http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5931-7577
Abstract
Aegyo (performed winsomeness) is a layered articulation of behaviours, gestures, vocal and linguistic adjustments, narratives and fashions that serve to enact child-like charm and infantilised cuteness. It is a widely debated but poorly studied phenomenon observed especially among younger South Korean women and, more seldomly, among men. This article will provide a preliminary ethnographic description of aegyo based on the fieldwork performed in Seoul, Incheon and Seongnam in 2015 and 2016, supported by the results of two online questionnaires from early 2016. The article tackles three separate dimensions. First, it briefly relates aegyo to comparable articulations of performed winsomeness in the broader East Asian context. Second, it relates it to the elements of Korean traditional or indigenous knowledge. Third, it explores the meaning of these performances with regards to contemporary figurations of femininity and the local politics of gender, with aegyo seen as a marked but normalised multidirectional process between various social actors.
Acknowledgements
We are thankful to our friend Sehee Eom (Seoul, Republic of Korea) for contributing to our field research and for helping us to collect data presented in the ethnographic section of this article, and to Dr Sol-A Yu (Yonsei University, Seoul, Republic of Korea) for facilitating our research and for the encouragement to publish these findings.
ORCID
Aljosa Puzar http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5931-7577
Yewon Hong http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7044-5692
Notes
[1] The secondary infantilisation in this sense was proposed by Goffman (Citation1979, 72–77) in his work on gender in advertising where ‘the parent-child complex—taken in its ideal middleclass version’ is a ‘source of behavioral imagery’ for the socially produced ‘expressions’ of femininity. For the early ethological work of Konrad Lorenz studying responses to the ‘infantile’ and for its critical evaluation in contemporary cuteness studies, see Dale et al. (Citation2017). Different from both of these theoretical dimensions is the back-loop imitation of this secondary infantilisation by the children themselves, as hypothesised later in this article. For discussion on the emotionality of cuteness, see Strong (Citation2012) and Sherman and Haidt (Citation2011).
[2] For the broadly related theoretical debate about cuteness and agency, especially within the affect-focused studies, see the chapter ‘The Appeal of the Cute Object: Desire, Domestication and Agency’ by Dale et al. (Citation2017, 35–55). For the timely case study of cutified agency in Singapore (and beyond), see Abidin (Citation2016).
[3] Bunwigi here means ambiance or atmosphere, the social ‘air’ or feeling of the place. Bunwigi was not part of our questionnaires as it was not assumed to be on the same level of locally specific conceptual importance as our specifically tested cultural concepts that traditionally define Korean interpersonal relations (nunchi, chemyon and jeong).
