Nichola Gwon's Mykoreanhusband.com: How Living with a Korean Husband Becomes a Story

Online writers in the 21st century form a new type of readership by combining conventional literature with diverse media such as pictures, voice recordings, videos, and comics. Away from traditional narrative structure, they create hybrid literary genres in order to comprehend complex contexts in which they are situated. They find their fragmented and mobile subjectivities expanding beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, and they experiment with varied genres of narratives to represent their global experiences. Observing this burgeoning literary practice, literary scholars are confused about how to comprehend it and what is a proper methodology to categorize it. Among diverse online writings, this paper investigates Nichola Gwon's blog, Mykoreanhusband.com. She married a Korean man in 2012. Being a white Australian woman, Gwon encounters cultural conflict with her Korean husband. In order to comprehend her marriage life, she keeps her blog by mixing diary and comics together. Her blog attracts the worldwide internet audience because of its humorous representation of her marriage life in episodic comic strips. Yet, the ways in which she observes her husband relate to what ethnographers did in the Third World. Gwon employs certain cultural, racial, and linguistic gazes to document the life of her Korean husband in Australia. Furthermore, her online writing is highly selective in that her narrative radius mainly focuses on her marriage life. Considering her narrative trope, I claim that Gwon's online writing is an ethnographic memoir in which she documents her Korean husband's cultural, racial, and linguistic differences.