| This work explores the intersection of gender and cultural identity in Korean women's involvement with Japanese girls' comics (or shoujo manga). The popularity of Japanese girls' comics in Korea is a particularly fascinating phenomenon. Produced in a former colonial power, these texts have been continually imported, localized, and consumed in Korea, a former colony, for more than half a century even after the end of the colonial period. By analyzing this unique dynamic, my research opens up new areas of inquiry very little explored so far in Western academia and contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of globalization. While the existing literature has critiqued the nature of cultural flows between the West and the East, I examine the postcolonial relationship between two Eastern countries from a marginalized perspective of an Asian feminist equipped with Western theory and methodology. Noting that women's global experience is different from men's, my project focuses on a gender-specific context of postcolonial culture. It also sheds light on the fact that comics, as drawn representations, grant women more room to negotiate their identity in a glocalized era.;In order to to specifically explore the complexity of Korean women's subjective engagement with the trans-cultural media, I conducted participant observation and ethnographic interviews with 31 Korean women in their twenties or thirties who have read Japanese girls' comics at least once in their lifetime. Deeming globalization a complicated, ambiguous, and multilateral process, I found that my informants had consumed Japanese shoujo manga as active participants rather than passive receivers. Strongly identifying themselves with the feminized, culturally hybridized texts, they had experienced and negotiated three cultures --- Korean, Japanese, and Western cultures --- in a glocal context. In sum, the women I interviewed had dwelt primarily in Korea consuming mainly Westernized images carried mostly by the Japanese media, thus intersecting the local and the global. This project aspired to position the country's gendered cultural hybridity on the globe and to expand the knowledge on hybridized culture in Asia. I anticipate that this empirical analysis will fill the research niche of cultural hybridity, which is in dire need of a gendered perspective. |
