하위 남성 주체와 한국 대중문화: 포스트 식민체제하 대중잡지 명랑을 중심으로

초록

This paper analyzes the popularity of postwar popular culture, centering on the popular magazine Myeongnang in the 1950s and 1960s, as the coarse consumption of subaltern male subjects under the postcolonial regime. Founded in 1955, Myeongrang was a leading publication that, along with Arirang, dominated the Korean popular magazine market until the 1960s. Unlike Arirang, which aimed for a "Reading-oriented magazine", Myeongrang employed a visual-centric editing strategy based on the so-called "7S" (including Sex and Star), effectively capturing a core readership of men in their 20s and 30s. Under the specific conditions of the post-war aid economy, Myeongrang rapidly implemented a modern magazine format by actively appropriating Western discursive resources, such as American popular magazines and Hollywood film stills. While professing to be a general-interest magazine covering home, entertainment, and hobbies, Myeongrang selectively borrowed genre conventions related to culture, science, and women from Western magazines as mere signs of authority without substantive contextualization. In this process, the female body was appropriated both as symbolic capital representing Western affluence and modernity, and as a thoroughly reified commodity within a gendered visual system. Notably, this editing style served as a mechanism for managing the anxiety of subjects under the postcolonial system. To soothe the sense of deficiency felt by subaltern male subjects, Myeongrang displaced the female body into a vulgar commodity while simultaneously integrating it with the veneer of Korean culture, thereby establishing the masculine gaze as a universal perspective. In this light, the "vulgarity" manifested in the magazine was not merely a display of lowbrow taste, but a product of the refraction of cultural positioning and subaltern desire within the postcolonial context. In summary, this paper analyzes how popular magazines of the 1950s and 1960s performed a dual strategy: compensating for a lack of symbolic capital through the imitation of Western resources, while imaginatively providing psychological compensation for subaltern anxiety through the vulgar consumption of the female body. The study thus demonstrates that the foundational structure of Korean popular culture was constituted through the intersection of postcolonial hybridity and the desire of the subaltern male subject.

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