CL's "Hello Bitches" and Post-Feminist Body Representation

Introduction: Disrupting the K-Pop Formula

In her music video "Hello Bitches," CL manages to escape the constrictions of the typical K-pop girl group — the familiar rotation of sexy, innocent, seductive, and chic — by asserting a more aggressive, masculine-mimicking (gangsta-rap-mimicking, to be precise), hyper-sexual attitude of domineering energy. Yet in doing so, she falls into a separate trope: not the trope of the cute or sexy K-pop artist, but rather the trope of the strong, feminist, sexually assertive pop artist — a trend represented in various modes by figures such as Nicki Minaj, Iggy Azalea, Beyoncé, and Lady Gaga.

CL's performance channels the swagger of chauvinistic hip-hop artists, who wave, strut, and bounce in front of the camera while surrounded by their posse and a cadre of scantily clad women. For CL, her posse is that cadre of women — though here they are dressed in tight leather one-piece swimsuit-cut gear, flaunting cleavage, derrieres, and snarls. The women do not smile seductively for the viewer; instead, they grimace and raise their lips as though sneering at anyone who assumed this would be just another K-pop song. The tone set by the video and its choreography is that CL is "street tough," and that her gang of girls would sooner run you over with their attitudes than give you the time of day.

CL manages to flip off the camera within seconds of appearing on screen, bouncing in hip-hop video fashion while surrounded by a circle of similarly dressed women who appear to be conducting some sort of feminist ritual through a tribal, choreographic dance. It is a sensationalistic presentation of what post-feminism has come to represent today — a suggestion of post-feminist identity within a paradigm of gaudy, over-the-top performance, in which "being tough" means strutting, swaggering, and sneering like tattooed, hip-hop gangsta male counterparts.

Visual Codes and the K-Pop Paradigm

In some ways, the video challenges the genre codes of K-pop and the constrictions they place on identity; in others, it reproduces and reinforces them. One cannot separate the music from the video or the message from the performance. As Marshall McLuhan observed, "the medium is the message."¹ In other words, both the visual representation and the audio convey messages that have an effect on the viewer.

The visual content remains rooted in the K-pop paradigm: the video consists of scantily clad young women who, were they not snarling throughout, would be considered conventionally attractive. To challenge this base, however, the video highlights the toughness of the girls by putting their hair in long dreadlocks dyed pink and purple to signify femininity; their makeup is heavy and bold, indicating strength of personality, courage, and a no-fear philosophy of life; and their outfits occupy the extreme edge of typical K-pop sexuality, representing more of a dominatrix version of desire than the usual sweet-but-seductive, innocent-yet-suspicious display of the standard K-pop group. The aim of the CL video is to command: to upset the standard, which it does to some degree, though it also relies upon that very standard in order to set up its motif of self-display. The dance moves are hypnotic, fast, angry, sexualized, and full of angst — but they remain a variation on a theme: the Asian-as-sex-object theme that nearly every K-pop music video employs for effect.

Thus, CL's video may seem revolutionary to some, but by relying upon feminine aggression and gangsta-style mimicry, it relegates itself to a trope that is unoriginal — as flat and stale as its sugary-sweet polar opposite — and does little to genuinely expand the genre of K-pop music video artistry.

Post-Feminist Sensibility and the Body

In this sense, CL may represent the image of post-feminism — though, as Rosalind Gill points out, it is difficult for scholars to arrive at any agreement as to what that term actually means.² Gill argues that postfeminism is "best understood as a distinctive sensibility, made up of a number of interrelated themes," including the idea that "femininity is a bodily property" — a notion CL's video certainly demonstrates — among others.³ CL's music video does maintain a post-feminist aura, if one applies Gill's definition to understand the term.

Sexuality bristles throughout the video with an almost combative sense of display. There is a kind of self-discipline about the dancers' performance that suggests an overly strong confidence bordering on farce — though the point appears to be that CL and her posse are women who do not tolerate nonsense from anyone. The "shift from objectification to subjectification" that Gill describes does not quite ring true here, as the girls remain an object of desire — a subject of the "male gaze"⁴ — even as they project sexual desire and a sense of conquest onto the viewer. Objectification and subjectification are never really separate or without each other. Nonetheless, there is a clearly distinct sensibility evident in the CL music video — though it is, to be fair, a trope reaching more for shock effect than for genuine originality.

Conclusion: Sex, Power, and the Post-Feminist Trope

If CL's music video "Hello Bitches" were to be classified according to a category of sexual politics, it would be charted as something like a third-party outsider status come to disrupt the status quo. It is not bound by the same rules governing other K-pop video groups, because CL's representation of the body does not set out to achieve the same end — at least not entirely. CL still relies on the sexualized image, and in this way her group is objectified even as it subjectifies — but there is really no way around this in the sexual congress of postmodern discourse. The subjectifying is also the objectified, regardless of how dominant, militant, aggressive, or hostile one attempts to be.

In the case of CL's music video, sex is still a two-way street, and intercourse cannot really be obtained without the consent of a second party. Thus, CL and her posse of women still need the men — and vice versa.

Bibliography

Gill, Rosalind. "Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility." European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 10, no. 2 (2007): 147–166.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media, critical edition, edited by W. Terrence Gordon. Berkeley, California: Gingko Press, 2013.

Mulvey, L. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Screen, vol. 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18.

Unger, Michael. "The Aporia of Presentation: Deconstructing the Genre of K-pop Girl Group Music Videos in South Korea." Journal of Popular Music Studies, vol. 27, no. 1 (2010): 25–47.