Seeing Stars: Female Film Stars and Female Audiences in Post-Colonial Korea

Abstract

This dissertation examines the complex relationships between Korean cinema's construction of femininity and female audiences' interpretation of such representations while problematizing the master narratives of Western theoretical thinking, colonial and post-colonial discourses, and Korean nationalist discourses. In order to analyze the representations of femininity in post-colonial Korean cinema, I perform semiotic and discourse analyses of the on-screen and off-screen personae of three Korean female film stars from different time periods: Choi Eun-Hee, Chang Mi-Hee, and Jun Ji-Hyun. While balancing my own analyses of these three stars with the life experiences of Korean and Korean-American women (gathered through focus group interviews) and critical scholarship (primarily drawing on post-colonial feminism and Korean and Korean-American scholars' work), this dissertation explores the continuity and discontinuity that exist across the changing patriarchal values and representational politics, particularly in relation to such gendered processes as decolonization (and re-colonization), modernization, democratization, and globalization.