All posts filed under: Real Korea/ns

Finding Fletcher—Or Losing Her Audience? From Sapphic Icon to the Queerbaiting/Biphobia Divide

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For longtime subscribers to Real Koreans, hello! It’s Emily—it’s been a while. As you may know, I started this blog to write about things I was passionate about, which was mainly feminism, youth rights, and LGBT community updates in South Korea. I’ve stopped writing for a while, because I was unsure what I had to say about Korea, having moved away in 2014.In my 11th year abroad, I finally know what I have to say, which is the same as back then: writing about things I care about, which will include Korea, but also many other topics, like analysing my favourite arts & culture scenes (like today), how to deal with anti-Asian racism in Europe, and my experiences working in global nonprofits. The sapphic Internet has been up in flames the past three days over a new release from FLETCHER, in which the lesbian icon confesses to being in love with a man. While she last alluded to seeing someone in an interview June last year, there was no build-up to this major pivot in …

The Racism in Government-Funded Korean Language Course Material

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Looking to Learn Korean for Free? Well, Be Prepared for Some Racism I was going through Sejong Institute’s YouTube playlist to find useful material for my Korean tutoring classes. Then I found this. Let me take you down Racist Hill. Commentary at the bottom. The trope of Jeongnam, the Korean master of condescension, ends with him looking at the two black men’s shirts and pointing out “So, you’re the older brother? You look like it”. Here, the narrative is that the black men chose to play the Black Big Brother Trope. Although Jeongnam treats the three group of foreigners in the same condescending way, it is striking how explicitly racist the script is. Let’s look at the three groups of foreigners he interacts with. First, he meets the white American soldiers. With whom he has a brief exchange. This is done in informal/non-honorific language (반말). Second, he meets the Turkish man, “Abdul”. Although Abdul has a considerably more complex script compared to the other three groups, Jeongnam condescends him by (a) Telling him to fix his …

Korean Feminism Reins In the Collective Power of the Internet

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, Korean feminism takes advantage of the country’s telecommunications infrastructure and satiric humour to combat misogyny An emerging Feminist movement finds power in the collective power of the Internet Founded on August 6th, 2015, the independent website Megalian.com brands a new type of feminism – one that uses the country’s world-class ICT infrastructure to promote gender equality and to humorously bash misogyny on the Korean web. The name, currently filed for trademark registration by one of its users, is a neologism combining ‘MERS gallery’, the web forum where the movement was born, and ‘Egalia’, of Gerd Brantenberg‘s satiric novel ‘Egalia’s Daughters‘. Megalian.com operates strictly on an anonymous basis, with all members posting under the same nickname, except for notices regarding server maintenance by the site’s administrators, who nevertheless remain anonymous (As of December 2015, the few interviews conducted with its members or admins have not revealed any personal information). The collective movement began in June 2015, when women began to ‘mirror’ the misogynic comments made by male members on DCInside.com, a popular web forum. What was conceived as a minor page dedicated to sharing …