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This paper uses an inter-Asian TV drama, Meteor Garden (also called Boys Over Flowers in Japan and S. Korea), as an example to illustrate the formation of women's desire within the context of nation formation and neoliberal globalization. It argues that women's rights to Korean dramas are predicated on a politics of recognition which essentializes and naturalizes women's desire for love. This desire for love, when historicized as an institution for nation building and globalization, should be seen as a cultural technology of control which aims to depoliticize women, reducing women's citizenship to the intimate domain. Korean dramas and Korean living, based on consumption as a fantastic solution to social and systemic inequalities, reduce democratic politics to life politics; however, paradoxically, they also provide an occasion for understanding of women's "disagreement" rooted in their unhappy reality and this disagreement is the basis of democratic politics.
Key Words: Korean Wave, Feminism, Life Politics, Ideological Fantasy, Love, Cultural Right, East Asian Pop Culture
I. Introduction
Faced with the sweeping popularity of Korean dramas in Taiwan, the Minister of Information Bureau proposed to restrict Korean dramas to non-primetime slots in the name of protecting local TV industry in 2006. This news offended many fans. One TV drama critic, Heiniao Lizi, in her weekly column in China Times (January 14, 2006), pleads to the government that "drama fans are people who love to dream" and the government should "Give Dramas Fans the Right to Beautiful Dreams."
How does one make sense of this phenomenon when women's rights to cultural recognition and emotional needs through Korean dramas are in tension with national culture? Is the recognition of women's cultural right to be celebrated as those theorized in scholarships on cultural citizenship and right? What does it mean to conceptualize right to Korean dramas as a form of cultural right and what are its implications for national, transnational, and gender politics? To answer these questions, I will use an inter- Asian TV drama, Meteor Garden (also called Boys Over Flowers in Japan and S. Korea), as an example to illustrate the formation of women's desire within the context of nation formation and neoliberal globalization. This paper argues that women's rights to Korean dramas are predicated on a politics of...