Upcoming Event

Friday 25 Aug 2023 at 10am (Perth) in-person seminar on Curtin Bentley Campus (Building 211, Room 139) & via Webex 

This in-person and online seminar focuses on representations of Japanese and Korean masculinities in popular culture. After two short presentations, the two presenters will discuss how analysing pop culture representations of Korean and Japanese masculinities can open up new avenues for theorising masculinity studies.

Please register at: https://curtin.webex.com/weblink/register/ra40d2e4578a5f2fd9e00f582f290e333

This seminar can be accessed online via Webex: https://curtin.webex.com/curtin/j.php?MTID=ma0cfe5dfc8f999b8eb0c5ae1ffe7aea7

• Laura Miller: Who was considered to be a beautiful man in Japan’s ancient period? What did an attractive Heian period courtier look like? When contemporary popular culture producers set out to create manga, anime, film and TV series set in historical eras, they often find that the male beauty standards of long ago are quite different from contemporary reader and viewer expectations. I will introduce a few examples of historical figures who are represented by actors or drawn characters who reflect today's beauty ideology rather than those of the periods they are portraying. Although some efforts are made to depict the costumes or hairstyles of the period, the desire to cater to current beauty norms dominates these productions.   

• Jo Elfving-Hwang: This talk reflects on Laura Miller’s paper and work on how representations of Japanese historical figures have been updated to cater for contemporary global audiences and present an overview of the same in the context of contemporary Korean popular culture, and in TV series in particular. This talk will focus on representations of male beauty in Korean historical TV dramas, focusing specifically on how the context of sageuk (historical TV dramas) are utilised to communicate recognisable and appealing images of “Koreanness” for both international and domestic audiences in ways that combine recognisable K-pop stage aesthetics with stylised Joseon (and occasionally fantastical earlier period) costuming for contemporary viewers.

This workshop is supported by the Core University Program for Korean Studies through the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and Korean Studies Promotion Service of the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2022-OLU-2250005).