K-popscape : gender fluidity and racial hybridity in transnational Korean pop dance

Abstract

Analyzing bodily representation and audience reception, my dissertation examines (a) how racial hybridity and gender fluidity in Korean pop (K-pop) music performances challenge racialized gender norms in the West, such as feminine/masculine, white/black, heterosexual/homosexual, and colonial mimicry/contemporary minstrelsy, and (b) how colonial history influences East Asian and Western audiences’ different understandings of cultural appropriation and engenders intercultural (mis) communication on a global stage. Drawing on theories from theatre, dance, and performance studies, gender studies, critical race studies, media studies, and Asian studies, I offer close readings of dancers’ bodies, movements, and choreographies as well as audiovisual contents in select K-pop music videos. I also analyze audience reception from media coverage to global fans’ online comments around the world to see both local and global implications of K-pop. In their videos, K-pop performers move between enacting and negating whiteness, blackness, Asianness, and Koreanness with their fluid gender representations. I argue that these complex, intersectional, and often contradictory stagings, which I call K-popscape, are unreadable in the West due to the pervasiveness (and limitations) of stereotypes about Asian Americans.