• American Studies
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• v.43 no.1
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• pp.83-97
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• 2020

"Behind a Mask" (1866) marks the new direction of Louisa May Alcott's artistic and personal life. Her European trip solidified her identity as a mature woman, most importantly as a mature American woman, one whose independence from Victorian stereotypes would, from now on, make her fortune and fame. Her sensational stories, especially "Behind a Mask," would tell truths that readers recognized but had rarely seen written. These truths would free them, and the author herself, to explore their talents as individuals. Henceforth, Alcott would embody the successful American artistic entrepreneur as one who shed the European domination of false titles and inherited wealth. These motifs of the transnational connection pervade the story, in the form of images and likenesses. Just as Alcott would soon, in two years, reach astonishing financial success with the publication of Little Women, her meteoric ascent parallels America's rise to power in the world's economy, which came about with almost alarming speed after the conclusion of the American Civil War.

• Journal of Fashion Business
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• v.12 no.5
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• pp.126-140
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• 2008

This thesis aims to examine the symbolism of color in the clothing of women, focusing on the protagonist of the movie Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007). At the beginning of the movie, the Queen wears gowns with cartwheel ruff and wheel farthingales, symbolizing the attempt of establishing a powerful majesty. However, the Queen falls in love with Walter Raleigh and her clothing comes to emphasize femininity displaying her cleavage. Later on, her clothing indicates charismatic authority as she prepares for the Spanish war. At the end of the movie, the Queen who led the the country to victory in war puts on a luxurious gown with butterfly wings that reminds of a fairy queen. The colors of the Queen's clothing are categorized into three groups. First, the color red represents two opposite allegories. The positive image of red denotes Christ's blood, the love of God, and noble status of the Queen's image as a savior of England. On the other hand, red represents lewdness and evil which insinuate that the Queen is being attacked on her religious and political genuineness. Second, the color blue represents Saint Maria, chastity, and divinity. Third, the color goldw and white represent the Queen's ideals which are chastity as a virgin Queen and divinity.

• The Journal of Art Theory & Practice
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• no.7
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• pp.89-123
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• 2009

The Philippines was colonized by Spain for about centuries, from 1521 to 1898, and ruled by America for around four decades, from 1899 to 1946. After recovering from the Second World War, the government started to harness human labor as export itself. In the present time the overseas Filipinos keep the economy afloat with their steady transfer of money to relatives and dependents. Through the art works, the issue which Filipinos were exploited and exported by its government has been reflected as the various allegories. As Filipinos traditionally follow and keep Catholic belief, themes of Christ's sacrifice has allegorically been represented as salvation, struggle, suppression, and emancipation of people. Through the allegory, we can interpret both the intrinsic and superficial texts. Also we can identity certain modes of the visuality of allegory in selected works from Philippine art history that in their complex mediations materialize the people and dignity of their predicament and their prevailing. Philippine art can be divided as three different features: passion, vagrancy, and mass formation. The passion stage was depicted as deep structure of Christian thought and devotional feeling, harsh capitalist system. In the pictures of vagrancy, under the regime of Ferdinand Marcos, the themes of drift, deprivation, and homelessness are reckoned through the images of pictures. The stories represented with allegory have been played an important role to bring local issues up as national ones. Those stages take us to the processes of mass formation or the depiction of the people as a moment in the totality of force. The allegorical sign refers to another sign that precedes it, but with which it will never able to coincide reach back to a previous stage and in this constant attempt at return incorporates a structural distance from its origin. The true people's art is one that radically generates transformative technologies and techniques so that it irrevocably breaks the plane of "art". In the painting, the truth is represented by functioning as foundation of a rhetoric of the image. And at this axis, the passional, the vagrant, and the mass formation tend to come together because they render the form of contingency that must be suffered and hopefully surpassed, a Filipino subjectivity that must be stitched in time.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.251-285
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• 2014

Monsters cannot speak. They have been objectified and represented through a particular concept 'monstrosity' that renders the presence of monsters effectively simplified and nullified. In contemporary monster narratives, however, the site of monsters reveals that they could be the complex construction of society, culture, language and ideology. As going into the structure that concept is based on, therefore, meanings of monsters would be seen to be highly unstable. When symbolic language strives to match monsters with a unified concept, their meanings become only further deferred rather than valorized. This shows the language of monsters should disclose the self-contradiction inherent in 'monstrosity,' which has made others—namely beings we define as 'different' from ourselves in culture or physical appearance—embodied as abject and horrifying monsters. Unable to be understood, accepted, or called humans. I analyse Frankenstein and Dracula that firmly converge monstrous bodies into a symbolic meaning, demonstrating how this fusion causes problems in the multicultural society. I especially emphasize the undeniable affirmation of expurgated others we need to have empathetic relations with, because their difference, unfamiliarity, and slight divergences are likely to be defined as abnormalities. In the multicultural society, thus, we must learn to embrace diversity, while also having to recognize there are many others that have been thought of as monsters; ironically enabling us to think about an undeniable imperative of being responsive to other people. In this respect, the monstrous inhuman goes to the heart of the ethical undercurrent of multiculturalism, its resolute attempt to recognize and respect someone else's difference from me. A focus on empathetic relations with others, thus, can strengthen the process of creating social mechanisms that do justice to the competing claims of different cultural groups and individuals.

• The Research Journal of the Costume Culture
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.252-271
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• 2021

The purpose of this study is to expand satirical expressions that appear in a wide range of arts into fashion and to analyse and present satirical expressions that appear in contemporary fashion through the collections of Thom Browne. Theoretical examination of satirical concepts were made of domestic and foreign academic theses, dissertations, precious studies, and publications related to satire. Analysis was conducted on cases in which satirical expressions were applied in literature, painting, sculpture, and fashion. Based on these studies, analysis was conducted on satirical expressions appearing in Thom Browne's work. Material was gathered from collection reviews, interview articles, professional books, and internet photo material from professional fashion magazines encompassing 16 years of Thom Browne's collections officially recorded in the international fashion magazine 'Vogue', ranging from the 2006 S/S collection to the 2021 S/S collection. From this, a total of 1,753 photos were collected as data. Characteristics of satirical expression were analyzed and the results were as follows. A fluid reconstruction of 'gender fluid', dual meanings of metaphorical allegories, playful expressions of visual wit, constructions made of overlapped disassembled material, and borrowing of morphological distortion were all identified. Accordingly, satirical approaches as social aspects and objects in the flow of modern thought appear as positive forms based in humor that hope to be improved. This study anticipate the concept of satire will expand into a positive form as a new direction of fashion.

• Trans-
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• v.4
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• pp.87-109
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• 2018

The genres of fantastic of Korean films created in the 90s are diverse. The fantastics of these works are not manifested only in 'Ghosts' movies. For example, If the film Mystery Of The Cube, which is based on the mystery of Lee Sang, has a story of structuralist fantasy, we can say that a movie like Tell Me Something has a psychologically conventional fantastic. This study examines the fantastic of contemporary Korean films through 'completion of allegory based on realism'. For this, we borrows the fantastic concept of Etienne Souriau. In some films, fantastics can be found directly in the developing nature. In this case, the human being who justifies their domination of nature by upgrading their position as the objectifying subject of nature becomes 'alienated' in return. The notion of this alienation in film narratives is often revealed through allegories, particularly in the manifestation of fantasy by Étienne Souriau in the early 'personal experience'. Kim kiduk's film is a representative example of allegorizing elements of society through individual experience. Focusing on Kim Giduk's Bad Guy, this essay analyzes the process in which fantastic films of Korea in the 90s build up aesthetic fantastic through imitation of society.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.43
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• pp.377-404
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• 2016

In this paper, I intend to focus on the 1991 racial tension and violence portrayed in Anna Devear Smith's book Fires in the Mirror, which was published in book form in 1993. I make use of a series of interviews with many of those involved in the conflicts, which were based on the Jewish Holocaust and the history of African American enslavement. In Crown Heights, the black community and the Jewish community have each suffered terrible losses, but individuals and communities become rhetorically attached to foundational historical traumas that lie at the center of each group's cultural identity rather than try to understand each other's pain. Smith lets this rhetoric dominate Fires in the Mirror by putting contradictory monologues side by side in order to show how discourses on 'slavery' and 'the Holocaust' still have control over specific ethnic communities. My intention is not to delve into the conflict between the Jewish and black communities exclusively. Rather, I attempt to form an understanding of the problems of the critical/theoretical tenets proposed by 'the rhetoric of holocaust,' including the Jewish Holocaust and the black experience of enslavement. Such an understanding will help us see the failure in the theories, illuminating the ways that such rhetoric should have recognized its own violence and helped to forge a new relationship between racism and anti-Semitism. Fires in the Mirror mirrors back to us the ways that 'the Holocaust' betrays the possibility of error to indicate its own susceptibility to blindness. The cracks brought forth by conflicting narratives enable readers to observe wounds being healed and the possibility of new narrative looming up.

• Journal of Korean Theatre Studies Association
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• no.48
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• pp.289-332
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• 2012

In this paper, based on the theory of performance studies and community-based theatre, I venture to explicate the socio-political significance of director Yim Jin-Taek's community-based performance called 'madanggut', which is heavily based on elements of indigenous culture. Yim's madanggut utilizes elements of indigenous cultures and searches for 'the Korean ethnic (arche)type' as 'the ideal Korean type' or 'genuine Korean-ness' for the reconstruction of 'the Korean ethnic community.' This paper interrogates the major task of Yim Jin-Taek's madanggut, which ideologically promulgates the idea of ethnocentric patriarchy supported by the traditional (mainly Confucianist) notion of 'community' - inquiring if this type of theatre can provide useful and practical prospects for imagining a more democratic and plural civilian society in Korea today, when the interaction of globalization, nationalism, regionalism, and localism simultaneously impact our everyday life and cultural identification. Regarding the recent global phenomenon of the resurgence of nationalism, I looked at madanggut's use of symbolic resources from the past for imaginative communal bonding as a nation. But, the claimed homogeneity of the national past by means of 'nation conflation' of different social groups is an illusionary conceptualization, and the national historiography silences memories of the marginalized groups and denies their histories. It is certain that in Korea nationalism has historically performed an important function during the colonization and democratization period. Nevertheless, as Yim's Nokdukkot realized, it cannot be overlooked that as a representative of 'the Korean ethnic community,' 'the protecting man/the sacrificial woman' is contradictory to the plural and lateral thinking of participatory democracy in community-building. It is time to think about a new political language that relates individuals to the community and nation. 'The ethnic type' cannot represent the whole nation and the members of the nation should be the examples of the community they belong to for a more democratic society. I have selected Yim's several community-based works mainly from the 1970s to the 1980s since the works provide grounding images, symbols, metaphors, and allegories pertinent to discussing how 'the Korean ethnic community' has been narrativized through the performances of madanggut during the turbulent epoch of globalization. I hope that this paper presents Yim's grounded aesthetics of community-based theatre with fully contoured critical views and ideas.