Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019. x, 232 pp. US$65.00, paper. ISBN 978-1-60938-621-4.
Jungmin Kwon’s Straight Korean Female Fans and Their Gay Fantasies is an innovative book that argues that traditional mediated entertainment industries in South Korea (hereafter, Korea) have responded to heterosexual Korean women’s fantasies of the gay male body and gay men’s sexuality by producing coded television and movies. To make her case, Kwon organizes her book into seven chapters: introduction, five body chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction draws on a wide-ranging literature review to demonstrate that yaoi texts from Japan, which feature romanticized versions of young men’s love stories, have shaped women’s desires for “soft masculinity” (11). This romanticized form has found resonance with the idealized Confucian masculinity of the seonbi, the scholar, that heterosexuality has ignored and been denounced by Confucianism and Christianity, and that there have been increasing movements of gay visibility.
In the first chapter, Kwon distinguishes Korean “fanfic” from yaoi by arguing that the former provides heterosexual Korean women fantasy spaces to imagine their favorite K-pop idols in romantic relationships. Chapter 2 diverges from the media-specific focus to discuss issues of (post)feminism and sexism and the ways Korean women empower identities through personal consumption and political engagement. Returning to media, chapter 3 contextualizes commercial shifts in Korea’s film industry to set up the argument that it must now necessarily be responsive to audience interests, including women’s interests in gay-themed films. Chapter 4 explores gay-themed films prior to and after 2005. In chapter 5, the book returns to audience reception to understand gay Korean men’s lack of satisfaction with implicitly coded gay-themed cinema and their instrumental support for fanfics and heterosexual women’s interests in them. In the conclusion, Kwon discusses continuing gender inequality in media production and gay-themed cinema but focuses primarily on examples of continuing LGBTQ discrimination.
Throughout the book, Kwon writes from the standpoint of a scholar and a fan of fanfics, using a personal voice, which enriches the book with a credible subjective position and deepens affective engagements. The book is also a comprehensive examination of intersecting topic areas—gay-themed Korean cinema—production and text, heterosexual women readers of fanfics, and gay men’s reception of FANtasy influences on cinema. Kwon also covers diverse bodies of scholarly and contemporary historical literature, including yaoi and slash fiction, postfeminism, liberalization, and globalization of the Korean film industry, and scopophilia to name a few. Because of her authorial style, the book is accessible for undergraduates and scholars who work outside of film studies while remaining meaningful for experienced scholars in Korean media studies. It is an especially valuable text for its contributions to understanding heterosexual women’s consumption of gay-themed media and for its analysis of gay-themed cinema pre- and post-2005. Kwon’s book helps address the gap in queer media studies research about Korea, and, as such, it is possible that it becomes a generative text that inspires later generations of communication, literature, and media studies scholars.
Despite its contributions, the book has a few shortcomings. First, the book can be a bit confounding for readers who expect a focused study on Korean female fans’ gay fantasies as expressed in the book’s title. After the introduction and chapter 1, the book shifts such that FANtasy fans’ gay fantasies are only important as context, i.e. the market logic that commodifies their interests into the production of gay-themed cinema. This is, at once, a minor and major issue. It is minor insofar as that it does not diminish the quality of the book, but it is serious to the extent that readers’ expectations can be frustrated. Second, fan studies scholars may find Kwon’s undertheorizing of fandom and her apparent conflation of fans and readers of fanfics. Third, the book’s critical gaze is ambivalent. For example, its thesis is that heterosexual Korean women create a market rationale for gay-themed media, which she understands as unproblematically empowering gay men because of the cultural value of symbolic legitimation, even if it is distorted for women’s fantasy pleasures. While this is undoubtedly part of the picture, it should also interrogate women’s possibilities for paradoxically reproducing heteronormative patriarchy. This leads to my final critique that Kwon’s use of in-depth interviews is underdeveloped. Direct quotes are infrequent, and when used, the quotes do not demonstrate the depth, complexity, and contradiction that justifies the use of the method. Rather, the quotes are straightforward, and the interpretations of the quotes are usually restatements of them. Instead of quotes, the book often provides summaries of interviewees’ statements, or, more problematically, she speaks for the interviewees, drawing conclusions that are not available in the presented interview data. This is problematic because it denies the subjectivity of the interviewees by not providing them with names (pseudonyms) and context, which denies the reader the ability to understand the women and the readings they make. In other cases, it reads as anecdotal rather than as a rigorous analysis of the interviews.
Despite some limitations, the book promises to be an important text for scholars of heterosexual women fans’ reception of queer-themed media and for scholars of gay-themed cinema in Korea. For scholars and general readers interested in Korean media studies, the broad contextualization in the book also provides an accessible introduction to sexism and heteronormativity in Korea, yaoi and fanfics, and the neoliberalization of the Korean film market under President Kim Dae-jung. For these reasons, Straight Korean Female Fans and Their Gay Fantasies is poised to join the reading lists of many seminars in Korean media studies and the libraries of Korean media studies scholars.
David C. Oh
Ramapo College of New Jersey, Mahwah, USA