"The Perfect Body”: Constructing Korean Masculinity and Muscular Hierarchy through Physical: 100

• In Event: Idealized Bodies

Abstract

When it debuted in 2023, Physical:100 immediately captured global audiences, becoming one of Netflix’s most-watched shows. A South Korean sports-reality show, Physical:100 pits contestants of various sporting, gender, celebrity, and occupational backgrounds against one another in a series of physical games and challenges. According to the show itself, its goal is to find what the “best” body is, seeking to idealize the “perfect” body. In this paper, we offer a critical interpretive analysis to explore whether the interactions, bodily presentations, visual narratives, and discourses presented within Physical 100 represent a shift and contestation of the current normative orders of South Korean masculinity and muscularity. We demonstrate that Physical 100, a show designed to identify the “perfect” body in terms of athleticism, serves as a contested gendered terrain where categories and hierarchies of masculinity, muscularity, and bodily presentation are reproduced, played with, challenged, and partially transformed. We argue that Physical:100 is a cultural case of sport and reality-entertainment, where typologies of Korean masculinity and presentations of muscularity are played with and reformulated in ways that differ from analysis and discourse in other arenas of Korean society, such as popular culture, music, dating, education, and white-collar professional work. But such an alternative masculinity and body formation that celebrates incredibly fit people and large muscles, instrumentally and ornamentally, still maintains its own relatively rigid hierarchical status structure. One that is deeply intertwined with different eras of hegemonic Korean masculinity, male beauty norms, national celebrity culture, and traditional Korean cultural norms.

Authors

• Danny Lee, Indiana University- Bloomington

• Alex Manning, Yale University