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Corpses, Spectacle, Illusion: The Body as Abject and Object in CSI

This chapter intervenes in and adds to the growing proliferation of academic discourse on Korean television drama and highlights the narrow range and variety of female types, images and sexual relationships produced, screened and watched in the contemporary hallyu (or Korean Wave) era. Focusing on the 2005 South Korean ‘trendy drama’ serial My Lovely Sam-soon (Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation), the chapter argues that this critically overlooked work, through its innovative representational strategies, manages to exploit, critique and overtly challenge the ‘dominant male economy,’ in Linda Williams’ terms (1989, Power, Pleasure and the ‘Frenzy of Visible’, p4), of Korean television drama. Rather than focusing on what is popularly seen as a crucial generic element that is sentimentally, traditionally and conservatively defined as ‘pure love’ (and the consequent denial of a sexual life for its heroines this engenders), the drama, it is argued, quite extraordinarily foregrounds the sexual aspects of its central relationship and in the process confronts ‘rigid patriarchal expectations over correct and desired male and female behaviour.’ In focusing on the depiction of sexual activity in Korean drama, which has hitherto been a critically unexplored area, the chapter suggests that larger questions centering on gender identity within Korea can also be explored. As a consequence, the chapter looks, for example, at how Korean drama constructs ‘impossible values’ for female viewers and presents them as straightforward, obtainable and desirable. Engaging with critical writing on television drama and critical works that consider the complexity of televisual representations of sex from both western and Asian perspectives, the intention of this work is to offer an assessment of the highly-gendered construction or much Korean television drama and how it can be creatively and effectively confronted.