Popular Media Culture

On the other hand, with the context of current modern society, mass media have had a great influence on supporting counter-hegemony of gender. As a basis of the discussion, “counter-hegemony” can be simply defined as "critiquing and attempting" to remove the barriers of the “hegemonic” power in community (Redekop, Gallagher & Satterwhite, 2018). To create the elimination of stamping stereotypes as well as of the distinction between masculinity and femininity, a K-pop music video named "Balloon" of “TVXQ”, could be used as an obvious demonstration (SMTOWN, 2009).

Contrary to outdated stereotypes in people's mind-set that being masculinity must go along with manly appearance, muscularity or elegant clothing, the images of TVXQ's five members in this video represent the flippant manner and characteristics of female with white skin, beautiful baby face and colourful stuffed animals costume. Similar to the example of the female’s image against gender hegemony, the strong and independent appearance of the woman driving a truck in the parody video of Funny girls (2016) partially opened up a completely different viewpoint from the women’s stereotype of weakness, dependence or the main role of housewife as people always imagine about. In spite of such idol images, Korean pop culture has had a widespread influence and is well received by the audiences, especially the youth in both Asia and Europe. It is the same case in which if the image of that trucking woman appeared about 50 years ago, in my opinion, very few people would accept it. Nevertheless, nowadays, they can not only become truck driver but also business owners or politicians although the number of involving in these jobs is still quite small. Thus, these two products of popular media pointed out that hegemonic beliefs of the gender’s representation in society are deviant and unequal.

Male and female totally can have each other’s characteristics but it does not mean that they can be ridiculed or wrongly evaluated about their personality just because of this. Another popular media effort in changing people's perception of gender categories is the improvement in creating toilet symbols. As always from the past, all public location’s toilets have only two main symbols representing for two rooms, one for men and one for women. Even if a third room can be constructed, it is also for the disability. However, a breakthrough took place at the “Sigtuna Museum” in Sweden when the museum added another toilet with a "sender neutral toilet" symbol for "who have a different gender identity" (Löfgren, 2015). This new symbol is a combination of a half image of a woman in “a skirt” and the other half of “a man in trousers” (Löfgren, 2015). It can be considered as the "openness" in Swedish thoughts about the homosexual community as well as the designer’s desire of promoting non-distinction of gender all over the world (Löfgren, 2015). Whatever gender a person is, he or she should still be welcomed and not be discriminated due to the old-fashioned gender hegemony. However, the case of the new toilet symbols of Sweden can be considered as the beginning of the social recognition of the gender mixture, but not all countries have such modern thinking and this is only a few and very rare examples in spreading the idea of equality and being against the gender prejudice.