From Korean Wave to Korean Living: Meteor Garden and the Politics of Love Fantasies in Taiwan

This paper uses an inter-Asian TV drama, Meteor Garden (also called Boys Over Flowers in Japan and S. Korea), as an example to illustrate the formation of women’s desire within the context of nation formation and neoliberal globalization. It argues that women’s rights to Korean dramas are predicated on a politics of recognition which essentializes and naturalizes women’s desire for love. This desire for love, when historicized as an institution for nation building and globalization, should be seen as a cultural technology of control which aims to depoliticize women, reducing women’s citizenship to the intimate domain. Korean dramas and Korean living, based on consumption as a fantastic solution to social and systemic inequalities, reduce democratic politics to life politics; however, paradoxically, they also provide an occasion for understanding of women’s “disagreement” rooted in their unhappy reality and this disagreement is the basis of democratic politics.