Transnational Sport: Gender, Media, And Global Korea [Paperback]

Based on ethnographic research in Seoul and Los Angeles,Transnational Sporttells how sports shape experiences of global Koreanness, and how those experiences are affected by national cultures. Rachael Miyung Joo focuses on superstar Korean athletes and sporting events produced for transnational media consumption. She explains how Korean athletes who achieve success on the world stage represent a powerful, globalized Korea for Koreans within the country and those in the diaspora. Celebrity Korean women athletes are highly visible in the Ladies Professional Golf Association. In the media, these young golfers are represented as daughters to be protected within the patriarchal Korean family and as hypersexualized Asian women with commercial appeal. Meanwhile, the hard-muscled bodies of male athletes, such as Korean baseball and soccer players, symbolize Korean masculine dominance in the global capitalist arena. Turning from particular athletes to a mega-event, Joo discusses the 2002 FIFA World Cup Korea/Japan, a watershed moment in recent Korean history. New ideas of global Koreanness coalesced around this momentous event. Women and youth assumed newly prominent roles in Korean culture, and, Joo suggests, new models of public culture emerged as thousands of individuals were joined by a shared purpose.

Anthropologist Rachael Joo explores the gendered and mediated role of sports in producing a Korean sense of self on a global stage.

"In this far-reaching work, Rachael Miyung Joo reveals transnational sport as a powerful lens for observing the making of 'global Koreanness.' From the South Korean golfer Se Ri Pak and the baseball player Chan Ho Park to the Korean adoptee and Olympic skier Toby Dawson and the mixed-race Korean NFL player Hines Ward, and from the 2002 FIFA World Cup Korea/Japan to North–South Korea sporting matcheslsÒ