정보 시대 초국가적 미디어의 재현과 지식/앎

Transnational Media and Its Representations and Knowledge in the Age of Information: Luth L. Ozeki's My Year of Meats

We live in an increasingly transnational media culture in which access to a multitude of national and transnational TV channels, films and internet websites has become an everyday phenomenon. Despite the age-old concern for the cultural industry's mass seduction projects with conscious/unconscious misrepresentations, and passive consumers as brain-washed accomplices to commercially motivated mass media, it is true that increasing media production provides women with the unprecedented opportunity to understand diverse and alternative female lives of the world and to formulate women's networks beyond national boundary. My Year of Meats (1998), a novel written by a Japanese-American female writer, Ruth L. Ozeki, is the very one through which we can discuss some important issues involved in transnational media production and consumption and its relationship with individual intervention in the media production, for authentic representations and against willful ignorance and "bad knowledge" on the very disturbing affairs. This novel revolves around two women, Jane Takagi-Little as an American female producer of documentary and Akiko Ueno as a Japanese viewer of Jane's transnational TV series. Both women undergo their own personal changes while producing and consuming transnational media productions. Their changes and empowerments are getting enabled by the help of other women who are the subjects/objects of Jane's documentary program. Therefore, two women's life stories connected by transnational mass media (and delineated in a transnational novel) provoke the readers to imagine female networks and communities across national and cultural borders.