Major League Baseball and Racialized Masculinities in Korean Digital Media

Abstract

This study examines discursively produced racialized masculinities in today’s global era through mediated Korean-born sport celebrities playing in Major League Baseball. Resisting traditionally unknown, excluded, or falsely simplified Asian male subjects under a dominant White-centered Western gaze, this study aims to demonstrate relationally and mutationally constructed masculinities in complex cross-racial/ethnic interactions. Given that South Korea is a place in which gender, race, sexuality, and nationality are dynamically shaped by the country’s colonial history and national desire for a global visibility, I focused on this context and analyzed its media texts from online news articles and the following readers’ comments, considering the interactive features in today’s news consumption. As diverse morphologies among men of color demonstrated, this study contends that racial and gendered meanings are constructed according to particular conditions and connectivities; thus, there is no fixed hegemonic masculinity in men’s relations.