Abstract
In this article, I analyze the romantic desire of non-Korean – particularly Western – women for the fictional Korean male characters depicted in transnationally popular Korean television dramas. This article is divided into two sections: first, it examines the transnational popularity of the South Korean television drama series, My Love from Another Star, and its depiction of a particular type of romantic Korean masculinity called kkonminam (flower boy) masculinity. Here, I argue that these fictional stories problematize hypersexual masculinity through their representations of romantic masculinity. The second section of the article extends the analysis by deploying ethnographic interviews and participant-observations of Western fans of Korean television dramas who, believing that the kkonminam depicted in the dramas are true reflections of Korean men, travel to Korea to form romantic relations with Korean men in real life. Using feminist theories of love, such as those propounded by bell hooks and Lauren Berlant, and the theory of the erotic by Audre Lorde, I argue that these fans, while romantically desiring Korean kkonminam, also co-opt the discourse of romantic love and Korean romantic masculinity to articulate and essentialize cultural differences between the East and West.
Highlights
Over the last twenty years, Korean television dramas have gained increasing transnational popularity through a phenomenon called “Hallyu”
This article has attempted to analyze the politics of romantic love in the context of Korean television dramas and their growing popularity among female viewers around the world
I examined the Korean television drama series My Love from Another Star and its depiction of kkonminam masculinity, a popular trope in romantic Korean television dramas, which offers an image of male androgyny, romance, and sexual innocence
Summary
Over the last twenty years, Korean television dramas have gained increasing transnational popularity through a phenomenon called “Hallyu”. Rather than settling for men who were geographically proximal to them, they traveled to Korea to find their romantic ideals, purely based on the images they encountered in these fictional television dramas It became clear, as my research progressed, that my Hallyu tourist informants mixed fantasy with reality, with regards to depictions of kkonminam masculinity. As my research progressed, that my Hallyu tourist informants mixed fantasy with reality, with regards to depictions of kkonminam masculinity They did this based on their desires to find a new paradigm of romantic love that is not grounded in heteropatriarchal conceptions of erotics that equates all forms of erotics with sex. The positive connotations attached to the stereotypes embolden some women to remark that Korean men are weak, without the fear of appearing racially biased
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