EVENT DETAILS

Women's Studies presents a GFE Brown Bag lunch talk by Kim Feig, GFE, Ph.D. candidate, Culture&Theory, "An American Fairy Tale: How the United States Fell in Love with Laura Ling and Euna Lee."

An American Fairy Tale:
How the United States Fell in Love with Laura Ling and Euna Lee

This presentation examines one chapter within the longer story of the United States’ curiosity with North Korea. In March of 2009, North American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee were detained by the North Korean government and released nearly five months later following former President Clinton’s envoy to the peninsula. The women’s imprisonment captured the attention of U.S. audiences, and as the events unfolded the U.S. media spun a tale heavily reliant upon gendered, ethnic and racialized tropes. I explore the use of these tropes in the media’s construction of Ling and Lee as feminized and infantilized figures juxtaposed against the opacity and masculine fervor of North Korea. I situate these narratives within a longer trajectory of the West’s desire to ‘know’ this seemingly unknowable country. My larger project investigates issues relating to epistemology specifically in the context of U.S. configurations of North Korea asking questions such as: what enthralls U.S. audiences about North Korea? What discursive mechanisms are used to understand this country? And, what counts as knowledge or fact when faced with the unknowable?

A light lunch will be served.
Please RSVP bbaliga@uci.edu, by February 19, 2012