Discourse & Society
Volume 22, Number 4 (July 2011)
pagesw 440-457
DOI: 10.1177/0957926510395834
Adrienne Lo, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Jenna Kim
Department of Educational Psychology
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
This article examines how discourses of linguistic (in)competency regiment productions of citizenship in the South Korean popular media. Through an analysis of newspaper articles and television programs, we investigate how depictions of language competency become key resources for locating individuals within genealogies of kinship and chronotopic figures of personhood. In some cases, the speech of these celebrities associates them with imaginings of their backwards, low-class Korean kin, the Japanese colonial period, and American military presence, while in other cases, their language is associated with the 21st-century ideal of the modern, elite, globetrotting neoliberal subject. This analysis demonstrates how competence is read in relation to changing notions of citizenship in the new ‘multicultural’ Korea as these men are differentially positioned between multiple raced, classed, and gendered imaginings of Whiteness and Koreanness. More generally, we argue that understandings of linguistic competence are social productions, rather than reflections of language ability.
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