Girls' Generation? Gender, (Dis)Empowerment and K-pop

"The hottest phrase in Korea nowadays is undeniably 'girl group.' But girl group fever is more than just a trend: it's symbolic of a cultural era that is embracing the expulsion of authoritarian ideology." So reads the content blurb for a story on the rise of girl groups in the March 2010 issue of Korea, a public relations magazine published under the auspices of the Korean Culture and Information Service. Nonetheless, despite official, top-down promotion and cheerful assertions that this phenomenon is a liberating pop movement, a reading of the lyrics and visual codes of the music videos of popular contemporary Korea girl groups raises serious questions about the empowering nature of "Girl Group Fever."

This lecture will engage in a close analysis of the music and videos of groups such as the Wonder Girls, Girls' Generation, KARA, T-ara and the discourse that has surrounded their rise to popularity in South Korea, in order to challenge the notion that contemporary consumer society is making a radical break from more traditional, deeply embedded power structures and argue that a set of recurrent tropes in the studied media and marketing presentation of Korean girl groups undercuts claims to a progressive ethos.

Associate Professor Stephen Epstein is the director of the Asian Studies Programme at the Victoria University of Wellington. He holds a doctorate from UC Berkeley and before immigrating to New Zealand in 1994 he taught for two years at Swarthmore Colllege. He has published widely on contemporary Korean literature, society and popular culture and translated numerous works of Korean and Indonesian fiction. Recent academic works include "The Axis of Vaudeville: Images of North Korea in South Korean Popular Culture" (The Asia-Pacific Journal, 2009) and Complicated Currents: Media Flows, Soft Power and East Asia (co-edited with Daniel Black and Alison Tokita Monash University Publications, 2010). His most recent novel translations are The Long Road by Kim In-suk (MerwinAsia; 2010) and Telegram by Putu Wijaya (Lontar Foundation, 2011). He is currently working on a book tentatively titled Korea and its Neighbors: Popular Media and National Identity in the 21st Century.