Theoretical and Methodological Contributions

The following illustrate some of my theoretical and methodological contributions to the existing scholarship of global media culture and literature of the Korean Wave studies. First, I used a reversed media ethnographic approach, which still demands more attention and has not come to its fruition yet. Understanding globalization in ethnographic depth demands new deployments of ethnography that are locally based but globally engaged. The process of globalization is best understood from a local perspective, one that takes into account particular contexts and the lived experience of local people. Fans in the US understand and deploy the objects or texts of another culture—Korean popular culture—through the means they have at their disposal within their own cultural contexts. Yet, the media increasingly becomes implicated in intensifying patterns of distribution and dissemination through mainly Internet-based platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, or Tumblr. The call for greater local contextualization of studies of transnationally circulating media is a valuable contribution to our attempts to grasp the complexity of media flow and fandoms. Any consideration of the ways in which global media culture plays out in fandom should proceed both from the local context and our informed understanding of fan behaviors, motivations, and processes of meaning-making as driven by affective pleasures and investments.

Most of the previous studies of the Korean Wave addressed the whats, hows, and whys of international fans’ and audiences’ enjoyment of Korean popular culture and dealt

with various potential implications and meanings of the phenomenon both within and outside of the Korean territory. While these studies employed various methods such as surveys, interviews, and textual and discourse analysis to examine the phenomenon, very few provide first-hand ethnographic empirical explorations and interpretations of media reception. Based on previous studies, we already know that some international audiences or fans enjoy interacting with Korean popular culture. However, what has been ignored so far in the realm of Korean Wave studies are the mechanisms in which interaction occurs, continues, and intensifies. Any form of interaction and reception is constructed and functions in a specific social and historical context. The media ethnographic approach in my dissertation—a relatively long period of immersion in the scene where the actual reception of the Korean Wave among American fans occurs—provided the appropriate tools to know these mechanisms as a living organism.

Moreover, the past century of Western-centered scholarship talking to itself about audiences has permitted it to take contextual factors for granted. My work was a reversed ethnographic approach, which is not necessarily the same as the often so-called Westernized approach (Livingstone, 2015). I perceive my work to be not only a de-Westernized approach, but more “reversed” in that the fans being studied are Westerners and the point of departure and the gaze placed upon them is from a non-Westerner’s perspective. In other words, the gaze is from a member of the Korean culture studying how Americans consume her native culture. The reception of my participants’ media culture is non-Western—Korean popular culture—in their Western locality.

Some of the theoretical contributions of my study are based on the recurring patterns I dissected from my ethnographic data. I coined two terms: emotional proximity as another layer of Straubhaar’s (1991) cultural proximity theory, and woori-ness as one of the multifaceted soft power of Korean popular culture in the US. I used grounded theory as a reference to derive theoretical concepts—emotional proximity and woori-ness—from the qualitative analysis of my ethnographic data in addition to substantiating

the interpretation based on participants’ expressions and use of words and meanings (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). The theoretical approach of cultural hybridity to the Korean Wave phenomenon has de-emphasized the multiple processes and practices international fans generate (Anderson & Shim, 2015). One must not look at the notion of hybridity simply as a binary model—such as resistance/domination and center/periphery—or a descriptive tool to explain certain transcultural phenomena of media culture because hybridity is never a power-neutral space. It is a space where different power relations are continuously negotiated and struggled with. According to Kraidy (2002), the theoretical challenge of hybridity lies in context; transnational hybridity creates ideological twists in global contexts and fulfills (or does not) its progressive potential in a local context.

I found that the Korean Wave works as a mediator not only within the East, but also in the West by filling a large demand and void for audiences who were looking for less-sexualized, non-aggressive, clean-cut, and wholesome content. At times, transcultural fans become fans of transnational texts not necessarily because of where they are from, but because they may recognize a subjective moment of emotional proximity regardless of origin. The high level of hybridity in Korean popular culture

arouses emotional proximity among not only Asian audiences but also American audiences to renegotiate their identities and to realize what they have been missing out on. I found that the simultaneously complex yet fluid hybridity and emotional proximity embedded in Korean popular culture appeals to U.S. fans and transforms into a multifaceted soft power: the woori-ness (we-ness in English), signifying the unity of a collective mindset.

The notion of woori-ness works as a significant yet under-recognized facet of soft power when studying the implications of the Korean Wave in global/international contexts. This relatively unified notion of woori-ness is deeply embedded in various facets of Korean popular culture and can be traced back to the historical formation and building of the nation and the people of Korea as I analyzed in the Findings chapter.

Whereas the form of Korean Wave is highly hybridized and transnational, the driving force behind it, ironically, is homogeneous and unified. Rosalie shared her thoughts on the notion of woori-ness:

Rosalie: This [woori-ness] is the driving force behind all the success and today’s global phenomenon of Korean pop culture. And they are not selfish about it either. Korean culture is very much about community and collective society as

‘we are one.’ In the US, it’s very much about the individual. It’s not we, it’s I; it’s my house, it’s not woori [our] house as in Korean.

Fans of the Korean Wave in the US find a strong sense of community and belongingness—woori-ness—embedded in Korean culture. They are drawn to Korean Wave and find Korea’s unique cultural aspect of woori-ness as a path to globalization fascinating. This relatively coherent woori-ness can be seen as one of the multifaceted layers of soft power in the eyes of non-Koreans, especially in the US where national unification and sacrifice have been relatively silenced for the sake of individual freedom.

It is important to remark that although soft power can only be made possible with substantial hard economic power, it is not always guaranteed. This is where Korea’s woori-ness, derived from its historical position of in-between ‘semi-periphery’ to the

power structure in the world, comes in, working as an alternative post-Western soft power in international settings.