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Start Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
In K-pop girl group TWICE’s 2018 music video What Is Love?, the members gather in front of the television to watch favourite moments of cinematic romance from foreign classics: the pottery scene in Ghost, the headphones scene in La Boum, the library scene in Love Letter, etc. As she gazes with longing at the screen playing the movie reenacted by herself as the heroine (and another member crossdressing as the male lead), she lip syncs to the refrain: “I wanna know know know know, what is love?”
While the trope of the mise-en-abyme female spectator is a frequent subject within feminist film theory, her presence in a “new media” text as the YouTube music video and an arguably marginal (but emerging) locale of cultural production as K-pop, is less examined. This paper looks at how What Is Love? makes use of its medium as an internet video and its remediation of older screens from film to television (Bolter and Grusin, 1999), in triangulating the (extra)diegetic female gaze in a kaleidoscope of identification and misrecognition. Rather than a homoerotic gaze per se, I argue that the music video’s reinvention of heteromance involves an evacuation of the object of sexual desire altogether, replaced by a self now encountered as Other. This Lacanian tension between self and other, mapped onto the distinction between local and global, renders the rhetoric of “looking at oneself being looked at” doubly charged with K-pop’s cosmopolitan aspiration in relation to its international market and intercultural lineages (Suk-Young Kim, 2018). What Is Love? thereby offers a retake on the visual pleasures available for the transnational female spectator as she negotiates the (im)possibilities of transgressing the dominant fantasies of heteroromance and global cultural hierarchies with a supposedly more radical articulation of feminine subjectivity and minor discourse.
Remediating Heteroromance with K-pop: the Transnational Female Spectator in TWICE’s What Is Love?
In K-pop girl group TWICE’s 2018 music video What Is Love?, the members gather in front of the television to watch favourite moments of cinematic romance from foreign classics: the pottery scene in Ghost, the headphones scene in La Boum, the library scene in Love Letter, etc. As she gazes with longing at the screen playing the movie reenacted by herself as the heroine (and another member crossdressing as the male lead), she lip syncs to the refrain: “I wanna know know know know, what is love?”
While the trope of the mise-en-abyme female spectator is a frequent subject within feminist film theory, her presence in a “new media” text as the YouTube music video and an arguably marginal (but emerging) locale of cultural production as K-pop, is less examined. This paper looks at how What Is Love? makes use of its medium as an internet video and its remediation of older screens from film to television (Bolter and Grusin, 1999), in triangulating the (extra)diegetic female gaze in a kaleidoscope of identification and misrecognition. Rather than a homoerotic gaze per se, I argue that the music video’s reinvention of heteromance involves an evacuation of the object of sexual desire altogether, replaced by a self now encountered as Other. This Lacanian tension between self and other, mapped onto the distinction between local and global, renders the rhetoric of “looking at oneself being looked at” doubly charged with K-pop’s cosmopolitan aspiration in relation to its international market and intercultural lineages (Suk-Young Kim, 2018). What Is Love? thereby offers a retake on the visual pleasures available for the transnational female spectator as she negotiates the (im)possibilities of transgressing the dominant fantasies of heteroromance and global cultural hierarchies with a supposedly more radical articulation of feminine subjectivity and minor discourse.
Bio
Rita Rongyi Lin is a PhD candidate in the Screen Cultures program at Northwestern University. Her research explores the intersection of gender, spectatorship, and urban space in cinema through the figure of the flâneuse from across divergent national, historical, and theoretical contexts and tropes, including the fallen woman, the migrant, and the sleepwalker. Since the pandemic, she has come to spend much of her spare time watching k-pop and thinking about plastic orientalism and affective economies in the age of digital globalization.