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Funky Man (펑키맨) by After School (애프터수쿨) — Lyrics, Translation and…Critically...
(Source) Do Korean censors disproportionately target female singers? No, not just those shameless hussies that sing about what they’d actually like to do with their love-interests I mean, and/or dance...
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The Korean Ad Industry’s Celebrity Obsession
(Sources: left, right) See Busan Haps for the full article. It was prompted by Yoo In-na (유인나) and then Kim Sa-rang (김사랑; left) endorsing Gillette razors last year, when suddenly a lot of celebrities...
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Bikinis, Breasts, and Backlash: Revealing the Korean Body Politic in 2012
(Sources: left, right; edited from originals) Whenever someone strips for the sake of drawing attention to some cause, usually my instant, gut reaction is to dismiss it as a crass stunt. Unless it’s...
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How Many Teenage Girls Are Smoking?
(Source: Unknown) If you’ve been following my The Gender Politics of Smoking in South Korea series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Newsflash, Part 4, Korea’s Hidden Smokers), you’ll know that there’s a huge...
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Revealing the Korean Body Politic, Part 2: Kwak Hyun-hwa (곽현화), Pin-up...
(Sources: left, right) Apologies for the irregular posting everyone — I’ve been really busy for the last month or so, and to top it all off I’m recovering from a bad flu as I type this too. But...
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Which Korean Industries Have the Largest Gender Pay Gap?
(Source: unknown) A long time ago, a Korean friend told me that banks were like a microcosm of all Korean workplaces — almost all the tellers were women, and seemed to do most of the actual work, but...
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“Kang So-ra! When Are You Going To Stop Being So Fat?!”
(Source: Metro, Busan edition, May 31 2012, p. 11) One of the great advantages of Erving Goffman’s Gender Advertisements, I tell students in my lectures on gender roles in Korean ads, is that it’s not...
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Korean Sociological Image #71: “Specs” for the perfect Korean wife or husband
(Source) When I lived abroad in Korea, I spent a lot of time doing work in cafes. Probably a 100 or more during my 2 years there. As such, I eavesdropped on thousands of conversations. And nearly every...
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Essential Reading: “Multiple Exposures: Korean Bodies and the Transnational...
(Sources — left: unknown; right) See The Asia-Pacific Journal for the article. Covering many of the themes discussed on the blog, and much more besides, expect to see me linking to it for many years to...
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From the Archives: Bagel Girls, Banking, and Babies!
(Source) …[the character of] Chi-Yong’s mother sees marriage as a way to achieve social advancement and material prosperity, as it was in the Victorian era. These ambitions have come to the forefront...
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Korean Sociological Image #73: The True Numbers of Korean Working Women
(Source; edited) If recent BBC coverage is anything to go by, marriage in South Korea is like a business. It’s also becoming a bit of an explosive topic as social mobility slows down and the...
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Sex and Gender Stereotypes in Korean Advertising
Thanks to the students at Dongseo and Pusan National University for being such great audiences last week, and here is the presentation as promised. Sorry that the animations don’t work in the online...
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“Body Changing” Diet-Drink Generously Donated to High School Students
(Source) Young Korean women — not men — are the only demographic in the OECD that are getting more underweight than obese. Call me making a mountain out of a molehill, but diet-drink companies being...
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Pin-up Grrrl #2: Ga-in, Bloom, and why we’ll still be talking about both 30...
(Source) Ga-in shared, “Our previous MVs had received R-ratings and we didn’t understand the reason why. So for my recent MV, I decided to give them one.” (Daily K-Pop News) And to help, she watched...
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Revealing the Korean Body Politic, Part 3: Historical precedents for Korea’s...
(Source) “Building a Body” isn’t my favorite track off Marnie Stern’s third LP, but I think it’s one of the most important. It plays with the idea that a woman’s body is a canvas; a thing that is often...
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Revealing the Korean Body Politic, Part 4: Girls are different from boys
(Sources: left, right) The JoongAng Ilbo reports that having a full rack is seen as a disadvantage for women in North Korea. This is in marked contrast to the South, where a thin figure and big breasts...
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Korean Sociological Image #75: Gender Discrimination in Everyday Korean Language
As Noface-nameless explains: Students at Sungkyunkwan University has created this poster, among many others to point out all the gender discrimination happening with common phrases said between friends...
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Korean Sociological Image #76: Gendered Innocence and “The Nation’s First Love”
Suzy (18): Innocent. Song Joong-ki (27): Chic. Kim Yoo-jung (13): Young. Three celebrities, three natural labels. After all, Kim Yoo-jung is young. Song Joong-ki is chic, or at least compared to us...
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Korean Sociological Image #82: Pink it and shrink it!
(Source) Hello everyone, I’m James. I’m 37, male, and heterosexual. And I love pink. It started innocently enough. As “The Korean Gender Guy” (TM), some splashes of it seemed appropriate here and...
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Miss A (Still) Don’t Need a Man…And Neither Did Destiny’s Child
(Source) Has it been a year already? Sorry for the slow posting everyone — I’ve had a bad cold for over two weeks. But, serendipitously, it’s a great time to be thinking about Miss A again, their...
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