K-Pop Fandom
Subtitle
Performing Deokhu from the 1990s to Today
K-Pop Fandom insists that K-pop fan practices and activities constitute a central productive force, shaping not only K-pop’s explosive global popularity, but also K-pop’s cultural impacts, politics, and horizons of possibility. Over the past three decades, the K-pop fandom and its activities have expanded, intensified, and diversified along myriad dimensions, assuming novel social, technological, and economic forms, some of which are unique to K-pop, and some of which reflect broader cultural and industrial logics of globalized mass entertainment culture. Areum Jeong argues that K-pop fans, in performing deokhu—a Korean term connoting an “avid fan”—perform a materialization of affective labor that also seeks to produce good relationships between asymmetrically positioned actors in the K-pop ecosystem.
Through an autoethnography of becoming a K-pop deokhu, Jeong connects their experiences to generations of K-pop fans, showing simultaneously how fandom practices have shifted over time and the intricacies of fan labor participation. This personal connection paved the way for participant-observation and co-performer witnessing methodologies in the study, which crucially allowed for collaborating with fans whose communal pursuits have been stigmatized by dominant discourses that denigrate their activities as solely addictive, uncritical, and wasteful. Jeong’s genre-spanning corpus of fan activities and analyzing its contexts and contents represents an important contribution to the making of a fan archive that is also an archive of affective labor.
Bio
Areum Jeong is an interdisciplinary scholar and educator of Korean and Korean diasporic cinema, literature, popular culture, theatre and performance. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Korean Studies at Arizona State University (ASU).
Praise for this book
By bringing her own extraordinary ethnographic and historical analyses of K-pop into dialogue with existing literature on fandom and performance, Jeong vividly and sensitively communicates the novelty and significance of K-pop in South Korea to the fandom studies literature. This book will be an important text for scholars, educators, and students of Korean media studies. Jeong’s book will be a seminal touchstone in the field of K-pop studies for many years to come.
Thomas Baudinette Professor, Macquarie University
In writings about K-pop, my ultimate bias is Areum Jeong. In K-Pop Fandom, she deftly explores how the practices of K-pop fans are culturally significant and meaningful. Analyzing labor and identity practices, narrative and storytelling, and political resistance, Jeong's work moves far beyond the specifics of music to examine the power of audiences today. This is required reading for scholars and fans of K-pop.
Paul Booth Professor, DePaul University
