Portals, Pathways, and Project Proposal
Welcome to my site! Which, at this point, has become a spotlight and shrine for two of my favorite actors - John Cho and Steven Yeun. I make this website as my Graduate Report for the University of Texas-Austin. In my general studies, I am committed to research on Korean American cinema and representations of transnationality.
My project seeks to explore two questions:
1. How are transnationality and gender-related expectations inherently intertwined, intersecting, and conflicting?
2. What are the stakes and limits of representation of men-of-color, specifically cis/straight/Korean American men.
This platform was created using SCALAR, a pathway-based website builder from USC. SCALAR is the best database and website I can imagine to create my report. It can seamlessly present video, audio, and text. Most importantly, it also automatically generates visual connections between pages and media files. Overall, I want to emphasize a lack of linearity or fixed flow - I want you, the reader, to be able to jump from page to page without needing to build over-deterministic narratives or conclusions.
In order to materialize this project, I will be conducting a star study of actors John Cho and Steven Yeun in the films Columbus (dir. Kogonada, 2017) and Burning (dir. Lee Chang-dong, 2017). Cho and Yeun’s careers will be investigated through multiple forms of star study, focusing primarily on paratextual analysis (which covers posters, films, and publicity) as well as press regarding each actor, including interviews and profiles. The films themselves will take a more traditional formal analytical approach, owing much to film study. Their careers, star images, and performances within the films will be investigated within vectors of transnationality and intersections with dominant masculinity.
I want to take the time right now to (hopelessly understate) how much my work is indebted to Asian & Asian American, Black, POC, and Queer scholars whose writings and thoughts remain underpublicized and underpromoted in the wider realm of academia.
I look to achieve three goals within this project:
- Conceptual I hope to disrupt traditional notes of diasporic subjects and masculine Korean Americans. Through this project, I emphasize contradiction, ambivalence, and representation as three key ways to further identify complex stars and complex characters in Korean American media. It is not enough to say we must go from point A to point B, in terms of bad to good representation or ambiguity to clarity. Rather, I present notions of masculinity and transnationality that may oppose each other at times, but ultimately build to create a wide spectrum of choices for the Korean American star and community, which will assist in deferring stereotype in favor of three-dimensional personhood.
- Academic: This project is at once academically rigorous in its preparation. I have read many journal articles and books, as well as used my education to write a compelling report. At the same time, this project must also be non-academic in its form and content. As I will not have the opportunity to present my work in a traditionally published format, I relinquish this report to the public at large, with the hope to both inspire others to continue this type of research but also to keep myself accountable, to hold no supremacy in the realm of academia.
- Personal: As I finish this thesis report, I realize it is destined to remain hopelessly unpolished and unfinished. In those terms, I refer not to the ability to present an academically-approved project, but instead, I realize this is not the project that will settle my curiosities and anxieties around Korean American media in white, American culture. Rather, this is step one to a larger project in my life that, at this time, remains untitled, unscoped, and gratuitously intimate. My musings and thoughts regarding social issues and the media can never be fully encapsulated. However, the end of my academic career does not mean I cease to be an individual capable of creating work that interrogates discourse and ideology - in fact, for my position, the opposite. I hope to continue to create projects of this calibre and quality that can be more specific as Korean American media grows.
Everything that will be written, analyzed, or designed on this SCALAR platform will be done so through my personal decision-making and worldview. As a male Korean adoptee, I have generated my own lived experiences and real-world knowledge that affects everything from font choice to discursive language. In conjunction with academic literature, I seek to understand star images and film texts in a way that makes sense to me. I do not seek to proclaim any universal conclusion nor imply that there are stability with any concepts I talk about in this project.
Most of all, I simply want to fill a gap in scholarship regarding star studies conducted on Korean American actors, with particular focus on how they embody diaspora and transnationality. All I hope is that this platform may inspire anyone, regardless of their association or affiliation with universities or academia, and serve as one way to prompt a larger discussion of the role media plays in transnational understandings.
This page has paths:
- A breather before we begin. Jackson Wright
