Here Comes the Flood

This book breaks down the stereotypes often expected of Korean popular culture, showing how the lines of gender, sexuality, and stereotype in Hallyu productions are often blurred to be palatable to Korean audiences or clarified to attract global audiences.

This collection breaks down the stereotypes often expected of Korean popular culture, specifically examining issues of gender, sexuality, and stereotype in a variety of cultural products including K-pop, K-drama, and cover dancing through the lens of how “Koreanness” can be defined. A diverse range of of contributors showcase how Hallyu, or the Korean Wave, began as a wave rolling across Asia and morphed into a tsunami that has impacted every continent, making Korean popular culture an industry that draws in fans on a global scale. The stereotypes and issues being explored in this collection, contributors argue, are intertwined with how Koreans both at home and in the diaspora portray themselves publicly and consider themselves privately. In tandem with this, international fans of Hallyu take part in the conversation through performance and imitation, either reinforcing or breaking away from these stereotypes. Contributors examine a wide variety of settings to connect the concepts of traditional Korean values to modern Korean society in a symbiotic relationship between these values and cultural content creators. Scholars of media studies, pop culture, gender studies, Asian studies, sociology, and cultural studies will find this book particularly useful.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: Tracking the Korean Style: Hallyu in Hanoi, or Style in the Time of Corona

Michael Hurt

Chapter 2: “Girl Power” DPRK Style: The Girl Group Phenomenon in North Korea and its Fans across East Asia

Peter Moody and Seunghee Ha

Chapter 3: Disaporic Koreanness in Kim’s Convenience

Kyong Yoon

Chapter 4: The New Country Women: Exploring Popular Representations of Korean Gwichon and Transnational Women’s Marriage-Migration to the Korean Countryside

Snigdha Gupta

Chapter 5: Gender, Genre, and History in Great Queen Seondeok

Michael Ormsbee

Chapter 6: Breaking the Stereotype of Domestic Adoption in K-dramas

Marcy L. Tanter

Chapter 7: Crying Men Watching Webtoons: Misaeng and Korean Male Audiences

Jahyon Park

Chapter 8: “LISTEN TO K-POP, BURN THE POLICE!”: Swastikas, Feminism, and LGBTQ Rights in the 2019-2020 Chilean Protests

Moisés Park

Chapter 9: Queering the Wave: Drag Queens and Drag Kings in the K-Pop Industry

Tiago Canário

Chapter 10: K-pop Performance, Transcultural Negotiation of Gender Identity, and Belonging: A Case Study of a Peruvian Drag Queen Dancing to K-pop

Min Suk Kim

About the Contributors