Misogynistic in the K-Pop Industry: Analyzing Gender Bias Towards Female Idols
Keywords:
Misogyny, misogynistic, K-Pop, K-Pop industry, female idolsAbstract
Misogyny has always been a problem in the K-Pop industry. Those misogynistic acts include holding female idols to strict beauty standards, unequal treatments, and harassing and objectifying them. This study focuses on how misogyny functions in the K-Pop industry through content analysis of media representations. It examines how companies treat female idols, how they are portrayed, and how gender dynamics affect their career path. The purpose of this study is to provide a viewpoint of the unequal treatment of women in K-Pop due to their gender, the cause of this as well as how it impacts their mental health, and also to explore the perspective and experiences of female idols as they navigate the patriarchal norms attached in the industry. The results along with the analyses of the study show that misogyny is a familiar issue in the K-Pop industry by showing how female idols are facing unequal treatment and pressure to meet nonsense and strict beauty standards. Also, the harassment and objectification they experienced limited their freedom. This study points out how important it is to talk about misogyny in K-Pop in order to achieve fair treatment and protect their rights.References
de Freitas, I. L. L. (2022). Social media platform features and artist-fan engagement in K-pop phenomenon.
Dimri, S. (2023). Empowering Women? How the Postfeminist Rhetoric Serves the Interest of the K-Pop Industry.
Eva Marriott-Fabre. (2022, May 22). Internalized misogyny limits female self-expression, success.
Ferguson, K. E. (2017). Feminist theory today. Annual Review of Political Science, 20, 269–286.
Fuhr, M. (2015). Globalization and popular music in South Korea: Sounding out K-pop. Routledge.
Grayson, J. H. (2015). Tan’gun and Chumong: The Politics of Korean Foundation Myths. Folklore, 126(3), 253–265.
Grown, C., Elson, D., & Cagatay, N. (2000). Introduction. In World Development (Vol. 28, Issue 7, pp. 1145–1156). Pergamon.
Hamdon, S. W., & Timur, F. B. (2020). Feminism against Beauty Standards in South Korea: Force Creates Resistance. Journal of Techno-Social, 12(2), 69–74. https://penerbit.uthm.edu.my/ojs/index.php/JTS/article/view/8004
Hogarth, H. K. (2013). The Korean wave: An Asian reaction to western-dominated globalization. Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, 12(1–2), 135–151.
Hong, E. (2014). The birth of Korean cool: How one nation is conquering the world through pop culture. Picador.
JeonAe. (2020, January 14). 9 Former And Current K-Pop Idols Who Are Parents. Kpopmap.
Jonas, L. (2022). Crafted for the Male Gaze: Gender Discrimination in the K-Pop Industry. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 23(1), 231–247.
Jung, E. (2010). Playing the race and sexuality cards in the transnational pop game: Korean music videos for the US market. Journal of Popular Music Studies, 22(2), 219–236.
Kim, C. (1948). Han Dynasty mythology and the Korean legend of Tan Gun. Archives of the Chinese Art Society of America, 3, 43–48.
Kim, S. C. H., & Kim, K. (2014). A history of Korean Christianity. Cambridge University Press.
Kuwahara, Y. (2014). The Korean wave: Korean popular culture in global context. Springer.
Kwon, J. (2019). South Korean men are fighting against feminism—CNN.
Lee, H. K. (2013). “I’m my mother’s daughter, I’m my husband’s wife, I’m my child’s mother, I’m nothing else”: Resisting traditional Korean roles as Korean American working women in Seoul, South Korea. Women’s Studies International Forum, 36, 37–43. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2012.10.011
Lee, Y. (2019). Feminist fans and their connective action on Twitter K-pop fandom. Berkeley Undergraduate Journal, 33(1).
Lin, X., & Rudolf, R. (2017). Does K-pop reinforce gender inequalities? Empirical evidence from a new data set. Asian Women, 33(4), 27–54.
Lorber, J. (2001). Gender inequality. Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury.
Mohamed, S. (2008). Economic policy, globalization and the labour movement: Changes in the global economy from the Golden Age to the Neoliberal Era. Global Labour University Working Paper.
Mosse, J. C. (1993). Half the world half a chance: An introduction to gender and development. Oxfam GB.
Park, S., & Kim, J. (2021). Tweeting about abusive comments and misogyny in South Korea following the suicide of Sulli, a female K-pop star: Social and semantic network analyses. Profesional de La Información/Information Professional, 30(5).
Rische, J. (2023). “I’m not like the other girls”: The phenomenology of affect: How is female self-expression affected by internalized misogyny?
Rottweiler, B., & Gill, P. (2021). Measuring individuals’ misogynistic attitudes: Development and validation of the misogyny scale.
Ruhlen, R. N. (1998). Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism. 4(2), 33–66.
Steger, I. (2016). An epic battle between feminism and deep-seated misogyny is under way in South Korea. Quartz, October, 23.
World Economic Forum. (2019). Global Gender Gap Report 2020.
Yang, F. (2022). Possession by Devil: Women’s Alternative Language; A Feminist Reading of Kim Ji-young, Born 1982. Feminist Media Studies, 22(6), 1558–1563.
Zeinert, P., Inie, N., & Derczynski, L. (2021). Annotating online misogyny. Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), 3181–3197.