she feels, of
the ever-fluctuating postmodern era, harking back to a pre-modern time between
barbarism and civilization. For what I consider to be an acted out version of a car-
toon script, I find Jung heavy on the interpretation of symbolism. She moves from a
critique of contemporary technology (omnipresent concealed cameras and micro-
phones, mobile phones that force their keepers to act in pre-programmed ways,
and gadget-filled penthouses) to a vision of neo-Orientalist reception, where
Dae-Soo is fantasized by Euro-American audiences as a machinic Other who dis-
gustingly eats a live octopus and flaunts with incest. I wonder; I note other comic
book heroes such as Superman and Spiderman struggle with inner transgressive
selves without inhabiting anything neo-Orientalist. Finally, a truncated chapter 5
begins by moving from the mugukjeok notion of non-nationality to a chogukjeok
transnational interpretation of contemporary boy bands with “manufactured versatile
masculinity” (p. 163). These work across national boundaries by mixing singers and
languages, and they switch effortlessly from masculine to cross-dressing feminine,
from pretty boy to sexual predator. After four pages, Jung’s theme switches
abruptly, and a final four pages summarize the whole book, stitching and amalga-
mating a postlude to a conclusion.
Overall, Jung has provided a useful and convincing study, showing us just how
far Korean popular culture has come. I am particularly aware of this since, just five
years back, I edited a volume on Korean pop music that I must now admit seems
outdated. Again, Jung’s theorizing on Oldboy, marrying a diverse array of Korean
authors to a constellation of Western theorists, takes us in directions that others writ-
ing on Korean film have not yet gone. This is welcome. However, I sometimes won-
der about romanization, where Jung’s preference for the South Korean government
system leads to occasional puzzles such as the regularly repeated beulleokbeoseuteo –
I challenge anybody other than a Korean to recognize that this should be pronounced
530 REVIEWS
as (and means) “blockbuster”. I also wonder why the emotion or personal state of
han is rendered as haan, and why Jung regularly refers to the “IMF Crisis” and
“IMF economic catastrophe” rather than telling us she is describing the 1998
South Korean economic collapse. These, though, are minor points that should not
be allowed to mar what otherwise is a very fascinating book.
Keith Howard
SOUTH-EAST ASIA
Oxford–River Books English–Thai Dictionary.

1084 pp. Bangkok: Oxford University Press and River Books, 2010.
(Second edition.) £45. ISBN 978 0 19 956291 6
doi:10.1017/S0041977X11000735
For much of the twentieth century the most authoritative English–Thai

dictionary was the New Model English–Thai Dictionary, secretly compiled in
Bangkok’s Bang Khwang prison in the 1930s by So Sethaputra, a long-term pol-
itical prisoner who had gained a BSc in Geology from Manchester University in
the preceding decade. So’s dictionary, which first appeared in 1938, was later
successfully marketed in a number of different sizes and formats, from a
two-volume “library edition” packed with illustrative sentences, to various
pocket-sized editions. Although the dictionary has been updated since its first
appearance, later editions preserved many quaint or dated examples of usage,
some barely disguising the compiler’s contempt for the military government of
the day.
In 1991 Narisa Chakrabongse, owner of Bangkok publishing company River
Books, engaged the Translation Centre at the Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn
University to produce an up-to-date, high-quality English–Thai dictionary that
would reflect contemporary usage and serve the needs of Thai users of varying
levels of proficiency. The project took more than twelve years to complete and
resulted in a dictionary that provides accurate and idiomatic Thai equivalents of
more than 110,000 words and phrases.
The layout of entries is generally clear, although of necessity the Thai font size
is smaller than one would like. Each entry includes a pronunciation guide in IPA
and Thai script followed by a Thai translation or explanation, and, in many
cases, examples of usage. A distinctive feature of the dictionary is the use of
boxed notes on a variety of topics which give related vocabulary and useful
examples of the words in context. Among topics covered in this way are “age”,
“clock”, “dates”, “illnesses”, “letter-writing”, “might”, “numbers”, “should” and
“weight”.
Maintaining a consistent standard in a lengthy project involving a large number
of participants is always a challenge. In places in this dictionary there are oversights
that should have been picked up at the proofreading stage, if not earlier. The in-text
“weight” box, for example, includes the English names and weight limits for inter-
national boxing divisions, but no Thai name or transcription; the foreign learner of
Thai has to go to the main body of the dictionary to discover that words like “fly-
weight”, “bantam weight” and so on, borrow the English word. A different problem
occurs in the “numbers” box, where the Thai user will find that the English names

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Sun Jung: Korean Masculinities and Transcultural

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0041977X11000723

How to cite this article:

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Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/BSO, IP address: 132.174.255.116 on 18 Mar 2015

and retrospection – a “kind of consumption of the simulacrum of Japan’s past” –

Oxford–River Books English–Thai Dictionary.

For much of the twentieth century the most authoritative English–Thai

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