k film 3

No formal citation needed. (e.g., Hwang Sŏk-yŏng, p. 23)

Please refer to “Composition Hints” and “Close Reading Techniques” under “General Materials”

1:K-Pop: Kyung Hyun Kim’s “Becoming-Black” (min. 1 ½ pages)

Discuss how K-pop has adopted African American hip hop music and culture as an essential part, transforming, hybridizing, and misappropriating it by analyzing a BTS song, “Hip Hop Lover.” Consider the following questions: What are the specific aspects of singing, dancing, lyrics, visuality of the live performance (costume, mise en scène, etc.) that BTS borrows in this video from African American hip hop music and culture?; How does BTS’s “Hip Hop Lover” Koreanize African American hip hop? ; How has the prevalence of African American hip hop produced “becoming black”(cf. Mbembe) of Korean music specifically and Korean culture more broadly?

[Engsub/Vietsub] Hip Hop Lovers - BTS (Live)Links to an external site.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_3KCRAYAFQ

(Right-click on the link and then click “open hyperlink.” (There is no official music video of this song. There are other videos that translate the lyrics from Korean to English. This video also has the English translation of the lyrics.)

In your discussion, please consider Achille Mbembe’s following statement (quoted by Kyung Hyun Kim): “He declares that for the first time in human history, ‘the term, “Black” has been generalized, having acquired a ‘new fungibility.’ Blackness has been ‘institutionalized as a new norm of existence and expanded to the entire planet,’ in a process that Mbembe calls ‘the Becoming Black of the world.’ “; “The term ‘black’ signals not only a series of traumatic and excruciating historical experiences, but also, once you reverse it, an ‘act of creation and capability of living in the midst of several times and several histories at once.’”

2:Jungmin Kwon’s “Straight Korean Female Fans and Their Gay Male FANtasies” and Layoung Shin’s “Imitating Flower Boy Stars: K-pop Male Stars and Assembling New Female Masculinity in South Korea” (min. 1 ½ pages)

These two articles explore the relationship between female fandom (straight women fans of gay male manga and lesbian women fans of androgynous K-pop boy idols) and their subversion of normative gender and sexualities in the heterosexist patriarchal context of contemporary South Korea. Citing examples from both articles, discuss the specific ways in which female fans as “prosumers” re-appropriate and re-write the normative and non-normative genders and sexualities in their various fan activities and in their everyday personal lives.

3:Jin-kyung Lee’s “Changelings and Cinderellas,” Parasite and So Yeon Leem’s “The Dubious Enhancement: Making South Korea a Plastic Surgery Nation” (min. 2 pages)

Discuss the ways in which each text above deals with the contemporary issue of class polarization in South Korea. As these texts are somewhat disparate, you can address the issue of class in each text (Lee, Leem, and Parasite) separately. Please consider the following questions for each.

“Changelings and Cinderellas”: How are the two plots, Cinderella plot and Switched-at-birth plot, an articulation of class polarization, which became entrenched in the 2000s?; How do they represent the fantasy of class mobility in the context of actual class immobility during this period? Cite specific examples from the article.

Parasite

How does the movie represent the class chasm that exists between the two families, one, poor and the other, rich, in terms of its representation of verticality of spaces as well as its manipulation of spaces in general? Cite specific examples from the movie.

“The Dubious Enhancement”

Where does Leem locate the issue of class in her historical understanding of popularization of plastic surgery in South Korea? Put another way, what are the relations between class and plastic surgery in her article? Cite specific examples from the article.