Body
For nearly a year I have been carrying around with me an essay by David Zeglen titled “It’s the Thought That Counts: North Korea’s Glocalization of the Celebrity Couple and the Mediated Politics of Reform,” which appeared in an anthology titled “First Comes Love: Power Couples, Celebrity Kinship and Cultural Politics.” With America just nominating its first major party female candidate for president, herself the wife of a former president, I finally found the time to read it. If one can get around that word “glocalization” in the title (“a process that involves the selective borrowing of foreign styles which are then imbued with domestic meaning”), you will find an absolutely fascinating essay on how the Western press misreads the semiotics of North Korean political culture.
The argument is actually pretty simple—and devastating. Westerners (and this includes South Koreans) think that the appearance of signs in a non-Western society that are understandable in their own cultural terms (in this case celebrity, or more specifically, celebrity couple culture) signal a movement in that society’s values towards those of the West. In case the argument seems a little farfetched, Zeglen wisely sets up his analysis by sketching out another dictatorship that took the Western press to the cleaners: the Assad regime in Syria. The Assads paid a London PR firm to buff up the image of Bashar Assad’s wife Asma who lands an article in Vogue entitled “Asma Al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert.” The subliminal (and not so subliminal) message was “she’s smart and chic. They must share our values. The regime must be reforming.”
Having established the prima facie case through the Syrian example, Zeglen spends the next 20 pages detailing how the Western press misunderstood the portrayal of Kim Jong-un and Ri Sol-ju, particularly their joint appearances in public, and Ri’s sartorial choices. Among the publications that are called out for some extraordinary leaps of logic based on Chanel suits are the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Huffington Post, Der Spiegel, the Korea Broadcasting Service, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Independent, and even, astonishingly, the bastion of traditional South Korean conservatism, the Chosun Ilbo. All of them are caught making claims that joint appearances at amusement parks plus Prada, Christian Dior, and Chanel add up to liberal reform and opening.
"Among the publications that are called out for some extraordinary leaps of logic based on Chanel suits are the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Huffington Post, Der Spiegel, the Korea Broadcasting Service, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Independent, and even, astonishingly, the bastion of traditional South Korean conservatism, the Chosun Ilbo."
Simply pointing out this idiocy would have been an accomplishment, but Zeglen takes the argument up another notch, reinterpreting the same scenes—and the ones the Western press missed because Ri was not present—in North Korean cultural terms. The argument has multiple strands. One would be familiar to readers of Brian Myers or Brad Martin: the “gift” culture where the leader is elevated to the role of father of the nation bestowing his love on an infantilized public.
A second strand is Kim’s appearance: while Ri may be wearing Chanel suits, he is wearing a black Mao suit, appearing plump, and reputedly using plastic surgery to heighten his resemblance to his grandfather. She might be making some kind of political statement wearing Prada, but so is he—and his message is one explicitly aimed at reinforcing traditional values, not signaling reform.
A third aspect of the argument is an analysis of the visits where Ri is present—which are limited to sites associated with leisure, pleasure, and consumption—and ones where she is not. The focus on recreation and culture distracts the Western press from Kim’s visits to sites associated with the country’s authoritarian political culture such as military bases.
Yet at the same time, the North Koreans have to grapple with the issue of Ri’s image in terms of their own political culture. For example, as one anonymous source observes “In the past when Kim Il-sung’s wife Kim Sung Ae accompanied him on his guidance visits, the people considered it natural because she was the Vice-chair of the Union of Democratic Women, but Ri Sol-joo is just ‘ his woman.’ Indeed, the North Koreans have to balance the desire to portray the Kim-Ri relationship in certain ways for the Western audience against the overturning of tradition that such representation constitutes in North Korean terms.
Zeglen further explores how the Western press interpreted Ri as a “commoner” (even comparing her to Kate Middleton!) and the reality of the songbun system, Ri’s origins, and the issues created by her past as a singer in the Unhasu Orchestra.
His conclusion: “Ri continues to be the gift that keeps on giving to a Global North media myopically looking for fissures that suggest reform or even revolution.”
