Performing the Self
Androgyny, Aesthetics, and the Gendered Spectacle of G-Dragon in K-pop
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.70042/eroth/904210Keywords:
K-pop, Fandom, Gender Expression, Deconstruction, Dress, Gaze, Stan CultureAbstract
One of the most powerful testaments to South Korea's soft power is its global proliferation of the 'Hallyu Wave'. Since the early 2000s, the South Korean ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has consciously positioned popular culture as an exportable and valuable national asset, turning the country into a global content hub. This has been achieved by their food, beauty-products, webtoons, movies, dramas and music. The paper will examine this K-pop's performative stagecraft, visual aesthetics and construction of image and persona, through the androgynous and gender specific lens within K-pop, primarily citing the case study of the artist G-Dragon, one of the industry's most iconic and transgressive figures. By employing Entwistle's The Fashioned Body, the essay will interrogate how G-Dragon's artistic persona blurs the boundaries between masculinity-femininity, authenticity-artifice, self-spectacle. His androgynous aesthetics, manifested through fashion, music videos, performances, parody skits, function both as a site of resistance and commodification within the neoliberal machinery of Hallyu. Furthermore, drawing upon Jenkins' Participatory Culture, the article will explore how fandoms actively participate in reproducing, queering, reinterpreting G-Dragon's image, causing a co-authored discourse of fluid identity, disrupting the producer-consumer binary in art. In doing so, the G-Dragon persona emerges as a true 'Postmodern Celebrity.'
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References
Joanne Entwistle's Fashion and the Fleshy Body: Dress as Embodied Practice.
Entwistle's The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory.
Henry Jenkins' Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture.
Jenkins' Participatory Culture in a Networked Era
G-Dragon's Vogue Korea's 17th Anniversary Issue, Elle 2023 Issue, Vogue Korea 2025
G-Dragon's Crooked, Untitled 2014, Drama music videos
BigBang's Fantastic Baby music video
G-Dragon's Live Stages, Interviews
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