National publics and transnational subjectivities: Manufacturing Koreanness through media sport

Transnational Korean subjectivities are constituted through the production and consumption of media sport featuring Korean athletes and teams. This dissertation argues that media sport operates as an important context in the making of Koreanness in Korean communities located in Seoul, South Korea, and Los Angeles, USA. The interdisciplinary fields of the anthropology of media and cultural studies have informed the research questions and methodologies featured in this text. The transnational frame of analysis incorporates area fields of Korean Area Studies and Asian American studies. Information gathered through ethnographic field research on the production and consumption of media sport by Korean women and men offer the evidence incorporated in this study.; The dissertation presents an overview of the historical and ideological contexts for the consumption of media sport by Koreans located in and between Seoul and Los Angeles, including the relationships between (1) media sport and the developmental nationalist rhetoric of the South Korean state and (2) media sport and multicultural nationalism in the United States. The study details the gendered narratives of nation conveyed through Korean athletes in media sport. Discourses of gender and sexuality operate through athletic icons and work to structure different relations to the nation for women and men. The text also investigates the monumental reception by Koreans to the 2002 Korea-Japan FIFA World Cup. This event acted as an important context for framing notions of Koreanness within a globalizing world. It raised important questions about rapidly changing ideas of gender and generation in South Korea and Korean America. Korean responses to the World Cup challenged nation-bound frameworks for understanding Korean communities and identities.; My analysis of media sport engages a variety of important questions about the role of mass media in producing notions of identity in transnational contexts. It also brings attention to the power and significance of mass media and sport in shaping political ideologies and their material effects. The study suggests the importance of historically-situated ethnographic studies of media reception and the relevance of transnational investigations into subject formation.