K-Pop Fandom
Performing Deokhu from the 1990s to Today
An autoethnography of the K-pop fandom and its evolution
Description
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.
Areum Jeong is Assistant Professor of Korean Studies at Arizona State University.
Reviews
“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, 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, DePaul University
“Areum Jeong’s K-Pop Fandom is brilliantly focused on fans’ affective labor and its many materializations. Paying careful attention to the industrial forces of K-pop, Jeong analyzes the issue of excessive consumption alongside fans’ community and independently published memoirs that seek to evade the enclosures of neoliberal capitalism. Smart and immersive, this is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand the passions and practices of K-pop fandom.”
- Matt Hills, author of Fan Cultures
“Keen analysis of music industry trends and fan labor blends seamlessly with Jeong’s thoughtful foray down memory lane, which positions her at the forefront of K-pop’s past and present, both as a witness and active participant. This book feels intimate and exploratory, delving deeper into the concept of deokhu for English-language scholarship while interrogating the connection between fan labor, fan expectation, and fanaticism.”
- Tamar Herman, author of BTS: Blood, Sweat & Tears
"By centering the perspective of fans themselves, against stereotypical accounts that emphasize tropes of brainwashing and exploitation (28), Jeong offers a model for how scholarship can take seriously the creative, communal, and critical dimensions of popular culture participation. For popular culture scholars, the book provides a clear vocabulary, showing how fandom becomes labor, memory, community, intimacy, and critique."
- Li Wei, The Journal of Popular Culture