• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.4
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• pp.579-597
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• 2008

This article discusses David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly as a suggestive text for examining Western masculinity in crisis in the post-imperialist age, in which territorial imperialism is no longer valid. Previous scholarship on M. Butterfly has centered around the interlocking dynamics of imperialism, racism and sexism. Such critical attentions focus on how Hwang deconstructs racialized significations of the East and the West. In these discussions, the issue of gender is often addressed merely as a trope to represent the power relations between the East and the West. As such, gender as well as sexuality is highlighted as the very source of subversion of the power relations. My discussion departs from a critique of the gendered trope of the East and the West, highlighting a postmodern agent, the allegedly feminized character Song Lining: a Chinese actor who passes for a woman for political purposes in postcolonial China. Remaining an "inappropriate/d other" in the gendered imperialist discourse, Song becomes an emergent subject, who is capable of playing gender ambiguity for reclaiming a devalued identity, that of homosexual Asian man. Discussing how the central character Rene Gallimard's masculine identity is constructed in a cross-cultural space and how it evolves, I also argue that Gallimard's melancholic death signifies a historical unsustainability of imperialist masculinity in the postmodern/postcolonial age since World War II.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.682-694
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• 2022

This study analyzed the characteristics of masculineness reproduced in Korean cop films and their deep meaning, mainly in the 2010s. This analysis work will be a work that embodies the masculine ideal type and true masculinity recognized in Korean society. Also, through this, we will be able to approach the ideals and operations of Korean society. As a result, Korean cop films are mysteriously obsessed with masculinity and masculinity behavior through the main character in the film, which shows off masculinity with mental and physical superiority. Korean cop films also show a desire for patriarchal normality through an ending that shows the moment of masculine recovery through the physical victory of a rough and strong man. And the Korean cop film includes the claim that the implementation of social justice requires the existence of masculineness, which is essential, and that the implementation of social justice must be sacrificed to some extent.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.81-99
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• 2013

Đoạn tuyệt is the representative of not only Nhất Linh's literary life but also of the Tự Lực Văn Đoàn [Self-Strength Literary Group]. Đoạn tuyệt's contributions are emphasized in the following aspects: 1) critique of the feudal family model, 2) an advocate of female and individual liberation, 3) nationalistic content, though rather vague. Based on analysis of gender power relations in the masculinization of femininity exemplified in the character Loan of the novel, this paper addresses the following points: - In Đoạn tuyệt, the woman is eager to free herself from feudalist ties not to construct her own identity but to identify her with men's identities. - The construction of new feminine identities was conditioned in new rising discourses of Western modernity-based nationalisms in pre-revolutionary Vietnam. - The feminization of masculinity echoes the crisis of Vietnamese masculine in facing colonial power.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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• v.42 no.4
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• pp.626-638
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• 2018

Recent perspectives on masculinity have changed and are expressed as a genderless style in fashion. Male models wearing womenswear are frequently presented in menswear collections. This study analyzes the genderless men's styles from the Heterotopia concept viewpoint. Heterotopia, coined by the post-modern philosopher Michel Foucault, is a space that deviates from normality and a space of alternative. The research methodology is combined with a literature study and case study. Contemporary men's genderless styles examined through the Heterotopia concept are categorized as transition, deviation, contradiction, crisis, and coexistence. Genderless phenomenon are also accelerated by the development of the media as well as the younger generation who express personality and social messages through a genderless style.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.2
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• pp.187-217
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• 2010

By reading the main character, Rene Gallimard, in M. Butterfly as a spatial metaphor of America, this article examines how homogeneous American national identity of heterosexuality and white masculinity has been reinforced since the cold war and has constituted a crisis of hegemony with the decline of imperialism and how its pathological symptom is shown through the melancholic suicide of Gallimard. This article also argues how the feminine attributes implied in race, gender and sexuality in M. Butterfly are designated and allegorized as an impure, contaminated and ahistorical marker of national integrity in pthe social and material status of the heterosexual American white male. To develop my argument, I read M. Butterfly from a psychoanalytic point of view. Therefore I depend on Freud, Lacan, and Bhabha's psychoanalysis as the theoretical basis. In this paper, I also argue that the homogenized and fixed national identity is splitted and collapsed from within as shown in the Gallimard's melancholy and in the process of splitting the "Third Space" of hybrid subjects for the marginal and the emergent like Song Liling, a homosexual Asian man, can be built "from a space in-between." Therefore Hwang calls into questions conventions of fixed, essentialist identities through the shifting gender identities between Song and Gallimard in M. Butterfly and how identities in the plural are constructed variously in throughly historicized, politicized situations, and these constructions can be complicated by relations of power.