Transnational Sport

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 global media consumption. She explains how Korean athletes who achieve success on the world stage represent a powerful, globalized Korea. Celebrity Korean women athletes are most visible in the Ladies Professional Golf Association. In the media, young Korean golfers are represented as daughters to be protected within the patriarchal Korean family and as hypersexualized Asian women with especially marketable images. 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 an outsized event, Joo discusses the Korea-Japan 2002 FIFA World Cup, a watershed moment in recent Korean history. Joo was in Seoul during June, 2002, one of thousands of fans filling the city's streets in collective excitement. New ideas of global Koreanness coalesced around the event. Women and youth assumed newly prominent roles in Korean culture and new models of public culture emerged as thousands of individuals were joined by a shared purpose.