Ⅰ. INTRODUCTION

This paper is meant as a theoretical provocation, as provocative as the artists described within it. It is also meant to be more an informed supposition and tentative hypothesis than a thorough theoretical treatise. However, it is deeply grounded in data-as-“cultural signals” that have started to define a clear pattern of discourse, of which I am attempting to make meaningful theoretical sense. It weds ethnographic observations with parallel cultural signals picked up in in the field of media production seen on screens with examples seen on the street (for more on “field” to “desk” research, see Gomes et al), all of which point in the direction of a sea change in the nature of women’s gender roles in Korean society, at least for young people.

The photograph and caption with which I began this paper (see Fig. 1) can open a conversation about the agent provocateur. The model (as a) “Bebe” appears in this photo as her bukae (literally “sub-character” or alter-ego). The bukae gives artistic cover while providing aesthetic space in which to make socially charged assertions that come from her bon-kae (“original character” or official identity). The artistic work by photographer and graphic artist Yoon Jihyun or @chic_cookie embodies and exemplifies Saba Mahmood’s notion of “docile agency.” It is, from the model and photographer’s point of view, a feminist statement, using art as cover. But since this term implies “docility” and perhaps a deficiency of agentic power, I propose herein to call it “complaisant agency” in that it deals with artists using accepted aesthetics within a field—they are feigning compliance or complicity, but create transgressive art while maintaining the plausible deniability afforded by semiotic play.

Fig. 1

Korean Instagram model @bebe_min__ poses in the picture “Bebe.” (베베). 2022, taken by artist Yoon Jihyun. While the picture is deliberately provocative and sexually enticing along the lines of the sub/master trend that the model and photographer believe many Korean men find attractive, the concept (according to the model) is to radically assert her desire as grounding the look, and her agentic desire to submit, which is a function of her control, in which any male “master” is actually a mere accessory.

For some, this kind of art has become a staging ground for feminist artistic production. This is not the top-down, Big Feminism that is the realm of lettered academics and prominent activists. The art I discuss here, I argue, takes place on the smaller screens and in the pockets of the people, constituting a different kind Small Screen Feminism grounded in reality on the “street level” of Layli Phillips’¹⁾ “feminism” (Phillips et al 2006, 274) The pro-woman/womanist/feminist artists discussed in this paper have to operate under semiotic “cover” to not seem overtly feminist, or use the term “feminist.” This speaks to an older imperative to not rock any social boats, along the lines of how any mention of social issues in earlier Korean hip hop would elicit a social backlash (Anderson 2020, 126).

In addition to the standard textual analysis, this research utilizes a form of photo-sartorial elicitation (Hurt and Jang 2018, 17) to identify and contextualize examples of emergent feminist performance art as they bubble up from the depths of everyday life as organic, in-the-wild expressions of sentiment about gender, representation, and power in a society that is actively allergic to anything having to do with overt “feminism.” This paper also connects what is happening on the ground on handheld screens with the cultural texts being produced high in the stratosphere of the Korean culture industry’s K-pop videos and dances, which are also sites of feminist statements amidst a myriad number of shifts in subject, tone, and execution found in the K-pop genre and screened across the planet.

Ⅱ. DOCILE AGENCY

All of the theorists mentioned in the present paper inevitably are grounded by (or are in conversation with) Saba Mahmood’s concept of “docile agency” (2001), which is a way to understand the seemingly contradictory act of thinking or existing counter to the ideology within which one finds oneself, especially when it comes to being a woman in conservative Islam or a putative feminist within the K-pop performance field. With this incredibly facile concept, one can understand Mahmood’s example of the zar sub-religion in the Sudan, which is a “widely practiced healing cult that uses Islamic idioms and spirit mediums and is largely comprised of women” in a more nuanced way, and as a place of creating a space of spiritual resistance, or at least a space where domination cannot enter, even if no fighting or other concrete action is taken. Indeed, in a society where the “official ideology” of Islam is dominated and controlled by men, the zar practice may be understood as a space of subordinate discourse, and “a medium for the cultivation of women’s consciousness.” Importantly, Mahmoud stresses that “this in itself is a means of resisting and setting limits to domination” (Mahmood 2001, 205-206). In addressing the limitation of white, western feminism’s tendency to only locate agency in terms of active, obvious resistance with guns or picket signs, Mahmood identifies the unlikely mode of docility, which she warns “although we have come to associate docility with abandonment of agency, the term literally implies the malleability required of someone to be instructed in a particular skill of knowledge — meaning that carries less a sense of passivity, and more that of a struggle, effort, exertion, and achievement” (2001, 210). Mahmood offers the example of a concert pianist who has endured years of training and pain, and sacrifice, quite willingly, and then later uses these acquired skills in her craft, to become a brilliant performer on her own terms. Interestingly, by framing the concept in terms of the willingness to subject oneself to years of training in order to develop the proper performative skills-as-habitus, the concept offers itself as perfect for application to the adjacent field of dance.

Crucially in Mahmood’s concept of “docile agency,” she finishes her framing of the term by quoting Judith Butler in saying “the subject, who would resist such norms is in itself enabled, if not produced, by such norms” (Mahmood 2001, 211). This is how someone can mount resistance within the inherently exploitative, sexist, and sometimes even misogynist field of K-pop once known for “slave contracts” and still full of whispered stories of sexual exploitation by male executives and sponsors.

K-pop stars’ potential docile agency may lie in the market. The K-pop audience has shifted to be more responsive to “self-produced” idols telling more personal, authentic stories more obviously filled with authorship and agency (as opposed to the same culture factory-style of music production filled with saccharine, generic pap) and the demand for edgier songs making authentic, agentic, artistic statements that speak to actual social discourses bubbling up on local social media and in the hearts (and smartphones) of Korean netizens. Given audience desire for authenticity, the appearance of heavily agentic texts penned and performed by eager K-pop stars in response to a global audience increasingly hungry for it is genuinely unsurprising.

Fig. 2

Jessi provokes in her “Zoom In” music video. (“줌”). 2022, screenshot taken from YouTube by the author.

Ⅲ. HO IN CHARGE

Jessi (legally Jessica Ho)’s “Zoom” is not only the anthem for the Korean Instagram generation but a masterful work of semiotic legerdemain that is as laser-tight in its womanist orientation as it confounds any efforts at categorization into the commonly understood term/idea of “feminist” in Korean social discourse today. Much like Jessi’s sleight-of-hand in her bombastically bold track “Cold-Blooded Ho,” she maximizes shock value by invoking the moniker “ho” to describe herself and other socially transgressive and cool women, while also maintaining the plausible deniability that she is simply name-checking herself in the track. She plays the same game of sexy semiotics at the beginning of her “Zoom” video as she taunts, “I see you lookin’ at my P-I-C (I know), 크게 땡겨, 땡겨, 좀 더 땡겨봐 봐, 기똥차지” (“Pull (zoom in) big, pull a little more, ain’t it amazing”), which in the Instagram context of the video that is the overarching metaphor of the song, refers to using the thumb and index finger to zoom in on a picture in a touchscreen, but can also be read to refer to pulling, pulling (the literal meaning of the verb ddaeng-gi-da in Korean) and pulling big/hard) while looking at the picture, to imply masturbation, which also makes perfect sense in terms of the song’s larger context. In addition, 기똥차지/giddong chaji seems cheekily intended as a penis reference due to its near-homonym, aural similarity to the Korean slang term for penis, which many Korean Americans would pronounce as “cha-ji.” Jessi’s stage persona is that of a brash, verbal provocateur. Her constant, seemingly purposeful strings of double entendrés exemplify the kind of subtextual brinksmanship that seems to be a source of satisfaction in not only the execution of her art but of the other feminist/womanist artists that will be mentioned in this paper.

There has been a rise in the popularity of street dance performance as marked by the explosion of K-pop cover dance across the globe in the last few years (Saeji 2023), as well as the explosion of cover dance groups performing on the streets in Seoul as part of the post-pandemic bounce back to normal. In 2021 Street Woman Fighter, an elimination-style performance contest to determine the best K-pop cover dance group became a television phenomenon. This punctuated the recent explosion of interest in this mode of performance. Therefore it is important to talk about the impact of artistic expression and authorial agency as interpellated through the dancing body -- all done without culture industry puppet masters and producers dictating the terms of performance on the ground.

However theoretically facile Saba Mahmood’s concept of “docile agency” (Mahmood 2001) may be in defining a space where one can stage the “capacity to subvert norms” without having to necessarily take (possibly strategically disadvantageous) concrete action, the term itself is semantically loaded and often engenders more negative regard than her brilliant concept deserves. Therefore, I posit the notion of a “complaisant agency” that, like “docile agency” encompasses the meaning of willingly consenting to acquiring skills or the requisite tools needed in a field in which one cannot mount formal, visible resistance, while yet appearing to actively flourish and emotionally comply to standards and behaviors of the field. To continue Mahmood’s performance metaphor, the pianist would subject herself to the rigors required to master her art, while seeming to happily acquiesce to and cooperate with all other associated practices, types of emotional labor, or modes of comportment that would result in being seen as becoming an exemplary member of the field. It would be helpful to be not just compliant and cooperative, but actively complaisant as a performer.

In this way, the performer can take both authorial and personal pleasure in the performance, even within the constraints of the aesthetic requirements of the field that are exploitative or even oppressive. Jessi takes sexy, edgy potshots at the reserved standards of an industry that cannot contain her, but from the safe zone afforded her by linguistic play across the Korean-English divide, behind the shield of double entendre. This is the safe zone from which Jessi flexes her sex in her “Coldblooded” video (Fig. 3), as her dancers’ hands soon travel along the lines of their pudenda while Jessi proclaims her “kimchi so delicious (it) need(s) a Michelin.” Here, it is important to note that despite the spoken line being “kimchi” with the subtextual implication being that “kimchi” is a stand in for “pussy,” this is not mere conjecture, since the caption in the official YouTube video explicitly reads “p*ssy” while being backgrounded by unmistakable contextualization of the word being the slang term for her vagina, and the choreography also allows for no other interpretation. The choreography is as lewd as the lyrics, and is complaisantly self-sexualizing even as it is socially transgressive and possibly off-putting.

Fig. 3

Jessi’s dancers undulate in her “Coldblooded” (콜드블러디드) video. 2022, screenshot taken from YouTube by the author.

There is a niggling problem here, though. It is the one faced by pornography, a field that is sited (and often cited) as the space where pleasure becomes complaisance cum complicity. Embodied acts of complaisant performance, whether in fashion modeling, K-pop dancing, or performance are often the inflection points between where agency is enacted and evil is abetted. When Jessi says that her “pussy needs a Michelin” while the dancer slides her hand up and across her own pudenda, she risks losing control of interpretations inside this zone of easily contestable semiotic meaning that is also the very source of her aesthetic cover (i.e. changing “pussy” to “kimchi” might not suffice as cover and she might “get caught”). This is always a danger, but at least she has some degree of semiotic cover — a defilade of contestable meanings — behind which she can take her artistic shots.

Ⅳ. GENDER WARS: BUKAE AS DEFILADE

Put simply (if not glibly), South Korea is in the midst of a gender war, literally “젠더 戰” (Son 2016, 36), with the battles being waged electronically and on screens, from the glowing fields of social media services to the glittering images and icons on the millions of screens around the country (Lee 2023, 5976-5977). If one is paying attention to music videos coming out in the powerfully influential K-pop field these days, one might discern the signs of a nascent feminist movement, at least in the field of the video art that accompanies the release of the K-pop songs that define major social discourses about gender in Korean society. For example, Bibi’s “Animal Farm” and G-IDLE’s “Nxde” demonstrate clear and obvious assertions of feminist pop art. But before talking about feminist pop art products produced in a top-down fashion, we must first make a quick stop to check in with and examine Instagram, an important space of public representations of gender and womanhood. On a daily basis, on Korean Instagram the Korean culture industry productions utilize notions of the bukae or bu-kae-rak-teo, “sub-character”, which really took off as the concept of an alter-ego from around 2018 (Bak 2022, 29).

One might think South Korean culture should be the last place on earth to evolve an edgy, social media-based space in which to make stark and socially brash assertions about Korean femininity and womanhood. Given the extremely harsh history of “social disciplining” (Hurt 2016a) of the woman’s body in South Korea media cultures, such as the recent social caricature of the “soybean paste girl” (Song 2014, 442), these feminist moves on South Korean screens might seem out-of-place in that they place the practitioner in great social danger. Yet, it would be erroneous to think that Korean society is somehow anathema to feminist modes of thinking just because it happens to be particularly dangerous to be publicly identified with that concept today.

Feminist (or womanist) thought is baked into Korean notions of modernity itself. The “women’s question” was posed in a social conversation that was taking place around the time of the Donghak Movement in the 1890s (Kim 2013, 66-67), when the issue of women’s social disenfranchisement as a point antithetical to the development of the nation was raised. Interestingly, in the Korean historical context, consideration of feminist notions such as education for girls or the role of women in general under Confucianism came first and foremost before nearly any other issue considered to be a necessary part of the modernization that was generally perceived to be a positive social good (Yuh 2021). Indeed, the feminist publication Sinyoja (“New Woman”) predated almost all the other nationally-published publications now commonly associated with the advent of Korean modernity and modern notions of Koreanness itself. Indeed, Kim Yung-Hee writes,

In fact, the journal ignited the spark for Korean intellectuals’ debates on pressing social issues, including their scrutiny of colonialism and in imaging the future of Korea...Soon, any serious interrogation of Korea’s destiny under Japanese rule was incomplete without invoking the problem of women (2013, 45-46).

But at the same time that Sinyoja and women’s education were raising feminist issues, there was naturally resistance to the changing role of women in society. By the time of the Japanese Colonial era, the subject of women’s consumption and comportment had become an issue. Indeed, even in the 1920s, the editor of a popular culture magazine lamented the deplorable state of gender and morality with a commentary that reads like it was posted on a Korean anti-feminist message forum yesterday. “She has her hair cut short as if she were a traditional artist and wears high heels. Nothing she wears is cheap…The majority of MODERN GIRLS are harlots and prostitutes, and MODERN BOYS are sons of capitalists and bourgeois” (Quoted in Kim 2017, 194). The description here requires little update or alteration to allude to a 21st-century young woman holding a Starbucks takeout cup, the embodiment of the “soybean paste girl” (Song 2014, 442). Just as the “soybean paste girl” has been a politically reactionary response to the perception of “uppity” women not staying in their proper places in society in the 21st century, so was the notion of the “modern girl” a social admonition of the same kind, though the latter was part of the global shift in women’s social roles in the early to mid-twentieth century.

Still, it has become socio-political habit to think about feminism as by definition outside the realm of Koreanness itself, especially after 1945, when previous positivity towards modernity was tempered by suspicion of Westernization. This is when there was a doubling down on the older, Confucian roles for women (Kim 2009, 248-249). In terms of feminist thought and action, the Korean case is not just an iterative version of more western movements toward social equality. Korean feminist theory and praxis was much more practical and concerned with addressing specific problems such as employment conditions in the 1970s or sexual harassment in the workplace in the 1980s. It was in the 1990s, along with democratization of society, that more concrete headway was made in public policy through women-focused non-governmental organizations having their concerns be concretely adopted into the policies of major political parties. This resulted in major changes such as allowing women to be the heads of family registries, the creation of an Equal Employment Opportunity Act, and the creation of a Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, in Korean called the Ministry of Women and the Family (Lee and Chin 2007, 1210-1211).

By the time the 21st century was truly upon us, and indeed after 1999, when the Korean Constitutional Court declared that extra points being awarded in government exams for military service was unconstitutional, a perception had coalesced among many men that the ground had shifted underneath them to the point that rectification had become necessary. An anti-feminist backlash was underway and in a new, social media world, Twitter would become its herald. In the early aughts until 2016’s infamous femicide stabbing incident at Gangnam Station, a more battle-ready and fire-baptized Korean feminism would coalesce in digital spaces such as when the radical feminist group Megalia (and its more radical SWAT team-like force WOMAD) formed itself to fight against the misogynist antics of meninist group Ilbe in the Korean message board DC Inside (Lee 2023, 5976-5977).

As it would be impossible to give a history of the complex advent of total, digital genderwar on the Korean Internet, it must suffice to say that by the time Megalia/WOMAD had become the digital shock troops for “feminism” in Korea around the 2010s and in fact had become metonymic with the very notion of feminism itself (Oh 2023, 115-116), it had become something quite practically different from the theoretical idealism of academic and NGO feminists. The key point to understand is that Korean, Megalia-style digital feminism had (to) become a “troll feminism” designed to wage and win online battles. Indeed, the best way to understand it is through Jeong Euisol’s (2020, 165) notion that the Megalia/WOMAD turn can be defined as a “troll feminism” that is in it for the “lulz” and concrete wins:

Within this ‘lulz’ fetishism, which ‘obscures the social conditions and interpersonal strife’ and disconnects the object of the ‘lulz’ from the ‘emotional context’ where it arises (30), Megalians refuse to apply feminism’s intersectional criticism to their activism. Rather, they prioritize winning the battles, or games, which provides the shared or vicarious triumph and ‘hit feel’ – the feeling of satisfaction arising from the damage caused to an enemy by a user’s (metaphorical) hit in online battles – that establishes connectivities between ‘man-haters.’ (Jeong 2020, 38-39)

Given the recent, short history of globally-connected Internet and the use of overseas-based social media in South Korea, with Korean users actually using non-Korean media services outside of the “walled garden” of South Korea (Weigand 2009), along with South Korea’s “Dog Poop Girl” 2005 incident having inaugurated the era of cyberbullying by online mobs (Klang and Madison 2015, 155-156), and a great deal of social suspicion around cameras and photography (Hurt 2016), the growth of a vibrant assortment of Korean image-based, digital subcultures on American social media platforms such as Instagram is actually somewhat surprising.

In fact, it was from around the early 1980s that the term cho-sang-gweon (the right to control one’s facial image) jumped from the realm of highly specialized legal jargon in relation to civil lawsuits over commercial misuse of images into popular consciousness as an inappropriate use of photographs to become a site of social anxiety. With the weaponization of photographs mostly aimed in the direction of women in the days of myriad mini-scandals in the early 2000s Cyworld social network, the Korean Pandora TV (the “Pink Pajama Girl” incident being the best example (Hurt 2016b). This became an entire decade characterized by the highly stylized and pornified eoljjang phenomenon (Cho 2011, 11). This marked the advent of young women putting their images onto social media for public, visual consumption, which both seems to make perfect sense while being quite possibly the most imprudent social act imaginable in South Korean culture.

Ⅴ. SCREEN FEMINISM AND “ THE PRODUCTION OF NEW VISION ”

Legendary media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously quipped that the “medium is the message” – as true in his era as in the case of K-pop music videos and clips. Here I assert that a new kind of feminism/womanism is being spoken to, or at least a new mode of woman-oriented consciousness. In thinking about how this might work in the reception of K-pop videos, it is useful to talk about Teresa de Lauretis’s “cine-feminism and the creation of vision” as we think about how a feminist point-of-view can be formed, focused through, and intermediated/interpellated through screens and their flickering images:

By “the creation of vision” I mean two things: (1) the creation of a vision or a view of the world that extends beyond the screen to address, speak to, and include the viewer; and (2) the production of vision itself, the creation of a way of seeing…The production of new vision gives spectators not only new ways of seeing what is already present in a culture’s field of vision (for example, women, who are always represented, in one way or another, in each society and culture) but actually creates new objects of vision, the possibility of seeing something that otherwise remains outside a given culture’s visual and aural field (the example here would be “women seen through women’s eyes”). (De Lauretis 2008, 6)

De Lauretis was talking about a “cine-feminism” that is not an overt argument to consciously assert a feminist political agenda, but rather a way to assert and provide a virtual space to imagine oneself in a woman-oriented space, in a woman-oriented way. Crucially, this does not have to feel political, or require a political level of agreement. It can just do the work of putting people in the place to think about women, with specific politics perhaps coming later, perhaps not. Alas, such is the unique power of the digital, as intermediated through screens across the nation, to usher in a new way to be feminist/womanist. Screen feminism/womanism is as deeply digital and personal as old school, western feminism was analog and tended to manifest as overtly political. This is a fundamentally large difference that McLuhan would likely consider as significant as the impact on voting of television in the United States.

In K-Pop (and on Instagram), performance is engaged in just such a “production of new vision” around women in Korean society. This relies on the newer, screen feminism since the 1990s identified by Korean film scholar Park Hyeon Seon as “Korean cinema as a global mediascape” (2020, 91), or to co-opt the language of Marvel films, a new “cinematic universe” in which women can imagine themselves into self-awareness.

Before going any further into a smaller-sized notion of screen feminism played out in the pocket-sized screens of Korea, it is necessary to circle back to extend the discussion of the aforementioned bukae (and bonkae). As I explained, the bukae/ bonkae identity bifurcation is necessary to mount embodied artistic expression that often violates highly politicized gender rules, roles, and norms in Korean society. I have treated the issue of the bukae before in somewhat greater detail (Hurt 2022), and although doing so is not the main goal of the present paper, it is important to clarify how the portmanteau bu(sub)-kae(character)/alter-ego differs from the western idea of the “finsta”/”fake Instagram”, especially in relation to the Korean referent of the bon(original)-kae(character), or one’s official/legal/public identity.

This is unlike the use bifurcation apparent with the Rinsta (“real Instagram”) and Finsta (“fake Instagram”) chronicled by Kang and Wei in 2018, in which American participants described divergent uses of different Instagram accounts that generally allowed users to engage in posting things with off-color content that might not be appropriate for more “authentic” posts linked to a “real” identity. The Korean notion of bukae/bonkae extends beyond just using different social media accounts for different purposes, such as hiding one’s posts from parent and teachers, or one’s romantic partner. Although there is almost nothing published about the Korean bukae/bonkae phenomenon in English, the Korean academic literature has been talking about what I describe as a true identity bifurcation across different Instagram accounts that convey “multi-persona representations that show various occupations, describe different types of hobbies, and depict situations pertaining to various social roles” (Kim JS 2021, 603).

Through my fieldwork in 2014 I noticed the explosively sudden rise in the popularity of Instagram in Korea, as well as the newer kinds of expression that began to take off there. I had already moved from documenting pure street fashion on the streets of Seoul, and as I increasingly saw the clothing as a mere lens through which to look at social norms around gender and identity expression, I began to see Instagram as more than just a dumping site for images and a means for simple communication. I staged a bukae identity as the account @seoulstreetstudios as a means to interact with the growing number of Korean Instagram-based models as a member of a broad field of Korean Instagramming, modeling, and photographing.

On the other end of the camera, a bukae account is often necessary for Korean women showing skin or sexual concepts in their feeds. And interestingly, these are not “fake” Instas or images anonymized with face-altering software, as in Figure 2, since the use of mosaics or facial blurring in this way is actually quite rare on Korean Instagram. The bukae provides an alternative space in which to mount curated identities that are legitimated by being perceived as professional endeavors that exist beyond the pictured subject. Interestingly, as the common half-joke goes, often one’s creative bukae is argued to be the bonkae, while the socially-recognized bonkae is just the bukae one uses to navigate in “normal” society that would never accept such a person(age). In this hypermodern way, “Kim Minji” is the pleasant woman who graduated from a top university with a degree in Economics and has a nice desk job, but her ordinary life is just a bukae for keeping up social appearances, while the bonkae might actually be the less socially acceptable wild persona. In this identity bifurcation, there is no agreed-upon “real” person. The undefined vagueness and duality between bonkae and bukae states defines a kind of quantum mechanics that allows either state to be real — depending on who is looking and why.

Pay models and emergent performance artists can more safely occupy visual space on Korean Instagram because the existence of the bukae defends the scantily-clad model from being forced into a Madonna-whore binary. The viewer, aware of the bukae/bonkae is forced to see her as an array of superimposed personages argued to at least be partially linked to entrepreneurial, artistic, or some kind of socially useful production.

Indeed, “feminism” as a stance, as signified by the loan-word descriptor from English that marks it as a foreign idea, is essentially a non-starter concept for most Koreans, not to mention a dangerous place to be seen by the digital public. As a nigh-scarlet letter for anyone to whom the word is pinned — as Irene from Red Velvet found out the hard way (Septiani and Prihatini 2022) —it is virtually impossible for a movement to coalesce around “feminism.” As it stands today, almost all the self-described performance artists I know on Korean Instagram are doing what can only be described as feminist work, yet they refuse to let themselves be described as “feminist,” since that can lead to social (media) suicide. Even obvious feminist texts such as those of K-pop performer Bibi avoid the term. None of the obvious feminists can publicly admit to being feminist, at least publicly or officially. Although it is usually inappropriate to ask directly, it seems clear that many of the young model/performance artists with whom I work regard “feminism” negatively, based on the way it has been defined in public, gender war discourse, despite engaging in what appears to be feminist work.

Yet there seems to be a third path. Alice Walker and Layli Maparyan’s “Womanism” (Maparyan 2012), as described in a Korean musical performance context by Kim Iljung (2021), seems to be the logical space within which to stage political statements about the status and/or the representation of women in Korean society. It could be both an aesthetic strategy as well as a psychic state that enervates those occupying the aesthetic-social space defined by artistic practice and bukae/bonkae states in superposition. Whether it is embodied through posing or dancing on screens, womanism-in-Korean practice interpellates agentic moves for a different kind of representation of women in society, as intermediated through new media forms that slowly become defined and given more power as hallyu. This will be the staging ground for a new kind of womanism in Korea, as opposed to an aping of American-style/western/white feminism. To wit:

Alice Walker, who first coined the term, defines “womanist” as “black feminist or feminist of color”. Furthermore, she emphasizes the inclusiveness of the idea: “Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female … Womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender” (Walker 1983: xi). Perhaps a more comprehensive definition comes from a womanist scholar, Layli Phillips, who defines womanism as “a social change perspective rooted in Black women’s and other women of color’s everyday experiences and everyday method of problem solving in everyday spaces, extended to the problem of ending all forms of oppression for all people, restoring the balance between people and the environment/nature, and reconciling human life with the spiritual dimension” (2006: xx). Womanism, Phillips argues, “is postmodernism at street level” (2006: xxxiv). (Kim IJ 2021, 232-233)

This is the kind of semiotically open-ended space of interpretation, a state of existential superposition between bonkae and bukae that all the figures above convey. This mode of attack, on the level of symbology and semiotics— as opposed to placards carried in street marches as in the history of western feminism — is where a Korean, womanist “feminism” can and is being waged. Korean Womanism in this context is a screen feminism in an on the ground, on the Korean “street” mode of execution. As such, the Korean “street” as the popular culture produced by everyday people, reflects back the “big screens” of the K-pop culture industry by producing their own cultural texts on the small screens of Instagram, and is one likely space where the Korean womanist movement will be waged. It is semiotically sly, with performers putting out artistic assertions in the protected realm of commercialized art, in bukae mode, pushing subtext that can be plausibly denied.

This analysis began with a brief consideration of Jessi’s videos “Zoom In” and “Coldblooded,” which I have considered womanist in their comportment as holistic, womanist statements more than feminist assertions taken piecemeal, dance move by move. To paraphrase Phillips above, Korea-based womanism is western feminism at Korean street level. It is easy to point out that the K-pop dance choreography that frames the undulating bodies in a male gaze that comprise most K-pop cover dance groups, and with the highly sexualized choreography inherent to the genre, both rely on a highly sexualized focus on female bodies and hence may actually be argued to be complicit with the mainstream male gaze and the over-sexualization of female bodies. However, I believe there is a different way to think about hyper-sexualized dance forms -- especially as they might lead to an arguably womanist agenda, as culture industry K-pop runs parallel to womanist formations on the ground, as glimpsed deep in the bowels of Korean Instagram. Indeed, it is easy to talk about the “derivatizing“ dancing (see Cahill 2014) that happened in 1st-generation K-pop as sexist, or even more recent dancing divas as womanist in orientation, even if it hard to describe the constituent parts of these the texts as “feminist.”

When we talk about K-pop and dance in the times of Girls’ Generation or the Wonder Girls, we are talking about generic, canned dancing devoid of agency or sense of authorship. The problem with how Girls’ Generation generically generates the idea of the Girl starts with the accidental pun of their name itself -- girls as objects of not only the gaze but commercial production, who are generated through the gyration of an army of hips. It is actually the polar opposite of the interpellation of myriad socio-structural forces through dance, and hence the bodies of individual women, which critical dance scholar Melissa Blanco-Borelli has described as “hip-gnosis” (2016, 20). Nay, armies of dancing girls from Girls’ Generation to the Wonder Girls and beyond have channeled greater structural imperatives through culture industry specialist-choreographed dances designed to maximize prurient, visceral interests, and thereby, profit. In this sense of interest-aligned interpellation through dances devoid of the artists’ agency, Girls’ Generation demonstrated culture industry hypnosis, and not agentic, subjectivity-filled hip-gnosis.

Ⅵ. BEYOND OBJECTIFICATION

When it comes to the recent wave of self-producing idols in the “fourth generation” (Cahyadi 2021) of K-pop in which the performers themselves are writing the music, choreographing their own moves, and setting the tone of their performances as political statements on stages and screens, the question of agency becomes much more interesting, since the entire production is agentic from the beginning. Subjectivity can come to the fore within a field that is obviously obsessed with the administrative and authorial control of production companies and managers. That is why a discussion about “objectification” has dominated the conversation about K-pop dance. Since the undulations and gyrations of an earlier mode of K-pop dance have indeed given the feeling that there was a lack of agency and authorship in the final artistic product, there was a tendency to talk about the sexual objectification of K-pop music videos (See Kim 2011). Generally, the conversation has been about the fact of the commercial use of girls’ bodies in visual/musical productions, but not the ways their dance was or was not possessed of obvious authorship or agency. Indeed, they were pre-programmed dancing bodies, as opposed to artists.

Still, actual “objectification” was never necessarily the problem to begin with. Influential articles such as Kim Yeran’s “Idol Republic: The Global Emergence of Girl Industries and the Commercialization of Girl Bodies” ardently made the point of objectification of girls’ bodies in a commercial context as an absolute negative. Yet, as time and the evolution of representation within the enduring field of K-Pop has shown, “sexualization” was also difficult to argue as inherently problematic within a creative field in which sex and sexual desire itself is baked into the very grammar of the medium’s language, if not the product itself. In a similar vein, Ann C. Cahill points out that the fact of being objectified is not in itself problematic. In Cahill’s analysis of the putative objectification of sex workers, who are stigma-adjacent to K-pop dancers, she warns, “using objectification to analyze the ethics of sex work assumes that being identified with one’s body is necessarily degrading. The objectification analysis rests on the ethical diagnosis of being reduced to one’s body, a diagnosis that neatly positions the body as subordinate to the allegedly more valuable, non-bodily elements of identity” (Cahill 2014, 843).” Indeed, she continues, “using objectification. An ethical analysis of sex work, reinscribes the familiar hierarchy of mind over body, a hierarchy that feminist philosophy has correctly worked hard to deconstruct” (Ibid).

The useful theoretical tool here is the concept of “derivatization,” which involves not just being objectified, but being denied subjectivity:

To derivatize is to treat another subject as if the only salient aspects of his or her subjectivity are those that align with the subjective elements of one’s self (or another privileged self) The waiter who must radiate endless, cheerfulness and patience; the mother whose worth is measured by how quickly and completely she meets her child needs and wants; the athlete who is expected to not only take enormous physical risks on a regular basis, but also, for some mysterious reason, demonstrate moral righteousness: all of these are derivatized subjects. (Cahill 2014, 845)

Sexual objectification is not necessarily a problem. But if a certain idol or performer is only understood by fans as an aspect of their sexual appeal to the people gazing at them, and they are treated only in terms of that narrow aspect of that expectation, then a problematic derivatization has occurred. This seems to actually be the problem pointed out by “objectification” but which never actually speaks to the heart of the problem in terms of being robbed of agency and subjectivity. In the top-down, robotic mode of K-pop performance, the end product just seemed less of an individual’s artistic statement than a forced performance, much like American cheerleading routines. This is certainly not the case with the new modes of K-pop, in which extreme, hyper-subjectivity as strong, personal statements by individual, “self-produced” (Cahyadi 2021) performers are the norm. This is no longer Girls’ Generation’s performance of Tiqqun’s young-girl by doing generic dances for an obvious male audience. Acts such as New Jeans are comprised of individuals making agentic statements about real girls.

As we talk about K-pop dance and derivatization, and even possibly recent K-pop dance as a staging ground for feminist political art, it is important to remember that these new ways to dance (or not dance) are not necessarily “feminist” in the individual parts of their form (as in “this particular dance move is feminist” or “this one is not”), but they function as a different model of dance in how it interpellates, within a womanist space, not just the imperatives of a commercially-concerned male gaze but a different use of dancing bodies and dance itself in the larger sense of its socio-political function.

Ⅶ. DANCING LESS

In her “Fast Forward” music video, Jeon Somi sings about just “going through the motions” towards the desired reality of her eventual connection to her most significant lover. She seems to drive the point home with dance motions that appear simple, “going through motions,” minimalist, TikTok-style, mini-moves. She reduces her apparent level of engagement in presenting herself as the dancing subject. In her performance, she goes through the motions by seeming to follow along in a procession of more distinct-appearing, self-contained moves that feel like they are lifted straight out of short-form video content, rather than heavily planned, choreographed moves common in a K-pop video.

She dances, but in an obligatory way, in a series of sequences perfect for TikTok/ Reels, both on-trend and clearly not designed for derivatizing, visual consumption. In the beginning of the video, she literally fast forwards to the inevitable moment where she is spurned by a bad boy, and engages in the increasingly popular act of taking direct, physical revenge on the boy in question, before asserting symbolic control through rounds of quickly repeated dances in which she gives the prompts followed by the male dancers immediately reproducing her move in the same way that TikTok/Reels works through processions of prompts and emulations.

In so doing, she rivets their gaze upon her, and centers herself within it as a means to control their looking, to control them completely. Most interestingly, she sets the tone — as she sets the TikTok-style, memetic rules, and sets the terms of the dancing through a playful series of moves to the sequence that immediately follows of her dancing then the men following those moves in formation, until we see a group of dancing men being remote controlled in formation in a way that is not only reminiscent of the remote controlled fashion of girl group dances in the Girls’ Generation era of K-pop, but also in the remote controlled fashion that TikTok-style dance memetically propagates across the world, with the undulations and gesticulation in a single video infinitely replicated.

Somi is displaying power here by de-objectifying and re-subjectifying the viewer’s gaze upon her — a young, beautiful K-pop star — in a way that prevents the derivatizing gaze from becoming a major mode of looking. She is able to achieve a deft, sleight-of-hand switch in which she takes the genre expectation of the video out of the derivatizing glare of a center stage K-pop idol doing purposeful dances for the video viewer and downshifts it into the disposable and flighty, insignificant fare of a TikTok meme, where one can look lightly. Not only does the viewer place less emotional stock in the dance, but the viewer is placed into a position of not just watching an idol dance sexily for them, but one in which the idol is displaying her hipgnotic power as a flex upon others on the screen.

Somi is empowered through dancing less and seemingly utilizing what dancing is done to hip(g)notize more strategically, utilizing the kinaesthetic empathy of dance to delimit the gaze by interpellating to empower a more agentic kind of dance, or even the choice not to dance.

Similarly, what we can see in the productions of self-producing fourth-generation idols, such as in (G)I-DLE’s “Nxde” (Fig. 4) is a space in which K-pop dancing girls have repurposed a mode of their putative subjugation (dance) into a different direction and even defined a new kind of political statement, hence producing political art. Indeed, in (G)I-DLE’s “Nxde” music video, Soyeon notably only puts herself on display or actually dances in the video for the camera and the audience/(our) gaze in the space of metatextual commentary in which she is playing roles as dance/modeling tropes within the text, as Marilyn Monroe in (in)famous media moments, as a burlesque dancer on a stage (within a stage), as herself as a paparazzified subject within a tabloid newspaper, as a movie star in a glass case at an auction, as a dancing girl in an 1830s Fantascope, as Jessica Rabbit, as herself (perhaps?) in an Instagram Live, and finally, as an art object on display that finally becomes a printed artwork that eventually pulls Banksy’s best trick by proceeding to auto-share itself within the frame. She thereby pulls off the biggest magic trick of any K-pop performer dismissed as an idol and therefore something less-than an artist. She ascends to the point of becoming auctioned off as a high art object before promptly destroying the art piece. In Banksy’s case, this was a work of metatextual tricksterism because he eventually increased the value of the artwork by destroying it and hence succeeded in generating another bit at auction through the very means he was dismissed as a non-artist or just a miscreant hack, i.e. a mere vandal. This was Banksy’s ultimate trick. For Soyeon’s part, her ultimate trick in this video is the obvious message that she is laying herself “nude” before our gaze, in a sort of Billie Holiday “all of me” moment in which very little of Soyeon is actually visible for the audience to see.

Fig. 4

Idol Jeon Soyeon’s non-dancing in “NxDE.” (누드), 2023, screen capture from YouTube by the author.

Soyeon tricks the viewer by seeming to show all of herself, by exposing herself, especially in ostensibly revealing poses and reenacted, risqué shows, but in the end, she’s playfully hiding, having revealed next to nothing of her actual self–the video is all bukae. This is the deftest sleight-of-hand about the video itself, and in terms of the complaisant agency of which she is in complete command, the entire premise of the video is that it’s a piece of semiotic trickery, a headfake, and one punctuated by the end of the video, in which she “strips” with her back to the camera before jumping back to the (non)revealing trickery of the Fantascope girl, before drawing a “luxury nude” that is merely a roughly-drafted sketch in a fancy, wooden frame. As the in-video audience (and us) expectantly and impatiently wait for the reveal (which is both the climax of the video and the resolution to the song’s crescendo), the drawing – and the video – shreds itself, leaving us with nothing to see. Soyeon has not laid herself bare. The video – and Soyeon – revealed nothing, outside of our irrepressible desire to gawk, and our propensity to fall for the oldest piece of tomfoolery and its inevitable punchline of “Made you look!”

Videos such as Bibi’s “Animal Farm,” (G)I-DLE’s “Nxde,” and Jessi’s “Coldblooded” function within a society and a particular field (K-pop) rife with misogyny and sexism. Strategic, complaisant agency is the only way for them to succeed as performers, while successfully connecting with an audience that demands more artistically sophisticated, personally authentic musical productions.

Notably, Soyeon pulls a different “trick” by dancing/exhibiting herself only in terms of metatextual, self-contained tropes within the text that actually contain little of her actual self. Bibi, who has previously proven her dancing abilities, simply does not dance in “Animal Farm,” but instead leans hard into the cinematic mode as she re-enacts a scene from Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill as she murders a tableful of man-pigs that had intended her to be their main course. The message that she is literally taking a stab at the patriarchy is lost on no one. Yet, since being accused of being a feminist in Korea is tantamount to a scarlet letter in today’s climate of cultural misogyny in South Korea, Bibi denies the obvious, “You say you don’t know what the MV means? I’m glad you watched it. There aren’t any meanings” (Han 2022).

Indeed, Bibi must play the game and remain a complaisantly typical, Korean K-pop star, despite the fact that claiming absence of subtext in that video is about as believable Orwell claiming he was actually only talking about animal life in his original book of the same name. What is most strikingly radical as a K-pop idol is her refusal to dance, even as part of the narrative itself, for either the man-pigs on screen or for us, the audience. Just as Somi refuses to exert herself, or Jessi leaves most of the dancing to the Street Woman Fighter winning dance team.

Indeed, there is power in not dancing. One of the first instances demonstrating the power of a woman not dancing is found in CL’s “Dr. Pepper” video, in which she strategically deployed the semiotic tools of what I have termed “symbolic misogyny” in which she places herself with the other (male) rappers in the video, moving her body in clear mimicry of the male rappers, differentiating herself from the other women in the video by taking on the accoutrements of female sexualization in stiletto heels. Indeed, the sexy, female backup dancers are marked in the video as those who cannot wear heels — and in fact, they are prominently shown several times wearing only socks (Hurt 2018, 182). Crucially, the only time CL displays herself in sexualized dancing motion, she is alone in the frame. Her sexualization is definitively not mixed with the sexualized consumption of the other women in the video. CL is not only symbolically declaring herself a man, she is declaring herself to be in a different category (and literally above) the other women.

CL is masterfully complaisant in how she follows nearly all the conventions of K-Pop and rap music videos to the semiotic letter, yet manages to subvert being placed into their typical, derivatizing crosshairs by decoupling sexualized objects from her personage as she becomes a semiotically defined, symbolic man. She is complaisant within the parameters of genre conventions, yet manages to avoid being beholden to those same conventions. By engaging in the “symbolic misogyny” of the other men in the video as a symbolic man herself, she is light-years away from being able to be called anything resembling a “feminist.” Yet, she declares herself a powerful, agnatically enabled woman.

In the end, the space provided by complaisant agency from the dance of the big screens of K-pop production down to the small screens of Instagram run by the receivers of these messages is the staging area for mounting aesthetic resistance, all under the cover of art, and affords the artist a social buffer zone from a system that would otherwise swiftly snuff out any embers of obvious ideological or social nonconformity.

Ⅷ. CONCLUSION, THE GIRL GAZE, AND THE EMERGENCE OF NEW JEANS

Complaisant agency can be best understood as an aesthetic strategy employed within a womanist space in which political acts can be carried out with a liberating, plausible deniability under the cover of art and artistic expression. In the Korean Instagram-informed cultural context bukae can provide an additional layer of protection even behind the dual shields of art as cover and the prophylactic function of hiding transgressiveness inside subtext.

New Jeans is all the rage now because their target audience seems to be young women like them, who tend to help sidestep the derivatizing gaze problem, and who speak more directly to that audience by not centralizing dancing in their K-pop practice, as they approach dance as something as incidental and casual. Their goal is relatability to a girl demographic by dint of their more casual, less sexualized dancing based on TikTok-style moves. They are attainably aspirational and not fantastically aspirational, which a Girls’ Generation video of the past would have been and a BlackPink video is now. A pair of actual new jeans, apropos of the concept, are supposed to fit comfortably and casually, yet be pretty and stylish; they fit well in the mirror and flatter in general. The group of performers easily occupy a space of complaisant agency that may or may not provide a space to transgress, but no group is more complaisantly pleasant than New Jeans right now. They are where the bukae and bonkae comfortably converge, flickering and becoming one another interchangeably, and New Jeans’ power shines through as ultra-adept, master transmitters of dance’s power to influence and spread ideas through kinesthetic empathy that can be used to interpellate all sorts of social messages, as New Jeans sometimes chooses to do.

In sum, New Jeans wraps up teenage Korean girl angst and awkwardness in newtro/retro packaging as they interpellate the standard social messages and machinations urging girls to be pretty, desirable, and actively desired by someone. New Jeans does the moves most girls want to do and can imagine themselves doing; they wear the clothes girls want (and are wanted) to wear, and they are adept at being the girls that girls want to be. They have perfected a new, girled gaze that is constitutive of a new, screen feminism whose main product is a “new vision” of female identity that can include feminism or womanism as a set of specific political concerns if one wants. This girled gaze perfected by New Jeans looks for (and projects) a fantastic, projected desire for an idyllic, female identity while interpellatively screening Korean consumer society’s need to have girls consume the right things and be the right way of girl. K-pop girl groups have abandoned a target audience of middle-aged men who consume K-pop girls as objects largely devoid of agency. Instead, groups like New Jeans have now defined a semiotic mode of engagement in which the complaisant agency of a Girled Gaze can command the attention of eyeballs across the globe and move even more product than before, because now the prime mover of said product(s) is the disposable income commanded by teenage girls wanting, in the end, to be the girls on the screen.