• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.41-76
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• 2013

Based on an analysis of the Japanese animation director Kamiyama Kenji's Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex series, this paper discusses two important subjects in modern technoscience-cyborg and old age. In fact, age has been an important social and political category in the modern world, along with gender, race, and class. However, age has not been a significant research topic for STS scholars. Even though many of these investigators have extensively explored the complex relationship between gender and technoscience, especially after the publication of Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" (1991), few of them have been interested in how age is reconfigured by modern science and technology. If women, as Haraway has claimed, can have a different political and cultural outlook by becoming cyborgs, then, can we expect a similar socio-cultural transformation with regard to the interaction between cyborg and old age? Do the elderly experience lesser age discrimination through the growth of biomedicine and technoscience? Indeed, it is believed that seniors are increasingly becoming cyborgs with advancing age, since their declining bodily functions are consistently replaced and assisted by various biomedical technologies. Does this enable them to overcome ageism and age discrimination as well as their alleged physiological and mental limitations? As an answer to this question, Mike Featherstone has asserted that becoming a cyborg in old age could make the wrinkled skin a mere mask and create diverse new possibilities that were hitherto unavailable to an aging person. Based on my reading of Ghost in the Shell, however, I analyze a more complex set of problems when the senile cyborg is created through the encounter between the elderly and technoscience. I argue that while the senile cyborg could challenge traditional family ideology and nationalism it would leave ageism intact and define a new individualistic life form through a body controlled within the globalized internet and capitalist economy.

• Korean Journal of Labor Studies
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.1-45
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• 2017

This study aims at explaining organizational mechanisms of inequality that has been rising rapidly alongside the proliferation of irregular employment in the post-crisis Korean labor market. It argues that inequality is not sufficiently explained by individual gap in human capital or widespread marketization as such. Social categories into which each individual worker falls seems more important as a source of labor market inequality. Employment types that are composed of regular and irregular employment do not simply indicate the different economic meanings of employment contracts but have rather been institutionalized as a social category of status in the context of inequality over the past two decades. They are also often matched with other social categories such as gender that have created and reproduced greater labor market inequality. We pay attention to the organizational practice of dominant incumbents who make claims for advantages of return based on their exclusive accessibility to limited organizational resources and explain how that particular practice plays a role to increase relational inequality between those insiders who achieve advantageous returns and outsiders mostly irregular workers who are excluded from those resources because of the social categories that they belong to. In this study, we identify seniority based pay as the key organizational practice that justifies categorical differences within the workplace and examine how that particular practice contributes to organizational level segmentation and income ineqaulity.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.8 no.11
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• pp.115-124
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• 2008

My former thesis was about the present status of Korean film aesthetics of Korean blockbusters through the cultural hybridity. Now this thesis focuses on hybridity and tragedy in Korean blockbusters from the postcolonial perspectives. Typical examples are Shiri, JSA, Taegukgi containing a special Korean situation of division ideology and expressing an extremely Western style of production. These movies hardly provide any historical causes, critical explanation, or vision beyond the discourse of national tragedy. They simply supply sentimental feeling of sympathizing with the misfortune of heroes in the course of national suffering. Therefore, these movies shows limitation not to accomplish postcolonial resistance.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.12-24
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• 2017

This paper analyzed the representation of migrants in television with the example of KBS's My Neighbor, Charles. This primetime TV show with consistent popularity has showcased different types of migrants from other Korean television shows in terms of gender and race, and, partly the difference brought popularity to it. This study finds the major reason of the difference from changed migration patterns in Korea. Until recently, the main population of immigrants in Korea was composed of female brides and workers, but it became diversified to include male and the West migrants. This triggered the changes in media representation, but not thoroughly. Though the faces of migrant protagonists have been diversified, the remaining ideology of nation-centric that has been the main frame to regard migrants as someone to be integrated through traditional values persists. This study finds a few conflicts between the traditional and the change. For example, represented realities of migrants are extends to include their activities in public domain, disputes of multicultural society such as social differentiation and bias, and the criticism of Korean traditional culture. In a gender perspective, while all the marriages represented showed different kinds of vulnerability, discourses of traditional familialism were also clearly presented through different tools of representation. This study aims at contributing existing studies of media representations of migrants with a more complicated pictures in the context of social changes and migration population changes.

• Journal of the Economic Geographical Society of Korea
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.111-125
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• 2010

For a shift to a new paradigm that allows restoring solidarity among class, gender, and race, it is necessary to closely investigate the differences between Marxist view and poststructuralist view which provide theoretical basis for labor movement and for feminist movement, respectively. However, little effort has been devoted to this task. This paper critically compares two best wellknown geographers; Harvey's class-centered theory and Gibson-Graham's post-structuralist feminist approach by focusing on their understandings of "difference". David Harvey argues that racial/gender discrimination is another form of class-exploitation and puts priority on the solidarity based on the commonality of labor. On the contrary Gibson-Graham argues that the privileging of class above all else marginalizes other political dimension, and proposes the deconstruction of hegemonic discourse of capitalism and the construction of "community economies", Based on the critical survey of both theories, I propose that understanding the role that spatiality plays in capital accumulation process is the key to compromise two different approaches.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.301-338
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• 2021

John Woo's A Better Tomorrow arrived at the turning point of Korean society between 1987 and 1988. The Hong Kong movie boom that started here reached its peak around the 1990s. What does this phenomenon mean? Hong Kong action films have functioned as an important resource for Korean young male subculture since the late 1960s. The audience of A Better Tomorrow matches the audience of previous Hong Kong films in a generational and gendered way. The fascination of Hong Kong action films by young Korean men from 1987 to 1991 has nothing to do with Hong Kong's political context. However, a certain affect is shared between Korean and Hong Kong audiences. It could be said to be the brotherhood within the struggling group. The affective economies of this fraternity embodies the broad solidarity of 1987, the solidarity of comrades seeking to resist the violence of the world. It also works on symbolic and practical gender bias. In other words, this loyalty is nothing but loyalty between the (male) brothers who are confronting the injustice of the world. This is the "translational possibility" of A Better Tomorrow.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.17 no.12
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• pp.417-425
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• 2017

The goal of this study is analysing a box office success of The Handmaiden in terms of modified space-time and character. The movie which has original novel induces desire of watching by decreasing property of experience good of movie based narrative of novel. Contrary to novel that is set in Victorian age, the movie changed contents that make a character who realizes masculine of colonialism and women oppressed by man escape through transcending class by adopting period of Japanese occupation. It hereby decreases negative effect by substituting growth and solidarity of women for the element of homosexuality. Also the gender discussion about crimes against female when the movie was running increases factor of sympathy of characters and accord with subject of the movie. Beside that, The reasons of success are detector, star system of actor, effective public marketing of movie trailer and selection of movie won the award for best picture at a film festival.. Movie through adapting novel enhances ability of various creation and blow up appreciation of spectator. The differentiation of adapted hit movie is that the altered content is creative, has subject that corresponding with universal awareness transcending space-time and expresses property of media effectively.

• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.76
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• pp.7-30
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• 2016

The purpose of this study is to review and criticize the articles that analyzed Frozen by using the semiotic method of Greimas. The study also aims to apply the semiotic method of Greimas correctly to find the deep structure of the narrative of Frozen. The results of the narrative analysis based on the actantial model and the semiotic square show that Frozen is not Elsa's heroic narrative but Anna's one. Because Elsa and Anna are the opposing elements in this narrative, the success of Anna is the failure of Elsa. Frozen does not convey the subversive message about the gender roles by representing an independent and active woman who resists the patriarchal discourse. Instead, Frozen reproduces the conformist ideology by saying that love is the most valuable thing and that everyone should accept the role given to him/her by the community.

• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.43
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• pp.385-426
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• 2008

This paper focuses on how international marriages among Asians have been represented by the Korean media. Due to globalization, the so-called 'ethnoscape' has changed, and so ethnicity or racial identity within the boundaries of the nation-state changed. The recent diaspora of Asian women into Korea through international marriages has reflected how globalization has proceeded at a regional or local level. This paper attempts to analyze Koreanmedia discourses on the Asian female diaspora. This study analyzes what kind of generic forms TV dramas, other shows(TV reality programs, TV journalistic programs), movie and internet have employed to represent international marriages and how they have portrayed the subjectivities of the Asian female diaspora. This study discuss how this representation has been contested by the 'realities' of their international marriages. By examining how the Korean mainstream media have dealt with the conflicting issues of the Asian female diaspora, this paper intends to look critically at how local discursive practices have substantiated the changing ethnoscape. As a result of the study, this paper can find international marriages among Asians have been represented by Korean media still patriarchal system in male-oriented society. The otherness of Asian women justify the strong work of household affairs, and so justified life is standardized 'a kind of daughter- in-law', 'a complaisant daughter-in-law' in the process of migration. Also the otherness of Asian women standardized 'a victor' or 'a harmer' through international marriage of money that commercialized 'sexuality'. After all Korea media discourse on Asian women's international marriage, the gender issues on it have not been focused on a serious level.

• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.51
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• pp.156-173
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• 2010

This study analysed the narrative of and , two history documentary broadcasted on KBS, in terms of story-telling and discourse. And it also examined whether TV as mass media could provide an alternative interpretation against the dominant historical awareness. As a result, both programmes showed limitations on representing subversive point of view to the dominant ideology. At the story-telling level, firstly, they represented in a way of male-hero narrative though they were describing the history of woman, and while representing woman as a public figure they eliminated her feminity and individuality. Secondly, before evaluating woman as a historic figure they previously appreciated her appearance in a male-point of view. Thirdly, although they were telling the story of woman in a political view, they focused on love triangle, therefore failed to make her as a public figure. The discourses of both programmes were anchoring the existing historical interpretation instead of offering an alternative historical imagination. The narrator who were telling history at the studio in a omniscient viewpoint took a role as a meaning definer, placed at the highest rank in the hierarchy of discourse structure. Especially in , the dramatized images to cover lack of visual data helped anchor the patriarchal narrative and reduced the possibility of subversive interpretation on historic figure.