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Transnational Bodily Motion Industries and the Diffraction of 'Kinetic Animacy' - Bodies On and Off the Basketball Court, Affective Geographies of the Bodily Motion

  • Journal of Popular Narrative
  • 2023, 29(3), pp.105-142
  • DOI : 10.18856/jpn.2023.29.3.004
  • Publisher : The Association of Popular Narrative
  • Research Area : Interdisciplinary Studies > Interdisciplinary Research
  • Received : August 31, 2023
  • Accepted : October 19, 2023
  • Published : October 30, 2023

Doohyun Kwon 1

1동아대학교 젠더어펙트연구소

Accredited

ABSTRACT

The bodily motion and dialog of Slam Dunk's characters have become a long-standing trend among readers and audiences, and it's an ongoing trend. The characters in Slam Dunk, with their black motions and Asian faces, and the power of the male fanbase to resonate with them and share this resonance with women, suggests that the affective forces surrounding Slam Dunk are intimately connected to issues of racialization and gendering. Based on these considerations, this article seeks to map the transnational affective geographies of bodily motions, revealing them as assemblages of objectification, racialization, and gendering. As NBA commissioner, David Stern and his colleagues combined the most favorable aspects of black and white representation through the image of Michael Jordan. Jordan's contradictory image as a symbol of basketball also influenced the way Slam Dunk was represented. The tracing representation of Slam Dunk is a technique that maintains the NBA's affect as embodied through the bodies of black men, while iconographically erasing traces of blackness. Ultimately, this representation works together to deprive racialized individuals of the potential they may have as political agents, from the technology of sport coupled with patterns of bodily motion. On the other hand, Korean basketball players, who could be said to be characterizations of Japanese "hard body", were transformed into "soft body" as they were attached to the affect of hate towards the "Oppa band". This is a hierarchical way of gendering and infantilizing the object of hate. This generational problem is a historical fault line. The heyday of basketball in South Korea coincided with the decline of the student movement. Yonsei University, where the players who were part of the basketball festivities belonged to, was also in the spotlight for the "Hanchongryon(Korean Federation of Student Councils) demonstration". It is the affective economy of hate that unites and perpetuates the "Hanchongryon" and "Oppa band". The meanings and affects of bodily motions have been and will continue to be contingent, racialized and gendered as the terrain of pop cultural politics shifts and overlaps. The ongoing transformation of bodily motions should therefore be noted as a manifestation of the changing relationship between popular culture and everyday life, and the racialized and gendered (re)arrangement of global assemblages.

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This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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