Abstract
Abstract English-language studies of Korean drama (Korean TV serials) have tended to focus on the transnational consumption of drama in the context of the ‘Korean Wave’ (Hallyu). Analysing the classification and reception of Korean drama and its interaction with Korean audiences, this paper argues that there has been a significant shift both in the dramas produced and in the audience expectations and interactions with these texts. Building on twenty-one in-depth interviews and ethnographic data, the authors analyse the gendered structures of identification with the characters of dramas. Korean dramas are increasingly held to a standard of realism wherein audiences expect them to represent ‘reality’ rather than a fantastical escape from it. The authors argue, therefore, that dramas are also fulfilling a social function in being able to represent and generate dialogue over social problems in contemporary Korean society.
Highlights
English-language, and to a lesser extent Korean-language, scholarship on Korean drama in particular continues to focus on the globalisation of Korean popular culture with little attention being given to domestic appeal and audience interaction in Korea
Focusing on the Korean reception of and interaction with Korean drama, this paper argues that Korean tv serials can function as ‘critical texts’ that generate social debate and form a means for South Koreans to engage with the dilemmas engendered by modernity
In a 2010 study Jin and Jeong examined the effect of South Korean drama consumption on the perceived prevalence of single life and having fewer children in married life
Summary
Conducting ethnographic research in Korea in the 1990s, Nancy Abelmann observed that: There is hardly a page of my fieldnotes without mention of a television soap opera or melodramatic film. She said that she does not aspire to be like that, since ‘expressing oneself freely is not good to others’ In this sense the ideal-egos represented through female protagonists in Korean dramas were not read as products of male patriarchal desire but, rather, they expressed a desire developed in opposition to the prevailing allocentric moral order. In part this reading is enabled by a certain transformation in the texts of second-wave dramas that, to some extent, are challenging hegemonic visions of society. This standard of ‘reality’ applies to the gendered portrayals of subjectivity and to the portrayals of the modern social order, echoing in some respects the scholarly critique of the melodramatic representations in Korean dramas.
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