Engaging with Korean dramas: discourses of gender, media, and class formation in Taiwan

Abstract

This paper attempts to explore the politics of differential engagements with Korean drama, particularly with relation to the formation of gender and class identities. As social identities are mediated through the cultural, discourse becomes a significant site for understanding the relationships between structures and the formation of subjectivities. The imported Korean drama falls mostly into two genres – trendy drama and family drama. Both of them deal with family and love, and both of them aim at women audiences. As such, discourses of femininity provide a productive avenue for understanding: on the one hand, their place in social formation, that is, how women inhabit different discourses of femininity which in turn position them hierarchically in the social domain; on the other hand, how social processes, including globalization and nation formation, play a central role in constituting the different meanings and hierarchy of discourses of femininity. However, discourses of femininity also intersect with discourses of television in structuring women's engagements with Korean drama. This paper therefore traces the transformations of the discourses of femininity and television and explores how they regulate, constrain, or enable women's engagements with Korean drama. In doing so, this paper aims to highlight the hierarchically structured gendered discourses in the process of social formation in contemporary Taiwan.

Keywords:

• Korean drama
• reception studies
• cultural hierarchy
• class
• gender

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the National Science Council and KWID (through Sooyeon Lee) for funding this project. She expresses her deep gratitude to Yi-chien Li (the assistant for this project), Teri Silvio, Peter Kang, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes

1. For example, the Awakening Foundation published three volumes of books in 1996 entitled Handbook for women to leave home completely (Vols. 1–3), which deal with property, divorce, and domestic violence. Stir Quarterly, sponsored by the Awakening, also published a special issue (1996/10) on ‘Leaving home: reports on women's fights against patriarchal families’.

2. Advert on Sony Location Free TV. From Business Weekly (Shangye zhoukan), January 2006.

3. Advert on HP Pavilion m7380tw. From @Live Digital Fashion (Shuwei shishang), June 2006.

4. Young (1997) offers a detailed discussion on the devaluation of home in Beauvoir and Irigaray's writings, as well as the rejection of home as inappropriately imperialistic and totalizing in Biddy Martin, Chandra Mohanty, and de Lauretis’ writings.