Week 5: Coffee Prince: Changing Attitudes Toward Sexuality and Gender

A gender-disguise romance from the 2000s, read for what it assumed its audience already believed

22 March 2027

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The 1st Shop of Coffee Prince (커피프린스 1호점) is built on a premise common to the genre: a woman disguised as a man, and the confusion — comic and otherwise — that follows. Watched now, it’s as much a record of what a 2007 Korean audience found thinkable, sayable, and safely resolvable as it is a romance. This week asks what the disguise premise needed to be true about its audience in order to work as entertainment, and how much of that has moved on.

Questions#

• How did Korean television represent gender and sexuality in the 2000s?
• What does the show’s gender-disguise premise reveal about the social expectations it was written against?
• How have Korean attitudes and media representations changed since?
• What is the difference between a media representation and a lived experience — and why does collapsing the two produce bad arguments?

What to take from this week#

• how Korean television represented gender and sexuality in the 2000s, and what counted as a safe way to raise the subject
• what a gender-disguise plot needs its audience to find both plausible and resolvable
• change over time in Korean attitudes and their media representation, not a single fixed “Korean attitude”
• the gap between representation and lived experience, and why that gap matters to how we argue from a drama

Approaching this week#

This topic needs handling carefully and academically. Avoid making simplistic claims about “what Koreans think” — Korean society, like any other, holds a range of views that have also changed considerably since 2007. The discussion is about what the drama assumed and represented, not a verdict on a whole society’s beliefs.