2025 Theses Doctoral

Excessive Diasporas: Consumption and Embodied Spectatorship in Contemporary Korean Cultural Productions

Jo, Andrea Erin

This dissertation examines Korean cultural productions in the diaspora—across film, theatre, and social media—as a means of interrogating national, cultural, and gender identity and rethinking the very definition of diaspora.

The first chapter centers on film and examines queer desire and spectatorship in The Handmaiden and Spa Night; the second chapter shifts to theatre, analyzing Yakiniku Dragon and its depiction of the Zainichi-Korean diaspora in Japan; the third chapter moves into the digital sphere by exploring mukbang, an internet phenomenon.

Each chapter is organized by medium and pays particular attention to a specific sense: in this chapter, I look at film and touch; in Chapter 2, theatre and smell; in Chapter 3, the internet and sound. However, I do not relegate the realm of the haptic to solely Chapter 1, the realm of the olfactory to Chapter 2, and the realm of the aural to Chapter 3—instead, I look at the many ways multiple senses are activated in all chapters.

In this project, I analyze not only these cultural productions themselves but also their interaction with spectatorship, asking how excess structures both the performances and the ways they are received. By foregrounding excess as a defining principle of diaspora and performance, I consider what is generative in that excess—what it reveals about the limitations of stable identity categories, about the conditions of diasporic spectatorship, and about the affective and bodily responses that these cultural productions provoke. By focusing on the aesthetics of excess, I explore how an engagement of the senses produces a spectatorship of active embodiment.