ZEGLEN, David

The Glocalization of the Political Celebrity Couple: Kim Jong Un and the Politics of Reform

 

In July 2012, North Korea’s official state media broke with the long-standing tradition of keeping the dictator’s wife from public view by announcing to the world that the identity of the fashionable woman who had been publically accompanying Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un for the past several weeks was none other than his wife, “Comrade” Ri Sol-ju. The subsequent media visibility of the newly-christened totalitarian couple led the Western media to weave a narrative of cultural convergence between the West and North Korea which was heralded as a sign that North Korea was finally reforming their country in order to join the community of nations. For instance, the Associated Press suggested that the marriage revelation was a move towards “more Western-style” leadership while the New York Times stated that Ri Sol-ju’s appearance “had all the trappings of a Kate Middleton moment,” which presaged policy changes in North Korea.

This paper will weave together two arguments about the North Korean ‘celebrity couple’ phenomenon. First, this paper will look at how the North Korean media has appropriated tropes from Western celebrity culture and ‘indigenized’ them to produce a celebrity couple hybrid that reflects both global and local cultural practices. Rather than succumbing to cultural homogenization, North Korea has utilized trans-local symbolic resources for differentiated local interpretation and consumption. Secondly, this paper will also look at how hegemony is reproduced in the process of hybridization. By adapting some of the tropes of celebrity culture, the North Korean media has presented itself in a post-authoritarian image, while maintaining its own traditional social practices.

This paper will therefore deal with the intersection of celebrity culture and several aspects of North Korean culture, including the historical politics of male and female fashion. For example, Ri Sol-ju’s taste for the Western fashion styles of Christian Dior and Chanel presents the country as a worldly consumer society, indicating international trade and economic growth. However, when combined with the presence of her husband’s stolid Mao suit, the couple is presented as a symbolic continuation of local North Korean gender roles that harkens back to the early post-colonial period, where the leader is the arbiter of female beauty, and the woman who labors to achieve this right form of feminine beauty is brought closer to the national leader.

 

David Zeglen is finishing his M.Sc. in Globalization studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. He is currently a research intern at the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, a research and advocacy NGO based in Washington, D.C.