Top

Published in:

2018 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

4. Consuming Cosmopolitan White(ness)

Author : Ji-Hyun Ahn

Published in: Mixed-Race Politics and Neoliberal Multiculturalism in South Korean Media

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.

search-config

AI-assisted search

Off

Abstract

This chapter discusses white Amerasian actor and celebrity Daniel Henney, an interesting counterpoint to Ward’s case. Media discourse around Henney is disconnected from Korea’s racist past and is instead articulated with discourses of transnational mobility, cosmopolitan whiteness, and beauty. The Henney moment is considered as a neoliberal project that reorients racial lines by transforming beauty norms and masculinity in contemporary Korean popular culture. Through a thorough analysis of his visual representation in fashion magazines, TV commercials, and TV dramas, the chapter demonstrates that his whiteness is not a mere marker of his race but also an index of other intersecting categories, including (trans)nationality, beauty, gender, and class.

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 102.000 Bücher
über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

previous chapter From National Threat to National Hero

next chapter Televising the Making of the Neoliberal Multicultural Family

Ahn, Geonhyeok. 1978. A Biracial Singer Yoon Su Il’s “I Won’t Love” Kyunghyang Newspaper, April 8, 5. Retrieved from http://newslibrary.naver.com/viewer/index.nhn?articleId=1978040800329205005&editNo=2&printCount=1&publishDate=1978-04-08&officeId=00032&pageNo=5&printNo=10007&publishType=00020 (in Korean).

Ang, Ien. 2001. On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West. London and New York: Routledge.

Ang, Ien. 2007. Television Fictions Around the World: Melodrama and Irony in Global Perspective. Critical Studies in Television 2 (2): 18–30.CrossRef

Arlidge, John. 2004. Forget Black, Forget White. Ea Is What’s Hot. Observer, http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/jan/04/britishidentity.race.

Arnold, Connie. 2007. Teacher Discrimination in Korea. The Korea Herald, Oct 18.

Ashikari, Mikiko. 2005. Cultivating Japanese Whiteness: The ‘Whitening’ Cosmetics Boom and the Japanese Identity. Journal of Material Culture 10 (1): 73–91.CrossRef

Carter, Mitzi Uehara. 2014. Mixed Race Okinawans and Their Obscure in-Betweeness. Journal of Intercultural Studies 35 (6): 646–661.CrossRef

Chan, Yuan-Kwan. 2012. An Interview with Daniel Henney: Comedy, Career and Korea. Meniscus: An Arts and Entertainment Magazine, Asian American and Beyond, July 29.

Choi, Kang-Min. 2006. The Myth of One Nation and Mixed-Race. Journal of Korean Language and Literature 35: 287–314 (in Korean).

Choi, Ji Yoon. 2015. Daniel Henney of Big Hero - It Is a Pity That He Answered Back in English to a Korean Interviewee. Kukinews, January 15. Retrieved from http://news.kukinews.com/article/view.asp?arcid=0009040106&code=41181111&cp=nv (in Korean).

Darling-Wolf, Fabienne. 2006. The Men and Women of Non-No: Gender, Race, and Hybridity in Two Japanese Magazines. Critical Studies in Media Communication 23 (3): 181–199.CrossRef

Edwards, Tim. 2006. Cultures of Masculinity. London and New York: Routledge.

Elam, Michele. 2011. The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press (in English).

Glenn, Evelynn (ed.). 2009. Shades of Difference: Why Skin Color Matters. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Gwyneth Paltrow to Appear in Korean Ad. 2005. The Korea Times, July 8.

Ibrahim, Habiba. 2012. Troubling the Family the Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.CrossRef

If Daniel Henney Becomes a World Star, Would It Be the Pride of Korea? 2009. In Midnight Entertainment Section 2.0. Retrieved from http://entertainforus.tistory.com/468 (in Korean).

Iwabuchi, Koichi. 2002. Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.CrossRef

Iwabuchi, Koichi (ed.). 2004. Feeling Asian Modernities: Transnational Consumption of Japanese TV Dramas. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Iwabuchi, Koichi. 2014. Introduction: Critical Mixed Race Studies and Japanese Experiences. Journal of Intercultural Studies 35 (6): 621–626.CrossRef

Jahng, Kyung Eun. 2011. English Education for Young Children in South Korea: Not Just a Collective Neurosis of English Fever!. Persed Perspectives in Education 29 (2): 61–69.

Jung, Young Hee. 2007. Cohabitation of Patriarchal Order with Feminist Demands in a Successful Television Drama Series < My Lovely Samsoon >. Media, Gender, Culture 8: 41–71 (in Korean).

Jung, Sun. 2011. Korean Masculinities and Transcultural Consumption: Yonsama, Rain, Oldboy, K-Pop Idols. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Kawashima, Terry. 2002. Seeing Faces, Making Races: Challenging Visual Tropes of Racial Difference. Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 3 (1): 161–190.

Kim, Miyoung. 2007. Global Talk? Pun with Beauties! Hankyoreh, March 29, 25 (in Korean).

Kim, Myoung-Hye. 2006. Female Audiences’ Reading of the Drama My Lovely Samsoon and Their Related Everyday Practice. Journal of Communication Science no. 6 (2): 76–112 (in Korean).

Kim, Nadia. 2008. Imperial Citizens: Koreans and Race from Seoul to La. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Kim, Youna. 2005. Experiencing Globalization: Global TV, Reflexivity and the Lives of Young Korean Women. International Journal of Cultural Studies 8 (4): 445–463.CrossRef

Kim, Youna. 2013. Korean Wave Pop Culture in the Global Internet Age. In The Korean Wave: Korean Media Go Global, ed. Youna Kim, 75–92. New York: Routledge.

Koshy, Susan. 2001. Morphing Race into Ethnicity: Asian Americans and Critical Transformations of Whiteness. Boundary 2 28 (1): 153–194.

La Ferla, Ruth. 2003. Generation E.A.: Ethnically Ambiguous. New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/28/fashion/28ETHN.html.

Lee, Joo-Hee. 2006. I Get the Best of Both Worlds. The Korea Herald, April 5.

Lee, Mary. 2008. Mixed Race Peoples in the Korean National Imaginary and Family. Korean Studies no. 32: 56–85.

Leonard, Pauline. 2008. Migrating Identities: Gender, Whiteness and Britishness in Post-Colonial Hong Kong. Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 15 (1): 45–60.CrossRef

Lim, Jason. 2013. White Men and Korean Woman. The Korea Times, July 26. Retrieved from http://koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2013/07/137_140007.html.

Lim, Timothy. 2009. Who Is Korean? Migration, Immigration, and the Challenge of Multiculturalism in Homogeneous Societies. Asia-Pacific Journal no. 30 (1): July 27, 2009.

Lo, Adrienne, and Jenna Kim. 2011. Manufacturing Citizenship: Metapragmatic Framings of Language Competencies in Media Images of Mixed Race Men in South Korea. Discourse & Society 22 (4): 440–457. doi:10.1177/0957926510395834.CrossRef

Mahtani, Minelle. 2014. Mixed Race Amnesia: Resisting the Romanticization of Multiraciality. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

Myers, Deauwand. 2014. To the Least of These. The Korea Times, Oct 20. Retrieved from http://koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2014/10/137_166636.html.

Nishime, LeiLani. 2014. Undercover Asian: Multiracial Asian Americans in Visual Culture. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Oh, David C., and Omotayo O. Banjo. 2012. Outsourcing Postracialism: Voicing Neoliberal Multiculturalism in Outsourced. Communication Theory 22: 449–470.CrossRef

Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Parameswaran, Radhika, and Kavitha Cardoza. 2009. Melanin on the Margins: Advertising and the Cultural Politics of Fair/Light/White Beauty in India. Journalism and Communication Monographs 11 (3): 213–274.CrossRef

Park, Kyung Eun. 2011. White Supremacy Hidden Behind the Current Trend of Mixed-Race in the Entertainment Business. Kyunghyang Newspaper. Retrieved from http://news.khan.co.kr/kh_news/khan_art_view.html?artid=201108212119105&code=960100 (in Korean).

Park, Moon-Gi. 2006. Daniel Henney and Cf. Marketing 40 (1): 29–30 (in Korean).

Park, So Jin, and Nancy Abelmann. 2004. Class and Cosmopolitan Striving: Mothers’ Management of English Education in South Korea. Anthropological Quarterly 77 (4): 645–672.CrossRef

Park, Soo-Mee. 2009. Korean Stars Take Their Shot at Hollywood. The Hollywood Reporter.

Rondilla, Joanne L. 2009. Filipinos and the Color Complex: Ideal Asian Beauty. In Shades of Difference: Why Skin Color Matters, ed. Evelynn Glenn, 106–132. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Saraswati, L. Ayu. 2010. Cosmopolitan Whiteness: The Effects and Affects of Skin-Whitening Advertisements in a Transnational Women’s Magazine in Indonesia. Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 10 (2): 15–41.

Seo, Byung Gi. 2005. Similarities and Differences between Daniel and Yun Suil. Herald Pop. Retrieved from http://entertain.naver.com/read?oid=112&aid=0000010505 (in Korean).

Shugart, Helene. 2008. Managing Masculinities: The Metrosexual Moment. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 5 (3): 280–300.CrossRef

Simpson, Mark. 2002. Meet the Metrosexual. Salon.com, July 22.

Simpson, Mark. 2013. Metrosexy: A 21st Century Self-Love Story. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

Song, Hyoung Gook. 2005. The Settlement of Culture in 2005. Kyunghyang Newspaper, Dec 30, 19.

Song, Min Sup. 2008. A Global Program on the Surfice…Orientalism Inside? Segye Ilbo, Jan 7, 24 (in Korean).

Ten-Asia. 2012. Daniel Henney. 10Asia 2009 [cited Oct 22, 2012]. Retrieved from http://10.asiae.co.kr/Articles/print.htm?a_id=2009020911012489906&sec=people3 (in Korean).

Tseng, Ada. 2008. Who the Hell Is Daniel Henney? Asian Pacific Arts, March 7.

Wallace, Bruce. 2007. Movies; a Most Unlikely Seoul Sensation; Just Two Years after Landing in Korea, Actor Daniel Henney Has the Country All Aflutter: Home Edition. Los Angeles Times, June 17, E.1.

Woo, Michelle. 2009. Daniel Henney—Seoul Man. CNN, Oct 19. Retrieved from http://travel.cnn.com/explorations/seoul-man-980485.

Wyatt, Edward. 2008. Generation Mix: Youth TV Takes the Lead in Diversity Casting. New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/21/arts/television/21disn.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

Title: Consuming Cosmopolitan White(ness)
Author: Ji-Hyun Ahn
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Mixed-Race Politics and Neoliberal Multiculturalism in South Korean Media
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-65773-8

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-65774-5

Copyright Year: 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65774-5_4