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A book manuscript in progress
Image source - rose project website (https://roseproject.co.kr/)
Desiring Darkness: Overdetermining Skin Color and Beauty in Transnational South Korea
Desiring Darkness: Overdetermining Skin Color and Beauty in Transnational South Korea is an interdisciplinary project that offers nuanced insights into the layered cultural meanings of skin-darkening beauty representation and performance by women in South Korea. By employing multiple research methods such as visual cultural analysis, technocultural discourse analysis, participant observation, field rhetoric, and in-depth interviews, this book explores the push and pull between local, regional, and global power relations that form and transform cultural meanings of artificially and cosmetically darkened skin and beauty in South Korea. The book's aim is to provide a new interpretive frame that understands Asian beauty through Blackness/darkness that is not subsumed by the imperialist logic of emulating whiteness.
Published Research Areas
Asian/American Digital Media
Asian/American Digital Media
Kim, Dasol., & Kim, Seonah (2024). Whiteness Construction in South Korean Digital Space: Oliver-ssaem’s Strategic Identity Distancing for Visibility. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies.
Kim, Seonah. (2023). “They expect us to all be yellow” Rhetorical Construction of Asianness in Blackface Controversy around Jella’s Yellowish-Brown Tanning Makeup on YouTube. International Journal of Communication 17, 5420-5439.
Race and Gender in South Korea
Race and Gender in South Korea
Kim, Seonah & LeiLani Nishime (forthcoming, 2025). Transnational Mixed Asian/Black Beauty: Negotiating South Korea’s Relation to Nigeria Through Multiracial Celebrity. Kwon, Jungmin & Eguchi, Shinsuke (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Communication and Transnationalism. Routledge.
Kim, Seonah. (forthcoming, 2025). Somatechnic of plastic surgery: Unmasking mediated male gaze and monstrous femininity in Mask Girl. Manuscript accepted by Women’s Studies in Communication
Kim, Seonah. (2024). De-/Re-Whitening Russianness: A Liminal Space of White Privileges Represented in Non-Summit. Television & New Media, 25(3), 270-286.
Kim, Seonah, Jeehyun Jenny Lee, & Anna Lee Swan (2022). Consuming Ali Abdul: conditional acceptance in the context of Korean multiculturalism. Communication, Culture & Critique, 15(4), 536-537.
Kim, Seonah. (2022). What makes Chloe Kim’s return glorious? Korean news coverage of Chloe Kim during the PyeongChang Winter Olympics. In Wang, Cynthia & Steve, Bien-Aimé. (Eds.,). Perceptions of East Asian and Asian North American Athletics (pp.257-289). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
Critical University Studies & Methodologies
Critical University Studies & Methodologies
Kim, Seonah., & Hou, Yang-Hsun (forthcoming, 2025). Duoethnography on Mobility, Race, and Gender: Conversations about Negotiating while Resisting the U.S. Gaze. In Mahali, Alude & Tate, Shirley Anne (Eds.,). Dialogues on Decolonizing University: Racialized Gender Transnational Learning. Palgrave Macmillian, Cham.
Kim, Seonah. (2024). Critical Complete-Member Ethnography Revisited: A Heuristic Reflection of Nativeness, Insiderness, and Homeland During the COVID-19 Pandemic. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 23, 1-2.
Kim, Seonah & Ding, Zhao. (2021). ZOOM-in/ZOOM-out Transnational Identities: Crossing the Virtual Borders of Pandemic Teaching Everyday. Communication, Culture & Critique, 14(2), 332-335.
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