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2 books match the query 'Joo, Rachael Miyung'
National Greens
The Natures of Korean GolfRachael Miyung Joo
Duke University Press, 2027
In National Greens, Rachael Miyung Joo details the rise of golf as a global Korean cultural project in the twenty-first century. While courses began as exclusive domains of the privileged hidden from public view, the sport is now a widespread visible practice popular across communities in South Korea and the Korean diaspora. Based on fieldwork in South Korea, Aotearoa New Zealand, the Philippines, and the United States, Joo aligns this transformation of golfing with shifts in Korean cultural formations, like the rising significance of leisure culture in everyday life, the globalization of Korean media celebrity, and innovative technologies now dedicated to recreation. She also explores the environmental and political repercussions of the sport’s proliferation as an influx in courses radically alters landscapes, and activist attempts to block or slow construction have largely proven ineffective. Highlighting the growth of golf in South Korea, its functions in imperialism and migration, and the effects of golf technologies, National Greens illustrates the game’s symbolic power in shaping ideas of leisure, landscape, environment, nation, and identity.
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Transnational Sport
Gender, Media, and Global KoreaRachael Miyung Joo
Duke University Press, 2012
Based on ethnographic research in Seoul and Los Angeles, Transnational Sport tells 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.
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