DrJane Park

Project Opportunities

Title: Gender and Cultural Studies

Summary of opportunity:

The Gender and Cultural Studies Department at the University of Sydney is the leading centre for research into gender and culture in Australia, renowned internationally for interdisciplinary research and teaching in feminist, gender and cultural studies.   

Opportunity synopsis:

With some of Australia's foremost academics and theorists on staff, the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies provides you with critically engaging ideas and the tools to analyse a wide range of issues. The Department's academics draw on a number of theoretical and empirical research paradigms, spanning social science and humanities research methods. In the discipline of Gender and Cultural Studies, students engage critically with the changing representations and meanings of gender and culture in the everyday world.  The department is renowned globally for its interdisciplinary research and teaching in feminist, gender and cultural studies, and has on its staff some of Australia’s foremost theorists in gender and culture. The department has a vibrant research culture where students are actively involved in research seminars and are frequently offered the chance to contribute to teaching and collaborative research projects.  The program profoundly enriches study and work in the humanities and social sciences as well as law, the physical sciences, government and education.

----------Current Research Projects----------

I am currently working on a book project, tentatively titled "Extreme Women: Korean Femininities in Popular Culture," which examines how diasporic and transnational Korean female stars embody fantasies of "extreme," socially transgressive women on screen - performances that, I argue, queer both traditional forms of Confucian femininity and Western stereotypes of East Asian women. I analyze the articulation of these fantasies through popular cultural texts in film, television, and the Internet, mapping the complex ways that cultural expressions of "Korean" and "Asian" femininity are being translated for global audiences.