Ordinary Outsiders: Transnational Content Creation and the Reclamation of Agency by “Foreign” Women in South Korea

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2021This project explores the online content and lived experiences of “foreign” women who create social media content about their lives in South Korea. The commercialization of social media has led to increased pressure to commodify everyday life. The culture that has emerged on platforms like YouTube and Instagram is one that normalizes turning people into brands, rewarding creators who strategically package their lifestyles and align themselves with corporate sponsors. In the age of the online entrepreneur, it is no longer shocking to hear about a YouTuber whose livelihood is rooted in producing videos about beauty, fashion, food, health, or travel. Flourishing from the neoliberal age of social media “influencers,” scholars have offered both celebratory tales of participatory culture and thorough critiques of platforms’ co-optation of users’ labor. However, absent from these conversations is a transnational perspective that considers the ways in which content creators with relatively small audiences carve out spaces that resist the capitalist imperative to constantly commodify and monetize. For the women whose experiences inform this dissertation, content creation can be emotionally, personally, and interpersonally meaningful in ways that help them navigate the challenges of being a woman online and being a foreign woman in South Korea. Through textual analyses of vlogs (“video blogs”) and interviews with creators, I demonstrate the ways in which some creators prioritize community-building, storytelling, and the creative process over quantifiable measures of “success.” Rather than rendering their experiences with Korea/n culture as exotic or exceptional, these women use social media to emphasize the ordinary. While these individuals continue to create within a global platform ecosystem that incentivizes consumption, commodification, and competition, their social media participation serves as an affective mode of transnational communication. For foreigners who are outsiders in the eyes of the state, social media can be a site at which to reconstitute notions of belonging and reclaim agency