Young Filipino Women’s Reception of the Class and Gender Ideologies in Selected Korean Television Dramas
A Theater of Struggle: Young Filipino Women’s Reception of the Class and Gender Ideologies in Selected Korean Television Dramas
Espiritu, B.F. (2011)
ABSTRACT :
This study examines the ‘theater of struggle’ in young Filipino women’s reception of Korean television dramas in view of the fact that US entertainment industries conveying the capitalist ideology have long dominated many countries including the Philippines and South Korea. Anchored mainly in Gramsci’s theory of Hegemony and Hall’s Encoding-decoding theory, the study employed textual analysis of selected Korean dramas, focus group discussions with young Filipino women in different colleges, and key informant interviews. Based on the young women’s opinions on the coming of Korean and other Asian dramas to the Philippines, American cultural imperialism in the Philippines has been challenged and subverted to some extent. While some young women subscribed to capitalist values that emanated from the West in selected Korean dramas, many of them articulated negotiated readings of capitalist values and almost all articulated their resistance and struggle against the patriarchal ideology. In reading selected Korean dramas reflexively, the young women identified social pathologies of poverty, class and gender inequalities, and other capitalist patriarchal values and constructed emancipator discourses with regard to these.