Monday Online Presentation Session 1

Cultural Studies

Session Chair: Sanaa Benmessaoud

11:35-12:00

70718

| OTT and Participatory Cultures- The Case of Netflix’s Wednesday

Nikita Chowdhary, FLAME University, India

The advent of OTT brought about a comfort in viewing, a personal safe space to indulge into, to escape the bitterness of reality, at your own convenience. This witnessed a sharp spike as the pandemic hit, becoming ‘The New Television’, giving the youth what they want to see, whenever they want to. For some shows more than the others, the feeling goes beyond appreciation to create a deepened sense of association. Netflix’s ‘Wednesday’ surpassed the popular ‘Stranger Things season 4’ for the most watched hours for an English-language series in the debut week itself, bagging top 1 in 83 countries. Jenna Ortega’s choreography on the song ‘Goo Goo Muck’ recorded more than 400K remakes in less than a month. Reddit forums are seen to be buzzing with fans tattooing Wednesday itself, eagerly awaiting the second season. Wednesday surely took the internet by storm, single-handedly reviving the Gothic subculture. This research engages with the online conversations around ‘Wednesday’ and their consequent influence on audiences to form participatory cultures. Netnographic research method will be used to understand the reception of the show and its impact via platforms like Reddit forums, Twitter, Quora, Instagram, and others. The aim of this research is to understand the specific elements that foster the creation of participatory cultures around OTT shows like ‘Wednesday’. Deciphering these factors will allow content creators in the entertainment industry to design superior content that can gain popularity easily and stand out in the vast content pool available at everybody’s fingertips today.

12:00-12:25

70530 | Scoping Popular Music Heritage of South Korea: Its Cultural Policy and Practice

Sumi Kim, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, South Korea

There has been burgeoning scholarly research on popular music as heritage in cultural studies over the few decades. It is perplexing because there is no official or fixed definition of popular music heritage as it demands contextual and discursive analysis. Therefore, defining popular music heritage is intrinsically difficult as its scope and content vary according to national heritage policies and practices. Depending on which government administration defines and perceives popular music as heritage as well as how popular music is practiced in the heritage sector characterises the concept of popular music heritage. The aim of this paper and presentation is to scope and frame South Korean (1948–present)’s popular music heritage from the relevant cultural policy and practice approaches. In the first part, the cultural heritage element of popular music will be identified by sketching the ways in which South Korean cultural policy documents such as cultural heritage and cultural industry acts and laws have described popular music. Among the legislative categorization and definitions of South Korean cultural heritage the national policies describe, I will extract popular music parts. The latter part will focus on the popular music heritage practice by connecting cultural institutions’ practices such as museum exhibitions and the tourism industry to explore how popular music heritage has been engaging audiences as part of heritage practice. In particular, contemporary K-Pop exhibitions will be discussed as the recent case study. Ultimately, this study seeks to contribute a contextual analysis of popular music heritage as part of cultural studies.

12:25-12:50

70311 | Silenced Voices: Alienation and Victimization of Women Depicted in Han Kang’s ‘The Vegetarian’ and Kyung-Sook’s ‘Shin Violets’

Keziah Priyanka F, Christ (Deemed to Be University), India

Sharon J, Christ (Deemed to Be University), India

Alienation is the most fundamental kind of loneliness and isolation, and it has been the topic of numerous psychological, social, literary, and philosophical research. In both internal and extrinsic meanings, alienation occurs as a natural result of an existential crisis. The issue of alienation has been addressed often and unflinchingly in modern literature. Korean literature could not be unaffected by it because of its socio-cultural reasons. The alienated protagonist frequently appears in twentieth-century Korean fiction. There have been significant attempts to depict modern women's bewilderment, dissatisfaction, alienation, disintegration, and estrangement. It will be summarized with references to the works of notable writers Han Kang and Kyung- Sook Shin. The characters are anomalies in their society, owing to certain flaws in themselves or to societal injustices. The novelist is more concerned with depicting an isolated individual's situation and expressing sympathy for them and disdain for society than in making philosophical judgements. The novelist describes how women are subjected to sexual abuse, pain, and estrangement through their novels The Vegetarian and Violets. This study attempts to demonstrate how the author, via the lens of these Korean novels, throws crucial light on questions of female identity and sexuality. In this context, the article will seek to analyze the writer's depictions of sexual assault against women, their suffering, and their experience of being alienated from the 'self'-body as a result.

12:50-13:15

70514 | ‘Tyranny of Silence’: The Uses of the Erotic in Audre Lorde’s Poetry

Swarnika Ahuja, Vivekananda Institute of Professional Studies, India

The idea of passion and pain becomes important to understand the erotic in Lorde’s poetry. It is soaked with a fearlessness with which she demands other women to speak. The notion of the erotic which has always been seen in the mainstream as closely aligned to the idea of the sexual act, finds a new freedom in the works of Lorde. For she passionately pleads for precisely this ability to pour out without feeling shame, disgust or fear. We are programmed to hide or to show but never truly be ourselves- free to be seen and heard as we want. The silences that we yearn to break but are forced to keep against our will. It is in these terms she articulates fear which she primarily understands as a fear to be seen, to be visible in a society that has taught us to be anything but our true selves, that has always prescribed only certain ways of existing. My paper will examine how resisting this ‘ tyranny of silence' is a battle for space, for representation, a battle to be heard and to break the silences within the archive of women’s writing. Through this unrestrained capacity to speak, to initiate dialogue with the feminist movements that have remained silent on Black women’s rights, the erotic is transformed into an act that no longer allows invisibility but rather the erotic becomes something of a tool at our disposal that brings us freedom from the isolation caused by our silences.