From Factory Girls to K-Pop Idol Girls

For the Record: Lexington Studies in Rock and

Popular Music
Series Editors:
Scott D. Calhoun, Cedarville University
Christopher Endrinal, Florida Gulf Coast University

For the Record: Lexington Studies in Rock and Popular Music features monographs
and edited collections that examine topics relevant to the composition, consumption, and
influence of the rock and popular music genres which have arisen starting in the 20th
century in all nations and cultures. In the series, scholars approach these genres from
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theories and methods from literary, philosophical, performance, and religious studies, in
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rock and popular music are worthy of critical study.

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Titles in the Series

From Factory Girls to K-Pop Idol Girls: Cultural Politics of Developmentalism, Patriar-
chy, and Neoliberalism in South Korea’s Popular Music Industry, by Gooyong Kim
Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2, edited by James
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The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper, and the Summer of Love: Roll Up for the Mystery Tour! edited
by Kenneth Womack and Katheryn Cox
U2 Above, Across, and Beyond: Interdisciplinary Assessments, edited by Scott D.
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From Factory Girls to K-Pop Idol Girls

Cultural Politics of Developmentalism,

Patriarchy, and Neoliberalism
in South Korea’s Popular Music Industry

Gooyong Kim

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Names: Kim, Gooyong, author.

Title: From factory girls to K-pop idol girls : cultural politics of developmentalism, patriarchy, and
neoliberalism in South Korea’s popular music industry / Gooyong Kim.
Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018044216 (print) | LCCN 2018053621 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498548830 (elec-
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Subjects: LCSH: Popular music--Korea (South)--History and criticism. | Popular music--Social as-
pects--Korea (South) | Music trade--Korea (South)
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 To
my mother, Bokshil Kim;
siblings, Choon-oak, Jeong-oak, Yoon-oak, Mi-oak, and Jaeyong;
children, April and Lucas;
wife, Seja Yoon;
and
late father, Deuk Kim.
 Contents

Foreword vii
Douglas Kellner
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction xv

1 Popular Culture as a Strategic Field of Neoliberal Intervention:

Developmentalism, Neoliberal Social Policy, and
Governmentality in the Post-IMF Korean Popular Music Industry 1
2 K-Pop Idol Girl Groups as Cultural Genre of Neoliberalism:
Patriarchy, Developmentalism, and Structure of Feeling/
Experience in K-Pop 27
3 Between Hybridity and Hegemony in K-Pop’s Global
Popularity: A Case of Girls’ Generation’s American Debut 43
4 Genealogy and Affective Economy of K-Pop Female Idols:
From Cute and Innocent, to Ambiguous Femininity, to Explicit
Sexualization 61
5 Elusive Subjectivity of K-Pop Female Idols: Split-Personality,
Narcissism, and Neo-Confucian Body Techniques in Suzy of
Miss A 77
6 Resilience, Positive Psychology, and Subjectivity in K-Pop
Female Idols: Evolution of Girls’ Generation from “Into the
New World” (2007) to “All Night” (2017) 93
7 The 90s, the Most Stunning Days of Our Lives: Retro K-Pop
Music, Nostalgia, and Positive Psychology in Contemporary
Korea 107
v
vi Contents

Conclusion 123
References 127
Index 145
About the Author 153
 Foreword
Douglas Kellner

I first met Gooyong Kim in fall 2006 when I invited him as my PhD student
at UCLA after several years of not having adopted a new student, and he then
began his works in Cultural/Media Studies, which was successfully con-
cluded in his dissertation, The Popular as the Political: Critical Media Peda-
gogy as a Condition for Grassroots Collective Action Mobilization via You-
Tube Videos, in 2010. The dissertation was an ambitious work to theorize
how individuals’ critical understanding and utilization of a digital video shar-
ing platform can facilitate a social change as a collective action mobilizer, as
witnessed by the Internet media’s integral role in the Arab Spring move-
ments and the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. While Professor
Kim’s From Factory Girls to K-Pop Idol Girls deals with an entirely differ-
ent topic from that of his dissertation, the texts share the same keen sense of
social problems and urgency that strives to understand how the status quo
maintains itself by an updated deployment of popular media culture and
engaged audiences. Both projects thus interrogate how popular culture in the
new media reproduces the status quo and yet can also be used for progressive
social transformation.
Dr. Kim’s From Factory Girls to K-Pop Idol Girls constitutes the first,
serious attempt to critically analyze structural conditions of contemporary
popular music production and marketing, focusing on female idols’ prolifera-
tion in the Korean popular music (K-pop) industry since 1997. K-pop has
been immensely popular and influential throughout Asia and the Asian dias-
pora throughout the world since the 90s, and became the fastest growing
music genre in the United States and other Western nations recently. I ac-
knowledge there are a growing number of scholarly efforts to investigate the
phenomenon, however, by and large in a microscopic and celebratory man-
ner. While any academic inquiry on a subject begins by descriptive explana-
vii
viii Foreword

tion, academia cannot advance its serious business without a sophistication

of its examination by multi-perspectival, critical approaches. I commend Dr.
Kim’s ambitious project that will usher in a maturing stage of K-pop scholar-
ship, more than 20 years after the emergence of the K-pop phenomena. With
his contribution to disembarking “Critical K-pop Studies,” I do hope his
book helps the academic community as well as the general readers develop
more advanced, well-balanced perspective to the topic, which provides a
wealth of intriguing research agendas on International and Intercultural Com-
munication, Political Economy of the Media, Cultural/Media Studies, Gen-
der/Sexuality Studies, Asian Studies, Korean Studies, and Critical Studies.
Gooyong Kim’s most important achievement is to correctly contextualize
the success of K-pop within Korea’s economic development trajectories.
With an acute application of Michel Foucault’s discussion on governmental-
ity, a biopolitical dimension of neoliberalism, his book reveals how the re-
gime of free market capitalism updates and reproduces itself by 1) forming a
strategic alliance of interests with the state, and 2) using popular culture to
facilitate individuals’ subjectification and subjectivation processes that lead
to neoliberal agents. To that end, Kim securitizes how dynamics of Korea’s
rapid industrial modernization (1960s–1980s) was updated, and re-
applied its formula of economic development when the state had to imple-
ment a series of neoliberal reformations, imposed and mandated by the IMF
in 1997. The K-pop industry has thus been supported and promoted by the
state, and young, female talents have increasingly been mobilized and de-
ployed in the culture industry in a similar way to how unwed, obedient
female workers were exploited and disposed of on the sweatshop factory
floors to sustain the state’s export-oriented, labor-intensive manufacture in-
dustry policy during its rapid developmental stage decades ago. For a better
understanding of K-pop female idols as a specialized topic in his book, Kim
investigates how a strategic convergence of Korea’s lingering legacies of
Confucian patriarchy and the state developmentalism not only successfully
markets the idols as an affective cultural commodity in the neoliberal culture
industry, but also, more importantly, deploys them as an active ideological
apparatus that pleasurably and effectively perpetuates and legitimates neolib-
eral mantras and imperatives in individuals’ everyday lives.
Thus, the book’s contributions and implications are multifold. Firstly,
From Factory Girls to K-Pop Idol Girls reveals the continuing importance of
the Korean state’s industrial policy even in a neoliberalism that individuals
tend to believe constitutes a demise or a minimal role of the state. Secondly,
Kim’s study indicates the sustained utility/legacy of the nation’s gender-
based hierarchy in a nationalist agenda for economic development during a
period of neoliberal reform and patriarchal nationalist development alike. In
addition, the text examines how a post-feminist, neoliberal discourse of girl
power has mobilized and marketed young, female talents in the industry as
 Foreword ix

affective commodities, and how K-pop female idols function as neoliberal

commodities which have exercised an active biopolitical power to reinforce
the Korean state and society’s hegemony over Korean culture and individual
lives.
Finally, as I established in my book, Media Culture: Cultural Studies,
Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern, Gooyong
Kim’s study of K-pop embodies a multiperspective approach that provides
comprehensive and critical approaches to popular media culture that engages
media production, consumption, and critical textual analysis within the con-
text of contemporary Korean and global society. Combining historical con-
textualization with political economy of the media, critical textual analysis,
and investigation into the socio-ideological effect of K-pop in the existing
networks of power and domination in gender relations, Kim endeavors to
understand K-pop female idols as a cultural politics of Korea’s establish-
ment, which plays a powerful role in individuals’ leisure activity, socializa-
tion, identity formation, and value system. His endeavor demonstrates the
continual vitality of a Critical Cultural Studies and the need to take seriously
the artifacts of popular media culture as a condition of social transformation,
as well as a reproduction of the status quo.
Popular music is a major, although mostly unrecognized, ideological
force throughout the world, and Gooyong Kim has shown how K-pop female
idols function as an important cultural and ideological force in contemporary
Korea. His book will provide an illuminating introduction to Critical K-Pop
Studies for scholars throughout the world and provoke lively, constructive
discussions of K-pop’s ever-increasing impact in ever-changing, neoliberal
Korea and beyond.

Douglas Kellner
University of California, Los Angeles
July 2018
 Acknowledgments

The research for this book gave me a refreshing opportunity to resume my

academic journey while I was in the middle of nowhere with many personal
and family issues. Starting with the sudden, untimely death of my father in
2010 and by a series of misfortunes in my family thereafter, I was devastated
to the extent that I abandoned anything scholarly. Then, Girls’ Generation’s
American debut performance came along on January 31, 2012, and rekindled
my intellectual curiosity and helped me maneuver the plights. While this
book is a critical investigation into the event and other adjacent phenomena, I
truly appreciate the debut event for providing me a turning point in my
academic and personal life.
This book is possible by a great deal of inspiration and resources I have
received from any number of people in my life. Research ideas for this book
were incepted while I was teaching courses on Korean popular culture and
media at Temple University. Along with many students who asked discursive
questions, Hyung-min Kim and Anat Schwartz were initial interlocutors dur-
ing my research’s formulating period. I thank them for having spent time
brainstorming with me, and wish them the best of luck in completing their
PhDs at Georgia State University and the University of California, Irvine
respectively. While there were many memorable students at Temple, I would
like to thank those who sat and spent time sharing their ideas in person: Evan
Greensweig, Huy Ha, Alexis Mongiello, Maura Sanner, Travis Sears, Noah
Udofia, Daniel Wampler, Jimmy Wong, and Liwei Yi. I thank my informants
in the greater Los Angeles area: Bibi Lee, Irelene Lee, Scarlett Lee, Carly
Stevens, Gunnbong Kim, and Ven. Beom-Kyung sunim. Colleagues I met
both at the Hallyu 20 Years conference in Vancouver, May 2016, and the
seventh annual Korean Screen Culture Conference in Helsinki, May 2018,
were helpful in strengthening my arguments: Dal Yong Jin, Tae-jin Yoon,

xi
xii Acknowledgments

Jae-ho Kang, Michelle Cho, David Oh, Benjamin Han, Shin-dong Kim, Ji-
hoon Felix Kim, J. W. Chung, Sungil Ko, and Andrew Logie. I especially
appreciate Douglas Kellner and John Lie for their generous comments and
suggestions at various stages of my writing. Also, I am grateful for genuine
advices and encouragements of my mentors: George Katsiaficas, Roy Nanjo,
and Greg Tanaka. I would like to show my gratitude to my close CNU
Department of Communication alumni who have nourished me with night-
long debates over drink: Young-Khee Kim, Hye-Seung Yang, Kyunsoo Kim,
Sung-Un Yang, Hyunjoo Kang, Jong-beom Kim, Woojong Lee, Saemin Lee,
Sang-kyu Lee, Gwangwoo Sohn, Seung-chul Lee, Gunnwoo Park, Deuk-
ryong Oh, Namyong Park, Joohyung Lee, Bi-oh Yoon, Seung-joon Yang,
and Wooram Goh. I offer my apologies to other sources of inspiration and
information for not including their names due to a shortage of my memory.
Lastly, the 2017 Korean Studies Grant Program (AKS-2017-P06) from the
Academy of Korean Studies supported the finalization of this book manu-
script.
Chapters of the book are modified versions of my previous works that I
presented at a conference or published elsewhere. Papers were presented at
various meetings and procedures like Association of Education in Journalism
and Mass Communication, International Communication Association, Na-
tional Communication Association, Mid-Atlantic Region Association for
Asian Studies, and Oriental Club of Philadelphia’s Regional Symposium. An
earlier version of chapter one was published in Routledge Companion to
Global Cultural Policy, edited by Dave O’Brien, Toby Miller, and Victoria
Durrer, in 2017; chapter two was included in Telos: Critical Theory of the
Contemporary’s special issue on the Korean Peninsula edited by Haerin Shin
in 2018; and chapter three was incorporated in the International Journal of
Communication’s special issue on Hallyu edited by Dal Yong Jin in 2017. I
sincerely appreciate the editors who considered my humble pieces, and all
the anonymous reviewers of various stages of my pieces for their invaluable
comments, criticism, and suggestions. I also thank an anonymous reviewer of
this book’s manuscript for constructive suggestions. While their advice was
all insightful, I was not always capable enough to fully incorporate it in this
book: If anything has been misconstrued in this book, the fault is mine.
My family has been the biggest contributor to my completion of the book.
I would like to thank my wife, Seja Yoon, and children, April and Lucas
Kim, for being patient with my occasional outburst of frustration in the abyss
of writer’s block and for understanding my inability to play whenever you
wanted to. Without your love and support, I would not have been able to
complete this book. Also, Candy the golden retriever stayed late at night to
accompany me, providing a regular break for fresh air. Lastly, I dedicate this
book to my mother, Bokshil Kim, and my late father, Deuk Kim, for their
 Acknowledgments xiii

unconditional love and support: They have always been the most compelling
motivation in my life. I love and thank you!
 Introduction

This book aims to expand a horizon of academic inquiry into South Korea’s
contemporary popular music (hereafter, K-pop) in its broader implications
for South Korean society (hereafter, Korea) and beyond. With Javier León’s
(2014) lament that there is a dearth of scholarly works that critically interro-
gate connections between a trend of popular music and neoliberalism, I ex-
amine how the recent success of K-pop is a cultural manifestation of the
country’s political-economic and sociocultural transformations. Since the
“singer is the image of the spirit of a people,” and popular songs embody a
culture’s belief (Pavletich 1980, 4), K-pop as one of contemporary Korea’s
most successful businesses provides an optic to understand the society. Popu-
lar music not only reflects a local sentiment at a given time, since it cannot be
separated from the society of its origin, but it also reconfigures or promotes a
certain cultural, economic, political, and/or social agenda simultaneously, as
examined by Raymond Williams’s (2007) cultural formation. Put differently,
as symbolic “forms and actual or desired social relations” (175), K-pop war-
rants a serious academic inquiry because it has been configured within, and
reproduces contemporary Korea’s formative constraints of various legacies
and dominant parameters simultaneously.
Likewise, this book strives to critically understand the current place of
Korean female singers in their formative roles in changing, contemporary
gender relations. Despite the fact that gender equality in Korea is worst
amongst developed countries (Bethmann and Rudolf 2018; OECD 2018), the
popularity of a number of K-pop female idols surpasses that of male idols.
Not only as dance music performers but also ubiquitous media figures, the
female idols are one of the most explicit sociocultural icons of the era, who
make the most active, lucrative contribution to Korea’s culture industries as a
cultural commodity both in the domestic market and overseas. In this respect,

xv
xvi Introduction

to examine K-pop female idols as one of the nation’s most dominant socio-
cultural genres helps better understand the paradigm and the possibility of
socioeconomic and politico-ideological relations around gender in the nation.
Considering Motown girl groups in the 60s as a social phenomenon of the
era, Gerald Early (1995) indicates their “music is the story of American
democracy at its best and its worst” in terms of cultural diversity, fluidity,
freedom, and racial inequality, revolving around African American female
singers and their bodies (134). Likewise, K-pop female idols are conceived,
produced, circulated, and consumed in regard to contemporary Korean peo-
ple’s imagined and/or shared desire, created by various historical junctures.
Again, like the Motown girl groups were a cultural manifestation of the
Fordist assembly line production system (Gordy 1994) and the Tiller Girls of
instrumental rationality of industrial capitalism (Kracauer 1995), female
musicians/performers in contemporary Korean history have mainly been in-
strumental in either satisfying patriarchal desires or adopting the cultural
hegemony of the empires, both Japan and the U.S. (Fuhr 2017; Lie 2015).
From this historical context, I examine how K-pop female idols have been
conditioned by Korea’s neoliberal social and industrial reconfigurations
since the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis and Korea’s subsequent reliance on the
IMF’s emergency bail-out funds that mandated a series of Structural Adjust-
ment Programs (SAPs). By analyzing how they, and more specifically their
sexualized bodies, are represented in the glossy music videos of K-pop, this
book sheds critical light on whether or not the traditional, patriarchal gender
script has been broken and they exercise agency as portrayed in the videos
with regards to their relationship to the K-pop industry’s business strategies,
its decision-making structures, and the county’s patriarchal traditions within
Korea’s neoliberal transformations. Since “what has replaced tradition, with
its function of providing a sense of continuity and coherence, is popular
culture” in Korea (Lie 2015, 94), K-pop female idols should be critically
examined in reference to their regulatory role in defining and providing new
sociocultural norms and values of gender-based social relations. Thus, with
this book, I hope to help the general audience who is interested in K-pop’s
recent surge of global popularity understand how and what role the music
genre plays in cultural politics within the country’s growing neoliberaliza-
tion, which coincided with the music’s major introduction to the public in
1996. By doing so, this book helps readers better understand the cultural
phenomenon by different parameters of complex interactions between the
state’s policy, culture and media industry, cultural tradition, and gender
norms.
Compared to a growing number of scholarly examinations on Hallyu or
the Korean Wave—the global success of Korean popular culture, such as
film, TV dramas, K-pop, and live performances—studies on K-pop have
been rather marginal to date. With a supposedly wide audience reach and
 Introduction xvii

their pioneering roles in Hallyu, TV dramas and films have been a major area
for both governmental support and scholarly attention (Chua 2010). As op-
posed to more than two decades of K-pop’s growing global success, especial-
ly its rekindling Hallyu around 2007, and contribution to the country’s eco-
nomic developments, relatively speaking, K-pop has not enjoyed a due schol-
arly recognition. In addition to this overdue (or insufficient at least) acknowl-
edgement, per Javier León’s (2014) disappointment, there is a dearth of
critical and systematic academic examination on a relationship between the
music genre and Korea’s growing neoliberalization since the late 1990s.
Moreover, there is no critical investigation into K-pop female idols’ recent
proliferation, which is the music genre’s most distinctive characteristic from
a perspective that investigates how K-pop has been conditioned within Ko-
rea’s preexisting sociocultural and politico-economic backgrounds.
To date, scholarly examination on the issue has mainly been descriptive
in its nature and scope, focusing on microscopic text analyses of Hallyu
contents, impacts of communication technologies, innovative strategies of
the culture industry, and/or fan activities. Though there are several edited
volumes on the topic, such as Kyung Hyun Kim and Youngmin Choe’s
(2014) The Korean Popular Culture Reader; Euny Hong’s (2014) The Birth
of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is Conquering the World through Pop
Culture; Yasue Kuwahara’s (2014) The Korean Wave: Korean Popular Cul-
ture in Global Context; Youna Kim’s (2013) The Korean Wave: Korean
Media Go Global; Sangjoon Lee and Abé Markus Nornes’s (2015) Hallyu
2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media; and Tae-Jin Yoon and Dal
Yong Jin’s (2017) The Korean Wave: Evolution, Fandom, and Transnation-
ality, to name a few, the current literature tends not to pay due attention to the
industry’s structural conditions of possibilities in its production, distribution,
and consumption that can only be correctly understood by taking broader
economic, historical, industrial, and social contexts into consideration. Al-
though in December 2013 the Korea Journal published a special issue on the
global success of K-pop as a response to scholars’ critical assessment of it, it
is still confined to descriptive accounts on how K-pop becomes successful
from technological, production, and business perspectives. Dal Yong Jin’s
(2016) New Korean Wave: Transnational Cultural Power in the Age of So-
cial Media and the International Journal of Communication’s special issue in
2017 analyze various economic and industrial backgrounds, including the
state’s policies; however, they are not an exclusive study on K-pop but a
survey on Hallyu in general. Fortunately, there have been few significant
academic endeavors to understand solely the K-pop phenomenon from vari-
ous perspectives recently: JungBong Choi and Ronald Maliangkay’s (2015)
anthology, K-Pop: The International Rise of the Korean Music Industry,
Michael Fuhr’s (2017) Globalization and Popular Music in South Korea:
Sounding Out K-Pop, and John Lie’s (2015) K-Pop: Popular Music, Cultural
xviii Introduction

Amnesia, and Economic Innovation in South Korea are worth a critical re-
view here.
As one of the first major scholarly endeavors to understand K-pop and its
phenomena, JungBong Choi and Ronald Maliangkay’s (2015) anthology, K-
Pop: The International Rise of the Korean Music Industry, makes a signifi-
cant contribution to investigating conditions and elements that have led a
peripheral nation’s popular culture in the global economic and political sys-
tem to a transnational phenomenon. To this end, the volume examines how
fandom, in other words, the consumption side of the music genre, has been
the main engine for its global popularity. While the editors acknowledge the
foundational role of the Korean government that provided the K-pop industry
with deregulation policies along with state subsidies and tax breaks, they are
not interested in larger, structural conditions of K-pop production as much as
its circulation and consumption. While there is an attempt to examine the
topic from a critical perspective, chapter three: “The Political Economy of
Idols: South Korea’s Neoliberal Restructuring and Its Impact on the Enter-
tainment Labour Force,” the volume is still confined to describing what K-
pop has changed rather than what has led to its sudden rise and success. In
other words, contrary to its claim that it “aspires to be more than a compila-
tion of reports on the ripple” that K-pop has created (Choi and Maliangkay
2015, 1), the book does not pay due attention to K-pop’s structural conditions
of possibility, that is, forces and elements behind its production, within the
nation’s place in global cultural, economic, historical, and political configu-
rations. Rather than investigating how the success of K-pop has been an
integral part of Korea’s complex neoliberal transformation by a dynamic
interaction with the nation’s preexisting cultural, industrial, and political tra-
ditions such as patriarchal capitalism and developmentalism (or developmen-
tal dictatorship), Choi and Maliangkay’s (2015) work has still “failed to shed
much light on related phenomena” in the dominant system of neoliberal
capitalism (1).
The volume’s focuses on the fans’ consumption of K-pop and excitement
they retrieve from it can be a symptom of being complacent to a business
mantra of the neoliberal culture industry. To focus on fans tends to celebrate
those who are mesmerized by K-pop, and in turn, likely to legitimate the
industry’s business or marketing strategy that aims to create audiences’ iden-
tification and participation in cultural commodities. In other words, since the
K-pop industry has taken advantage of fan club activities as marketing chan-
nels and consumer behaviour monitoring venues, a descriptive attention to
fan activities will eventually serve the industry’s strategic planning to incor-
porate and commercialize their immaterial, affective labour systematically.
Also, while the volume claims that K-pop has been successful by the fan, of
the fan, and for the fan, the chapters are not successful in examining audi-
ences’ detailed, complex reception processes, motivation, and gratification.
 Introduction xix

As to an unprecedented amount of fans’ involvement in the K-pop industry’s

production procedure, Choi and Maliangkay commend K-pop “fans/audi-
ences as adjunct producers” (10). However, they fail to recognize that ex-
ploiting fans’ ostensible creative contribution is one of the common charac-
teristics of a neoliberal service economy that profits from the audience’s
immaterial, precarious labor. In other words, while fans can certainly exer-
cise a reconstructive meaning-making activity that goes beyond consuming
cultural texts, the fact that they still have to refer back to the text and rely on
a sharing platform that the industry provides, does not guarantee fans’ genu-
ine control over the original text.
While I do not negate or ignore active fan activities as a means of con-
structing and expressing their subjectivity, I rather try to understand how K-
pop female idols, as a neoliberal commodity manufactured by the culture
industry, have contributed to mobilizing audiences’ dynamic investment in
affect, time, and money to conform to the status quo. As a psychological
compensation mechanism where audiences, especially female fans, can ful-
fill dreams of autonomy, glamour, intimacy, power, recognition, and success,
I argue the female idols provide them with a para-social relationship and
belief that their inherent lack could be compensated, and in turn, their indig-
nation as a critical transformative potential would be dissipated in patriarchal
society. While female audiences can develop an imaginary empowerment by
self-
identification with visually perfect-looking female idols, their consumption
of manufactured female empowerment does not change the harsh reality of
gender-based exploitation and marginalization. On the other hand, the idols
provide male fans, who suffer from dire living situations of un- or under-
employment, with a pseudo-opportunity to gratify an unconscious need of
male supremacy, which is pervasive in the nation’s operative mechanism, by
consuming the idols’ various manufactured affects, and infantilized sexual-
ization. In this regard, while fans tend to have an emotional “conviction
where one’s feelings can seem highly personal yet not quite one’s own”
(Duffett 2013, 162), their agency is not likely to overcome a fundamentally
asymmetrical relationship between the resource-rich cultural production of
the industry and their “passive” consumption on an individual level.
In this regard, the volume inadvertently acknowledges an immediate im-
portance in examining the political economy of K-pop fans’ cultural con-
sumption: K-pop is an “econo-cultural spectacle that turns spectacle that
turns ocular-acoustic-choreographic styles into reified cultural commod-
ities . . . [by] a mutant character business that enmeshes advertisement, idol
figures, digital technologies, and cultural merchandise—a business operated
by the syndicate of South Korean mega-corporations and show-business
magnates” (9). However, Choi and Maliangkay (2015) neglect an intellectual
vantage of examining the complicated issue of global K-pop fandom phe-
xx Introduction

nomena, deciding instead to keep the “simplistic image of consumer/con-

sumption at arm’s length” (9). Confined to describing what K-pop fans do
and trying to provide them with consumeristic, artistic, and curatorial agen-
cy, the anthology still fails to critically comprehend the fan’s situational
behaviors, which are context-specific to their conditions of locality, identity,
class, race, gender, and so on.
Another problem lies in the volume’s discussion of K-pop’s alternative
contribution to the global system of capitalist cultural production that is
demarcated between the developed global North and the developing, periph-
eral South. While throwing out vague terms like meta-fandom, partisan fan-
dom, and soft racism without providing any definition, Choi and Maliangkay
(2015) endorse that a decades-long issue of cultural imperialism or domina-
tion by the West has been ameliorated, if not overcome, by “the presentation-
al mode and content of the integrated entertainment genre” and its global
popularity (13). This counterflow of cultural production, or what Choi and
Maliangkay (2015) call “the role reversal in the global creative industry”
(14), has been celebrated by the current scholarship on the success of Hallyu
since Doobo Shim’s (2006) work on cultural hybridity. However, as I will
argue in chapter three, one has to pay critical attention to concrete conditions
and modes that beget cultural hybridity in terms of real economic, historical,
industrial, social, and political contexts of cultural production. Otherwise,
one loses sight of locality in cultural production by fetishism.
For Michael Fuhr (2017), K-pop is a sonic and visual signifier of what the
country has strived to achieve or emulate: “globalized modernity” in Korea
(3). Using a modernist project of development as an optic, he analyzes K-pop
from various factors that have contributed to its origin, growth, and success.
By using globalization as the main focus of his examination on the topic, he
strives to understand the topic from a holistic approach by doing both macro
structural and micro textual analyses. “K-pop exposes a local cultural vision
of what globalized modernity means” in Korea (3). Historical examination of
K-pop using the ethnomusicology perspective is an excellent source for a
greater contextual understanding of the music genre’s conditions of possibil-
ities. By “multiple relations and asymmetries through which K-pop is
utilized and connected” to various cultural, industrial, political, and social
imperatives and purposes (13), Fuhr (2017) successfully establishes what he
calls “relational musicology” of K-pop by its discursive and performative
dimensions. To be more specific, what makes Fuhr’s (2017) research on K-
pop promising is his contextualization of the music within Korea’s contem-
porary industrial and governmental policy trajectories for national develop-
ments, acknowledging K-pop has changed the nation’s status from a recipi-
ent of cultural commodities to an exporter.
As “the soundtrack (and K-Pop idols are the faces) of Korea’s globaliza-
tion process on the new millennium” (8), K-pop has been a manifestation of
 Introduction xxi

the nation’s collective imaginary or desire for globalization that the country
has tried to achieve on various grounds. As a concrete result of various
economic, cultural, industrial, political, and social parameters and decision-
making procedures, Fuhr (2017) tries to understand the K-pop phenomena à
la mode Anthony Giddens’s (1984) notion of structuration that simultaneous-
ly represents and constructs the nation’s global imaginaries in its characters,
logic, strategy, and forms. In this respect, K-pop retains an “inherent tension
between the global imaginary it depicts and issues of national identity that
were underlying, intersecting, and conflicting with it” (59). However, his
study retains a common problem that is consistent amongst Hallyu scholars,
that is a misconstruing of the relationship between neoliberalism and the
state.
As opposed to liberalism’s effort to balance two distinctive spheres of the
state and the market, the public and the private, and the political and the
commercial, neoliberalism has blurred the boundaries, transplanting market
principles into the core functions of the state (Miller and Rose 2008). How-
ever, in the current scholarship, there is a general misconception of neoliber-
alism by a myopic opposition between the state and the market, which ig-
nores the variegated, contradictory nature of neoliberal social formations. Or,
the term has been overused or misused by scholars without properly indicat-
ing its specific tenets they aim to examine, and in turn it has become banal.
Contrarily, I maintain neoliberalism is internally combined with the develop-
mental state to the extent that a concerted effort between the two becomes
prevalent in the trajectories of K-pop’s inception, development, and promo-
tion. To that end, I analyze how K-pop has been conditioned to prosper while
the state is in charge of reconstructing its national economy to accommodate
neoliberal challenges for economic development. With a different set of roles
and expectations, the state is an integral part of the neoliberal program via a
construction of minimal social safety nets, while providing the private sec-
tors with industrial fundamentals like mandatory education, infrastructure,
and legal frameworks. However, since state policies do not automatically
guarantee their success, the biopolitical aspect of neoliberalism plays an
important role in shaping individuals as competitive, neoliberal agents. Thus,
neoliberalization works not only by political imperatives to restructure the
national economic system, but also through civil society’s voluntary, bottom-
up support for the reforms as indispensable ethical responsibility (Lim and
Jang 2006). To address this perspective, deploying Michel Foucault’s (2008)
notion of governmentality, a biopolitical dimension of the neoliberal world-
view where subjectification and subjectivation processes occur, I also exam-
ine an extra-juridical functionality of the global market system’s political
economy, where cultural and ideological apparatuses exert determining roles
in perpetuating and normalizing neoliberal principles and mantra. With the
notion of “homo economicus,” Michel Foucault (2008) maintains that neolib-
xxii Introduction

eralism universalizes economic logic as the general matrix of people’s daily

behaviors in everything that human beings endeavor to realize based upon a
meticulous calculation of cost for benefit. From this point of view, I maintain
that, conditioned and promoted by state initiatives, K-pop, and to be more
specific K-pop female idols, have been an integral part of neoliberalism’s
grand transformative project that turns society into a massive marketplace by
conditioning the audience’s value system and code of thoughts and conducts.
While Fuhr (2017) is correct that the Korean government has been inte-
gral to the success of the cultural phenomenon as a “result of strategic plan-
ning and a fostering of the domestic entertainment sector by state-national
bodies” (10), he is ironically still confined to a myopic perception of neolib-
eralism as a demise of state intervention. Despite his perspective that regards
“the Korean nation-state [as] a pertinent agent in the field of K-pop” by its
strategic promotion for economic development (133), he still believes there
is a distinct rupture from state developmentalism to neoliberal “free-market
economy” in Korea. Due to this conceptual misunderstanding, his claim that
“sweeping effects of Korea’s state-national globalization agenda, legislative
changes, and promotional policies closely tied to the greater transition to a
digital economy have contributed to the emergence of a vibrant domestic
content market with high export-rates” for an increasing national economic
competitiveness since the Kim Young-sam administration (199 –8) becomes
completely erroneous (143). Subsequently, Fuhr’s (2017) naïve understand-
ing that a “perseverance of Korean cultural identity is at the heart of the
government’s globalization agenda and has been defined as a key policy
objective” reverses causal relations between an economic imperative of the
neoliberal state and its strategic use of cultural legacy and identity for eco-
nomic development (155). To redress Fuhr’s (2017) short-sighted argument
that the Korean government has promoted its culture industry in order to
secure and develop its unique cultural identity, I interrogate how the K-pop
industry as a national economic project has manipulated and exploited one of
Korea’s traditional cultural values, that is patriarchal gender hierarchy, as an
effective tool for economic, industrial, and political modernization or devel-
opment in chapter two.
Furthermore, while discussing a key aspect of neoliberal culture com-
modities in K-pop such as an excessive use of affect and visuality, and a void
of narratives and storyline combined with atemporality and a lack of real
places, Fuhr (2017) does not examine a cultural logic of neoliberalism in K-
pop. Though he examines K-pop as a cultural manifestation of (neoliberal)
globalization, Fuhr does not indicate that the state policies under IMF SAPs
were a local adaption to or a survival strategy in the global system of neolib-
eralism. Chapter one further dissects this point.
John Lie’s (2015) K-Pop: Popular Music, Cultural Amnesia, and Eco-
nomic Innovation in South Korea has been a source of my inspiration for its
 Introduction xxiii

broad, structural analyses on K-pop’s emergence, evolution, and success. As

a connoisseur of music himself, Lie acutely historicizes trajectories of the K-
pop phenomenon within Korea’s cultural, economic, industrial, political, and
social contexts, which I strive to emulate and further elaborate in this book.
By doing musicological comparisons between different popular music genres
in Korea, he basically maintains that K-pop is not an authentic music of, for,
and by Korean people, but a recent strategic invention for economic develop-
ment: “Nearly every aspect of K-pop is functional, intended to satisfy the
market rather than fulfill some deep artistic or political urge” of the people
(141).
However, Lie (2015) does not shed enough critical light on one of his
book’s main arguments, K-pop as economic innovation, in its roles in and
relations with Korea’s increasing neoliberalization. While emphasizing that
K-pop is a result of a “confluence of social change, economic culture, and
industrial transformation that sustains the export imperative” (4), he does not
examine how this innovation was conceptualized, designed, and implement-
ed within the state’s developmental policies and the industry’s strategic ap-
propriations of various business practices elsewhere. In turn, while an indus-
trialization of popular music and the nation’s volatile neoliberalization coin-
cided in the late 1990s, he does not critically examine what aural, visual, and
ideological messages K-pop sends out either: Considering popular music is a
“master key” that allows us to satisfy “hungers not only for fun and relaxa-
tion but also for meaning and even salvation, appetites for everything” in
one’s life (151), he should have examined various implications of K-pop’s
commercialism in its production backgrounds and its semantic ramifications
in society. For that matter, though “K-pop would fail the ethnonational test of
authenticity” since its roots are in rather African American U.S. popular
music, Lie (2015) does not investigate the effects of K-pop’s lack of socio-
cultural automorphism, but just indicates K-pop has been influential in for-
mulating, or priming, Korean people’s sentiments, ideas, thoughts, desire,
and worldview, as well as an integral part of their psyche. Moreover, while it
would have been great if there was some empirical substantiation on the
claim, his argument is still sociological or philosophical. In sum, while he
intends to analyze broader historical, ideological, political, and social impli-
cations of K-pop’s success as a strategic innovation for economic develop-
ment, he then seems to suspend this task by saying we have to admit the
reality that people love the music genre and we cannot do anything about it.
While this book itself tries to validate his points, chapters four, five, six, and
seven delineate how K-pop exercises cultural politics by perpetuating and
normalizing gender-specific scripts of neoliberalism to the audience.
Another issue in John Lie’s (2015) examination ironically comes from his
contribution to the literature, that is, his argument on cultural amnesia. As a
critical reconsideration of the “official” narrative of traditional culture, in
xxiv Introduction

which K-pop is explained by its imagined or real continuity to authentic

Koreanness, he maintains that K-pop is qualitatively new not only to Korean
traditional music, kugak, but also to its previous popular music genres such
as yuhaengga, trots, and so on. Germinated with the revolutionary success of
Seo Taiji and Boys in 1992, and heavily referenced to American popular
music, K-pop is a cultural manifestation of a new phase or orientation of
contemporary Korea. For Lie (2015), the decline of Confucian norms and
ethics, an increasing Americanization of popular culture, and an emergence
of consumerist youth culture are all the powerful contributing factors to K-
pop’s success, but largely remain amnesic to the audience.
While I agree with Lie’s argument on amnestic factors behind the K-pop
phenomenon, I aim to reevaluate his assessment, especially his emphasis on
“epistemic break” (Foucault 1994) or paradigm shift (T. Kuhn 1996) be-
tween K-pop and its predecessors. By a political-economic analysis accom-
panied by critical textual analyses, I strive to understand whether or not K-
pop has been incepted, produced, distributed, and consumed in a revolution-
arily new way. While Lie (2015) clearly indicates K-pop has been an indus-
trial innovation as much as an aesthetic one, his current argument does not
successfully examine how the industry manages to produce its cultural com-
modity, and in turn usher a transnational fandom yet. In other words, a
substantiation of his arguments on cultural amnesia (Confucian, or patriar-
chal tradition) and economic innovations (strategic field of industrial devel-
opment under neoliberalism) has not been elaborated enough. While he con-
tinuously indicates K-pop is severed from “Confucian ethos of seriousness
and sincerity, along with conservative attire and a demure posture” (59), he
does not discuss normative codes and rules of doing business, not to mention
that various decision-making processes in the K-pop industry are still
grounded in Confucian patriarchy—to be more specific, gender-, age-, and
class-based hierarchal relations. In this respect, by taking into account Lie’s
(2015) argument that “K-pop is a way of auscultating the South Korean body
politic” (4), I delve into reconsidering how various amnesic components still
are effective and powerful in the K-pop phenomenon by different guises and
levels of engagements. To be more specific, in chapters one, two, and three, I
re-assess lingering roles of patriarchal managerial structures and practices in
the K-pop industry, the state’s strategic intervention in the market, and the
establishment’s different applications of patriarchal gender norms and values
for the success of K-pop as a neoliberal economic innovation.
As briefly reviewed above, scholarly work that effectively investigates K-
pop as an integral part of the country’s formal and informal neoliberalization
is nonexistent to my best knowledge. To fill this serious academic void, I
critically reexamine and recontextualize the cultural phenomenon, focusing
on the relationship between a continuing legacy of state developmentalism
along with other cultural traditions in the neoliberal K-pop industry. In this
 Introduction xxv

respect, I argue that the Korean government’s neoliberal social policy as-
sisted its culture industry to produce high-quality culture commodities by
conflating the cultural and the economic and further legitimizing the system-
atic commercialization of the previously unmarketed, such as female bodies
and sexualities in the name of economic competitiveness. In order to practice
critical K-pop studies by contextualizing its development within Korea’s
modernization trajectories, this book strives to understand how seemingly
contradictory sociocultural and politico-economic factors such as Confucian
patriarchism, feminism, developmentalism, and neoliberalism have been part
and parcel of K-pop’s origin, development, and success.

PLACE OF CULTURAL MEANING: BETWEEN PRODUCTION

AND CONSUMPTION

While any meaning of cultural artifact is generated by a complex interaction

between a text’s material properties and production backgrounds, and an
audience’s specific location in cultural, economic, political, and social mi-
lieus, this book mainly focuses on the former for several reasons. First, while
the current scholarship on Hallyu or K-pop specifically has mainly dealt with
how the content is circulated and consumed, there is a serious dearth of
literature on a production aspect of the culture industry. While there have
been efforts to understand the textual quality of the cultural content, which
try to understand what appeal the content retains and how it pleases audi-
ences, they are largely descriptive or microscopic, and in turn ignore a struc-
tural condition of the textual production. On the other hand, related to the
former, like Choi and Maliangkay (2015), there is a growing attention to how
fans enjoy or construct their own meaning-making on the content; however,
it does not pay due attention to what implicit or latent messages are embed-
ded or prevalent to the extent that the audience still consumes no matter how
active they are in reconstructing or negotiating with it. In other words, I aim
to reconsider a fundamental asymmetry of agency and resource between the
industry and the individual in cultural (re)production.
While I certainly appreciate a recent academic achievement on the audi-
ence’s active intervention in meaning-making and text-production, on an
individual level like DIY content creation on the Internet, I pay more critical
attention to how K-pop frames the listeners’ perceptions on various socio-
political matters and experiences and in turn, contributes to constructing
neoliberal subjects, homo economicus. By understanding how K-pop female
idols have enabled female audiences to place themselves in “imaginative
cultural narratives and, as such, they help both to construct and provide
insights into that wider experience” (Whiteley 2000, 9), I strive to recontex-
xxvi Introduction

tualize the phenomenal success of the female idols back into their actual role
in contemporary patriarchal, neoliberal Korea.
Amongst many cultural commodities by the K-pop industry, this book is
dedicated to analyzing how music videos deploy and perpetuate cultural,
economic, ideological, political, and social hegemonies as a means of an
Althusserian “ideological state apparatus.” As an effective medium that fuses
culture and economy, and combines traditional and local artistic sentiments
with the most technologically advanced skills provided by transitional media
corporations, K-pop music videos have been the most appealing commercial
tool to promote the industry, trespassing formal boundaries across borders. In
other words, as a means of cultural politics, music videos have been particu-
larly successful in legitimating and perpetuating a dominant system of ideas
and social relations by the status quo (James 2015).
However, rather than a comprehensive survey, which is nearly impossible
in an ever-changing culture industry and media, this book’s overall structure
looks like a mosaic that juxtaposes several significant pieces and parts of the
topic, which I happen to have acknowledged. In turn, examining a female
idol group’s popularity and significance in its cultural, social, and historical
implications, this book inadvertently chooses certain music videos of certain
female idols, skipping some of the key moments and players in the industry.
Understanding dynamic interactions in each component, I reconsider K-pop
female idols not just as a cultural phenomenon, but more importantly as a
result of more complicated historical processes in Korea’s adjustment to a
changing economic and industrial environment in the aftermath of the 1997
Asian Financial Crisis and Korea’s subsequent neoliberalization by reliance
on IMF bail-out funds.

K-POP FEMALE IDOLS: POSTER-CHILDREN OF KOREA’S

NEOLIBERAL TRANSFORMATION

On January 31, 2012, Girls’ Generation (hereafter, SNSD), one of the most
representative K-pop groups, made a surprising debut performance on CBS’s
Late Show with David Letterman, and triggered a plethora of questions that
have led to this book. Honestly, I had not seriously considered SNSD’s
popularity or influence until I saw the debut performance, which my students
at Tempe University informed me of. My inability to answer all the questions
that I got has driven my research on K-pop to date. However, it is beyond the
scope and capacity of this book’s inquiries to answer how SNSD could
appear on the Late Show with David Letterman and Live with Kelly show on
February 1, given the group’s substantial lack of reputation, popularity, and
influence in the U.S., or at least due to my negligence. Instead, since an
investigative journalist could fathom this, I rather decided to comprehend
 Introduction xxvii

what led to the recent success of the music genre, and how different factors
have interacted in their constitutive roles in the phenomenon.
In my blunt observation on the debut performances, SNSD was not treat-
ed well enough for the performance: The stage itself was too small for the
members to execute proper dance routines, and in turn, they ended up mak-
ing awkward moves. After SNSD’s clumsy performance as the last slot of the
program, there was no interview about the song or the group by the host, but
a mere introduction of the group as a female group from Korea. It is atypical
for Mr. Letterman not to have an interview with a guest on the program:
What was most disturbing to me about the media’s coverage of the debut is
that the group was not appreciated for their artistic talents, if there are any,
but for their exotic otherness, or mystique Asian femininity. Rather, they
were consumed as a mere prop of exotic subjects to three old, white male
hosts. On the Live with Kelly show, SNSD members were asked to teach the
hosts how to perform dance moves: Soon afterwards, the male host of the
show complemented a member’s proficiency in English, not the group mem-
bers’ musicality or anything meaningful about the performance. It seemed
clear to me SNSD was not there on the stage for their musical talent but
something else. However, quite contrary to the vapid reception by the local
media and audiences in the U.S., the state government as well as local media
in Korea celebrated SNSD’s American debut as a national achievement that
proves K-pop’s economic and cultural prowess, which is deemed as a new
strategic field of national development.
While SNSD was consumed as a cultural commodity of exotic female
performers in the U.S., Korean media proclaimed it an optimistic sign of the
county’s competitiveness in global capitalism. Considering Korean popular
songs have reflected a “strong impact and appropriation of American pop
music and more importantly its transition into new articulative forms of
Korean identities” (Fuhr 2017, 47), this event warrants an inquiry into how
the K-pop industry has established its business practices and strategies with
reference to American cultural, economic, and social hegemonies. While
there are critical accounts on K-pop female idols like those by David Volodz-
ko (2016) and Lucy Williamson (2011), they are journalistic writings that do
not cover the topic systematically. As an effort to understand how K-pop has
become a national agenda as a part of the state’s economic development
policies that correspond to changing capitalist market conditions and prac-
tices since the 1990s, especially a major economic crisis in 1997, this book
examines the music genre and its adjacent phenomena from broader structu-
ral perspectives.
Likewise, amongst K-pop female idols, SNSD is the main focus of this
book’s examination for the group’s sheer success that is summarized by their
common moniker as the “National Idol” of Korea and their winning “Video
of the Year” at the 2013 YouTube Music Awards, beating Justin Bieber,
xxviii Introduction

Miley Cyrus, and Lady Gaga. Despite occasional discussion on other female
idols, such as S.E.S. and Suzy of Miss A, most chapters critically deal with
broader implications of SNSD’s performances on and off the stage for their
relevance to debates and discussions on female subjectivity and sexuality,
and their challenges and transformation of gender-related norms and boun-
daries. As Fuhr (2017) accentuates that K-pop is a cultural embodiment of
Korea’s latest globalization strategy, which is a result of the complex “di-
alectic relationship between the global imaginary and the various manifesta-
tions of national identity that cohere and cross-cut,” creating various tensions
and ruptures (18), I reexamine the idol group to reveal how different tradi-
tional, emergent, and innovative factors dynamically interact and co-con-
struct each other. This book’s lack of coverage on the most up-to-date, ever-
flourishing female idols is certainly subject to criticism for its ignorance,
negligence and/or laziness. However, I do hope this inevitable shortcoming
does not distract from my main argument about the critical, historical, and
structural examination on the topic. Rather, I do hope this book instigates
further systematic inquiry on K-pop female idols’ cultural, economic, and
social implication and contribution.
While a sheer number of female idols can be regarded as a sign of Korean
women’s growing influence, whether or not their increased presence in the
industry has yielded a substantial improvement in real life is still an open
question. As a closer examination on the changed social existence of women
in Korea, this book strives to investigate whether K-pop female idols have
contributed to increasing women’s broader cultural and social participation
or not, and if so, how. As a more critical reconsideration on the volume of
their presence, this book aims to understand whether the female idols have
opened up new possibilities of women’s existence and careers or not in
Korea. While Korean women had enjoyed a gradual increase in social partic-
ipation, many of them were forced to take part in economic activities in post-
IMF Korea due to a massive disemployment of their husbands or fathers who
used to be the main breadwinners in the patriarchal society. However, the
nation’s traditional gender hierarchy has still treated them unfairly in pay,
compensation, union protection, and a hypocritical double-standard on their
sexual display and behavior that the industry has promoted. As to Korean
women’s grudging entitlement or precarious participation in social domains,
I maintain the situations of the female idols provide an allegory of Korean
women’s employment status, unequal treatment, and double standards on
their sexual identities and behaviors.
With a classic argument that any meaning is produced, circulated, and
consumed between representation, audience, and social formation (A. Kuhn
1985), this book critically analyzes how female subjectivities and sexualities
have been represented and promoted in the industry to examine whether K-
pop female idols harbor an active alternative role mode for female audiences.
 Introduction xxix

For a more contextualized understanding of the topic in the neoliberal indus-

try’s marketing and survival strategies, I strive to comprehend how a new
construction of ideal femininity juggles between Korea’s existing patriarchal
gender hierarchy and the neoliberal hegemonic cliché of female empower-
ment by sexualization. Specifically, I investigate how a narrative of female
idols’ success is constructed in their music videos. Since the body is a central
locus of social control and power where cultural values are displayed, con-
tested, negotiated, and changed (Jagger and Bordo 1992), and female bodies
have been corporeal “histories of the repressed, in themselves, [that] hold a
special key to revelation” of the dominant ideology (Comaroff and Comaroff
1992, 17), I analyze how the idols’ bodies are displayed as a cultural text that
is replete with a symbol of societal norms and regulations. Since there is a
strong correlation between representations of the K-pop female idols and
discriminatory gender attitudes to labour and personal relations in both do-
mestic and public spheres (Lin and Rudolf 2017), I provide a diagnostic
analysis of Korean society through understanding a changed social status of
K-pop female idols. By doing so, I hope to better explain how the musical
and performative imagination of the K-pop industry has transformed and
reconfigured women’s location, meaning, and existential conditions in Kore-
an society, and in turn, how this aesthetic reconstruction of women’s reality,
or visual representation, discloses or conceals their asymmetric, exploitative
relationship to the patriarchal society.
In this respect, I deal with the idols not only as a manufactured ideal of
femininity by the neoliberal industry, but more importantly a popular mode
of Foucaultian governmentality that exerts biopolitical power in audience’s
everyday lives. In other words, by examining how neoliberalism has per-
meated its political economic mantras in individuals’ psyches and mundane
behaviors via K-pop, this book allows readers to understand how the industry
promotes certain types of female idol personalities, physical characteristics,
behaviors, and emotions that help condition the audience’s subjectification
and subjectivation processes. Considering Motown’s girl groups of the 1960s
influenced teenage girls’ perceptions and behaviors on premarital sexual ac-
tivities and consumerism in the U.S. (Douglas 1994; Stos 2012), it is impor-
tant to examine how a certain representation of K-pop female idols is pro-
moted as a means to understand which female conduct is promoted in the
music genre.
In this book, I maintain that there has been continuity in women’s contri-
butions to and roles in economic developments between the contemporary K-
pop industry and the labor-intensive manufacturing industry that led to the
nation’s neck-breaking modernization between the 60s and the 80s. These
successes largely stem from mobilizing and exploiting female workers,
which was orchestrated and maintained by the state government. As Elaine
H. Kim and Chungmoo Choi (1998) acutely indicate that contemporary Ko-
xxx Introduction

rea is a “palimpsest of multiple layers of Japanese colonialism and neo-

imperial domination, especially by U.S. hegemony” (3), I contend that the
recent development of K-pop has been possible, configured, and based on the
experiences of the country’s turbulent industrial capitalist nation-building,
which was driven by national elites who were trained by former colonial
occupiers including domestic juntas. In turn, I investigate, as this book’s title
indicates, if there is any improvement in the female idols’ labor conditions in
terms of their autonomy, dignity, and subjectivity, and how K-pop industry
as neoliberal service industry differs from the nation’s previous engines of
industrial developments from the 1960s to the 80s. By the context of gender-
based labor relations in patriarchal neoliberalism, the K-pop industry has
actively incorporated female idols’ social vulnerability and labor availability
in its business, and perpetuated the neoliberal market rationality of competi-
tion and success. To be more specific, just as Korea’s manufacturing industry
conglomerates achieved their fortune by exploiting cheap, docile, and abun-
dant female workers from the 60s to 80s, the K-pop industry capitalizes on
the competitive spirits, perseverance, and physical strength of young trainees
and idols who dream of being successful and famous in the glossy culture
industry. In other words, replicating the yesteryear’s authoritarian, exploita-
tive labor relations in a neoliberal service economy, the K-pop industry takes
advantage of the hegemonic business model that produces quickly profitable,
homogenized, disposable cultural commodities, that is female idols’ omni-
presence and abundance, from a highly concentrated, hierarchal production
system which integrates in-house procedures of artist recruiting, training,
image-making, composing, management, contracting, and album production.
From this point of view, K-pop is an exemplar of a neoliberal service econo-
my that reflects how business demands have shifted from a manual sweat-
shop workforce to immaterial, service labor. Retaining Korea’s traditional
culture of patriarchal sexism, female idols are employed to meet a growing
demand of culture industry as service sector economy, and by doing so, they
are effectively reinterpreting the traditional gender-based code of ethics, di-
luting its strict areas of application, and disseminating a new set of entitle-
ments in inclusion and exclusion. Thus K-pop female idols are the most
salient example of the industry elite’s strategic appropriation and application
of different business models in the contemporary neoliberal economy.
While bell hooks (1981) indicates that a subordinated woman in a colony
suffers from a double colonization by the colonizer and the patriarch of the
nation, I maintain the representations of K-pop female idols retain how the
industry elites internalize the idols and the audience alike with the hegemon-
ic gender relations ideal of patriarchal neoliberalism that combines the two
most powerful colonizing forces in contemporary Korea. This hegemony
further reproduces the country’s patriarchal value system by infantilizing
and/or hypersexualizing female subjects, and has been present in a split
 Introduction xxxi

personality or even a schizophrenic characteristic of K-pop female idols who

embody innocence/purity imagery and practice hypersexuality at the same
time, as examined in chapter five. This double confinement of female subjec-
tivity legitimizes and reproduces female subordination to the sum of the
political-economic status quo. Considering the K-pop industry as a hallmark
of Korea’s adaptation to neoliberalism, a limited characterization of female
identity in K-pop confirms the national agenda of masculine capitalist devel-
opment by commodifying female idols in their physical appearances and
affective, immaterial labor. In turn, it conditions, or helps subjectify (female)
audiences to sell the traditionally non-marketable for their survival and suc-
cess in neoliberalism, where “women are required, to a greater degree than
men, to be engaged in improving and transforming the self” (Baker 2010,
188). In this seemingly promising perspective on female success in the indus-
try, women voluntarily contribute to renewing and perpetuating the centu-
ries-
long gender oppression in the nation, by abandoning any sense of unfairness
or oppression in social relations but equipping themselves with an extra
amount of agency and efforts. In this model of voluntary internalization of
exploitative social relations between genders, women, especially any K-pop
female wannabes, trainees, and idols, become and exercise an ideal neoliber-
al subject, homo economicus, who capitalizes on their efforts in already
exploitative capitalist society, as examined in chapter six. In this respect, an
unprecedented number of K-pop female idols reveal how the nation’s neolib-
eral culture industry has been successful in updating and capitalizing on the
traditional gendered hierarchy in the neoliberal culture industry.
Thus, this book examines how Korea’s preexisting conditions, Confucian
patriarchy and developmentalism, have been an integral part of the genre’s
proliferation on the one hand, and in turn, investigates how the music has
been an integral part of Korea’s growing neoliberalization by its biopolitical
functionality.

SOME METHODOLOGICAL NOTES: INTERSECTIONALITY OF

MACRO AND MICRO DIMENSIONS

As an effort to systematically understand the topic, the book adopts various

approaches by deploying both macro and micro levels of examination. With
the book’s focus on a broader structural examination of the topic, the first
three chapters examine larger cultural, economic, political, and social con-
texts of the K-pop industry and the success of the female idols. Chapters
four, five, and six examine micro levels by looking into how the idols are
represented in music videos, and what kind of implicit and explicit messages
are intended in the entertainment medium. The last chapter recontextualizes
xxxii Introduction

the previous chapters’ macro structural and micro textual analyses of the
topic. By investigating how a certain K-pop songs and performers are fea-
tured in one of the nation’s most popular TV shows, chapter seven examines
a broader cultural politics of K-pop in the contemporary Korean society.
As Jager (2003) maintains, “particular events and works throughout Ko-
rea’s modern history have been discursively linked to one another and to
discern the underlying logic of these narrative connections” (xi), chapter one
examines how K-pop has been produced in a neoliberal version of develop-
mentalism, which was a main driving force behind the country’s neck-break-
ing industrialization during the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Providing an alternative
perspective to the current, dominant scholarship, chapter one argues that the
Korean government has played an integral part in promoting K-pop to main-
tain national competitiveness as a part of the state’s neoliberal social policies.
Michel Foucault’s (2008) notion of governmentality is deployed to illumi-
nate how the politico-economic status quo has exploited young females as an
effective means of neoliberal subjectification and subjectivation in the na-
tion’s post-IMF service economy. Arguing that K-pop female idols are the
apex of neoliberal commodity, chapter one concludes that they are the latest
export item in Korea’s decades-long developmentalism, and perpetuate the
contemporary myth of market competition and self-development.
As a more elaborated examination of the continuity the K-pop industry
retains, chapter two contextualizes the music genre within the nation’s centu-
ries-
long Confucian patriarchy. By deploying Raymond Williams’s notion of
cultural genre, chapter two investigates how post-IMF neoliberal, patriarchal
Korea’s historical specificity has rendered the proliferation of K-pop idol girl
groups, which commodify highly sexualized young female bodies, as a for-
mal universality. As a critical reaction to the existing K-pop scholarship, this
chapter analyzes how K-pop female idols operate on the continuum of the
traditional, patriarchal hierarchy that led to gender-based labor exploitation
during the country’s active industrialization from the 60s to the 80, within a
different set of sociocultural and politico-economic contexts of neoliberal
Korea. Korea’s culture industry has created a system of manufacturing idol
groups that has worked for years, stripping idol girls’ individual personhood
to make lucrative cultural products through mainly an infantilizaiton of and/
or a sexualization of female bodies as a commodity. This system has worked
for years, as the sexual desires of the male audience are satisfied by the
commodified sexuality of female idols, while their place in the social hierar-
chy is confirmed by the cuteness that the girls perform as a show of submis-
siveness. Just as docile, disposable, unwed female workers were exploited
for a politico-ideological slogan of national development during the nation’s
active, volatile industrialization period on labor-intensive manufacturing in-
dustry work floors, young, appealing, sexualized K-pop female idols have
 Introduction xxxiii

been deployed to maintain the national economic competitiveness in the

post-IMF, contemporary neoliberal Korea, however in a flash performance
stage of K-pop.
Chapter three investigates the sociocultural implications of SNSD’s debut
performance on the Late Show with David Letterman as a means to under-
stand what led to K-pop’s recent global popularity. Investigating critically
how the current literature on K-pop’s success focuses on cultural hybridity,
chapter three maintains that SNSD’s debut clarifies how K-pop’s hybridity
does not mean dialectical interactions between the electro-dance music genre
as a hegemonic American form and Korean content that “appropriates all the
elements of urban American (often African American) sound, movement,
and energy” (Lie 2015, 124). Furthermore, the chapter argues that cultural
hegemony as a constitutive result of sociohistorical and politico-economic
arrangements provides a better heuristic tool, and K-pop should be under-
stood as a part of the hegemony of American pop and a cultural surrogate of
a neoliberal capitalism. Specifically, analyzing SNSD’s signature songs like
“Gee” (2009), “The Boys” (2011), and “I Got a Boy” (2012), the chapter
examines how those songs can be interpreted as a cultural affirmation, or
propagation of neoliberalism’s ideology. It examines how cultural hybridity
as an alleged reason behind K-pop’s global (at least in Asia) popularity rather
recirculates and reproduces the American popular culture hegemony rather
than producing alternative creativity or negotiated cultural re-creation. The
chapter reexamines cultural creativity or originality of K-pop within the con-
text of the birth and practices of the industry, considering a “particular com-
bination of Western and Japanese construction of Korea with Korean con-
structions of the West” (Jager 2003, ix).
As a recontextualization of K-pop’s thematic evolutions within contem-
porary Korean history, chapter four examines how K-pop female idols have
become neoliberal episteme since 1997, which coincided with the country’s
explicit neoliberalization. Drawing a genealogy of K-pop female idols over
time, chapter four investigates how the idols have incorporated and repre-
sented a major episteme at a given moment. Establishing a taxonomy of K-
pop female idols by Generation I, II, and III, the chapter situates characteris-
tic developments of the idols within Korea’s major neoliberal events. Tracing
trajectories of paradigmatic representations of the idols, it investigates how
each generation is a symbolic response to the country’s extensive neoliberal-
ization. Generation I is characterized as ambiguous femininity with a sali-
ence of cuteness and innocence from 1997 to 2007; Generation II is also
identified as a sexual ambiguity, however, with a salience of growing sexual-
ization from 2007 to 2010; and Generation III has been typified as an explicit
sexualization since 2011. Each generation corresponds to the IMF’s structu-
ral adjustment program in 1997, the Free Trade Agreement between Korea
and the U.S. in 2007, and the G20 Seoul Summit in 2010, respectively.
xxxiv Introduction

Chapters five and six scrutinize how K-pop female idols are represented
in music videos as a micro level of analysis of the phenomenon. Chapter five
examines how K-pop female idols are commodified in their bodies and per-
sonalities. Focusing on one of the most popular female idols to date, Suzy of
Miss A, chapter five examines how she simultaneously retains contradictory
feminine characteristics, explicitly sexual and traditionally innocent/pure. It
investigates why and how her ironic personality is possible in the context of
Korea’s neoliberal project of economic development within its centuries-
long patriarchy. To that end, the chapter investigates Suzy’s split personality
by reconsidering how the traditional gender norm has been updated in the
neoliberal culture industry, proliferating and re-legitimating patriarchal gen-
der norms and values.
Chapter six deals with how the K-pop industry promotes a discourse of
resilience as a neoliberal ideal of female subjectivity. How can the public
become willing, devoted, docile workers in situations where they are not able
to sustain decent, humane living conditions under cut-throat, flexible neolib-
eral working conditions? Chapter six argues, in a therapeutic narrative of
overcoming obstacles and achieving goals, that K-pop music videos provide
audiences with a message that individuals have to be responsible for their
success and well-being rather than complaining about external, institutional
hindrances. While ostensibly promoting female empowerment, they update
and reinforce patriarchal gender norms and expectations. To this end, the
chapter examines SNSD’s “Into the New World” (2007) and “All Night”
(2017) to investigate how resilience discourse is promoted along with neolib-
eral positive psychology that aims to sustain a happy, devoted, and auto-
correcting working populace.
Chapter seven recontextualizes a social implication of K-pop in contem-
porary Korean society. This chapter interrogates a broader ramification of the
recent resurgence of 90s popular music, an earlier version of the current K-
pop, which was epitomized by the unprecedented success of MBC’s Infinite
Challenge: “Saturday, Saturday is Singers” (ToToGa). It aims to understand
what is suggested in the program’s special reunion performances of the
decade’s most iconic popular musicians. Focusing on how the program re-
constitutes a cultural memory of the decade, chapter seven examines the
cultural politics of the 90s’ retro music in contemporary neoliberal Korea.
Examining extra-musical conditions of ToToGa, and analyzing why and how
it became popular with regards to its referential roles to audiences’ emotions
and socioeconomic environments under neoliberalism, the chapter investi-
gates how ToToGa, as a cultural politics of memory of the 90s, selectively
navigates and repackages contradictory memories, conferring new meanings
onto the 90s and making its memory bearable. Since remembering the past is
fundamentally based on a necessity of the present, it seeks to answer why
there is a boom of 90s pop music at this moment. To this end, chapter seven
 Introduction xxxv

analyzes how ToToGa reconstructs and represents hegemonic discourse on

the decade’s sociocultural and politico-economic meanings.
 Chapter One

Popular Culture as a Strategic Field of

Neoliberal Intervention
Developmentalism, Neoliberal Social Policy, and
Governmentality in the Post-IMF Korean Popular Music
Industry

Compared to centuries of slow, tedious progress in Western nation-states,

Korea rapidly achieved its economic, political, and social modernization in
less than four decades, a phenomenon commonly known as the Miracle on
the Han River. In just a decade, Korea rendered another phenomenal achieve-
ment at this time in the culture industry, that is Hallyu, or the Korean Wave. 1
As an allegory of this fast development, K-pop’s main features consist of
addictive, fast, and dynamic beats and sounds, garnished with a perfectly
synchronized, mesmerizing choreography by attractive, physique male idols,
or appealing, delicate, and sexy female idols (C. Kim 2012). Since TVXQ’s
debut in 2004 (H.O.T. was the first K-pop idol to launch in 1996), the Korean
soundscape has been dominated by K-pop idols that are mainly produced
and/or played for the purpose of product exportation (Oh and Park 2012; G.
Park 2013b). For George Katsiaficas (2012), along with glorious democratic
uprisings against military juntas in the 70s and the 80s, as a reflective of
Korea’s industrial, technological, and economic development, Hallyu has
become a symbol for Korea’s competent advancement to a more civil, so-
phisticated country with an image of an attractive, clean, and advanced na-
tion-state. To a large extent, this cultural phenomenon has been equated with
national achievement and pride, which Jeongsuk Joo (2011) calls “pop na-
tionalism,” and has retained an ideological conflation between economic

1
2 Chapter 1

development or superiority and cultural modernity. With the local media’s

aggressive reportage on its global success, which is always translated to
amount of cultural export revenues, K-pop and Hallyu in general have been
promoted as self-assertive tokens of the nation’s cultural attractiveness and
economic competitiveness.
During her inaugural speech in February 2013, the former, impeached
President Park Geun-hye declared her intention to recreate the Miracle of the
Han River by Hallyu. The Miracle was effectuated by her father, dictator-
President Park Chung-hee, by distinctively masculine, exploitative modern-
ization rested on an unprecedented, nation-wide mobilization of young and
cheap, but well-disciplined female workers into the labor-intensive manufac-
turing industry for commodity exportation from the 60s to the 80s. In this
respect, Korea’s “miraculous” industrial development was possible through
“Confucian parental governance into a modernizing project” by an optimal
combination of patriarchal hierarchy and masculine developmentalism (H.
Kim 2001, 53; K. Shin 2002). Thus, her policy outlook is quite outdated and
poses a stark difference in characteristics, nature, and orientations between
the previous industrial development and the current cultural business. I sup-
pose the impeached President Park officially disclosed how the state has
treated the cultural in its relations to other governing tools and subjects in
contemporary Korean history: Culture is a pliable auxiliary of governmental
policies for economic, political, and social development. Actually, according
to the Hyundai Research Institute, the recent global success of K-pop has
contributed to national economic growth mainly by immaterial, service sec-
tors like tourism and cultural content production, and by an increasing expor-
tation of consumer products that the idols endorse or use (P. Kim 2011).
While the preceding administrations of Kim Young-sam (1993–1998),
Kim Dae-jung (1998–2003), Roh Moo-hyun (2003–2008), and Lee Myung-
bak (2008–2013), all actively promoted the culture industry as a means to
develop or sustain the national economy, they were modest in officially
summoning and deploying the rhetoric of state developmentalism in the
realm of culture. With Park Geun-hye’s speech, the state officially declared
that its economic/industrial policy coincides with its cultural one, or sub-
sumes the latter to the sum of the former. Historically and practically, owing
to the devastated economic, social, and political conditions after the Japanese
colonial occupation and the Korean War, the state’s cultural policies have
been instrumental in realizing the government’s political, economic, social,
and/or ideological agendas (Yim 2002). For example, dictator-President Park
Chung-hee, who seized power through a military coup in 1961, made full use
of patriarchal nationalism that mandated the population, especially women,
to exercise obedience, diligence, loyalty, frugality, and cooperation in order
to implement export-oriented, labor-intensive industrialization, which pro-
vided the illicit political elite with a rationale for developmental dictatorship
 Popular Culture as a Strategic Field of Neoliberal Intervention 3

in the poverty-stricken country. In this respect, regarding national develop-

ment as a result of an active “incorporation of the actively residual [socio-
cultural and politico-economic traditions] by reinterpretation, dilution, pro-
jection, discriminating inclusion and exclusion” (Williams 1977, 123), I
strive to critically examine the success of K-pop within a continuum between
Korea’s residual legacy of developmentalism and post-IMF neoliberal state
policies. With a careful reconsideration of the sociocultural and politico-
economic backgrounds of national development, I provide an alternative
approach to the currently dominant K-pop or Hallyu literature which does
not pay due attention to those structural issues. To be more specific, with
regard to a lingering influence of patriarchal gender hierarchy and discrimi-
nation, I examine why and how the K-pop industry promotes female idols as
one of the most successful and omnipresent commodities in post-IMF neolib-
eral Korea. Within a complex interplay between developmentalism, tradi-
tional culture/custom, and neoliberal capitalism, this chapter investigates
how female idols in their teens and twenties, who used to be confined to the
domestic sphere, have suddenly occupied a central arena in cultural and
social domains as much as male counterparts.
With a rapid rise of Hallyu, there are growing numbers of scholarly
endeavors that explain how it has been possible from intrinsic perspectives,
attributing the success to the Korean culture industry’s technical and business
innovations. For example, cultural hybridity allows Asian audiences to relate
their sentiment to K-pop’s glossy features (D. Shim 2006; Ryoo 2009); K-
pop’s cultural proximity makes palatable to the region’s burgeoning tastes
(Iwabuchi 2001, 2008; Cho 2011); K-pop’s innovative production value,
such as seamless choreography, catchy songs, fashionable outfits, and spec-
tacular music videos makes it attractive (Park 2013a, 2013b); it was K-pop
industry leaders’ strategic manufacturing and business planning that led to a
global success (Shin and Kim 2013); and, YouTube is a major factor in K-
pop’s global reach (Jung and Shim 2014; Oh and Lee 2013; Oh and Park
2012). In sum, the current literature is celebratory, merely focusing on micro-
scopic analyses, rather than larger sociocultural and politico-economic con-
texts critically, not to mention explaining how a recent surge of female K-
pop idols is possible at all.
While there are a few scholars who have critically examined a political
economy of the culture industry (Jin 2007, 2014, 2016; Kang 2015; H. Lee
2013; D. Shim 2002), their arguments are not successful in explaining how
governmental interventions have been an integral part of Hallyu. For exam-
ple, citing a researcher at the Korea Culture and Tourism Policy Institute,
Doobo Shim (2008) believes it was liberalized global market conditions
rather than the state’s promotional policies to export the cultural commod-
ities that caused Hallyu’s international success. Although I have no objection
to this observation, there is a need for more critical attention to be paid as to
4 Chapter 1

how Korean cultural industries became capable of producing quality enter-

tainment content and promoting female idols in the context of the country’s
neoliberalization and traditional gender norms/expectations. How could the
industry, which was not developed as much, have achieved the state of the art
in its aesthetic, technological, and business features in such a short period of
time, and competed other already advanced foreign products and services in
a jungle-like neoliberal market competition? To that end, I investigate what
roles the state played in the culture industry, while facing challenges from
other competing foreign economies and neoliberal policy mandates from the
IMF’s SAPs.
By examining the political economy of K-pop’s success, I reconsider a
lingering legacy of Korea’s developmentalism in K-pop’s neoliberal, ser-
vice-oriented market rationality. I review Michel Foucault’s (2008) notion of
governmentality as a means to analyze how, by their popularity and ubiquity,
the idols have played an ideological state apparatus (Althusser 1971) that
promotes the population’s subjectification and subjectivation processes to
internalize the neoliberal value system, and in turn, interpellates individuals
to be neoliberal agents. There is an important caveat to be discerned to
correctly understand neoliberal characteristics of the K-pop industry: Com-
paratively, the K-pop idols “voluntarily” become prey of the industry’s ram-
pant profiteering which capitalizes on their competitive spirits, perseverance,
and physical strength by their dream of being successful and famous in the
neoliberal show business, while under Park’s developmental dictatorship,
workers had to endure exploitative, inhumane working conditions to support
themselves and their families by the state’s effective utilization of patriarchal
nationalism in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. More importantly, as a popular mode of
governmentality, the idols, especially female idols, as manufactured cultural
commodities by the industry—meaning that they are highly visible, adored,
and respected by the public—exert an effective, hegemonic agency that
preaches individuals (consumers, audiences, fans, and so on) are capable and
powerful, indicating “it is girls’ generation,” while the “industrial warriors”
who largely paved the way for the Miracle were despised as “Kong-suni” 2
and have still not received due recognition for their contribution to national
development. In sum, I shed critical light on K-pop idols’ political, econom-
ic, cultural, and social implications for post-IMF Korean society in a nexus
between the state’s politico-ideological necessity and the market’s economic
imperatives.
 Popular Culture as a Strategic Field of Neoliberal Intervention 5

LEGACY OF NATIONALIST DEVELOPMENTALISM IN THE

K-POP INDUSTRY

Developmentalism or the developmental state has been an effective model

for the third-world’s rapid industrialization and economic growth since
World War II (Wallerstein 2005), and Korea is one of the most successful
examples of the nation-state being in charge of social integration and eco-
nomic management. The Miracle of the Han River was possible by the state’s
complete control and guidance of the industry based on the nation’s cultural,
economic, geo-political, and social resources in the post-Korean War era.
Designed and implemented by the state, export is an integral part of national
development, and has been systematically managed by the state’s compre-
hensive subsidies given to chaebols, industrial conglomerates like Samsung.
This national development relied on its labor-intensive, export-oriented in-
dustry that was based on a constant, abundant flow of cheap, young, docile
workers since the 60s. In this respect, it is worth quoting John Lie’s (1992)
analysis on how Korea’s developmentalism worked during its active industri-
alization from the 60s to the 80s:

The state cultivated and fostered large conglomerates [and they] were able to
take advantage of state-supported credits and tax incentives, while undertaking
large investment and achieving efficiency and export promotion. Moreover,
the state forced large conglomerates to compete for state patronage, therefore,
the state was able to foster relatively efficient organizations to execute its
economic plans and strategies. (293)

In other words, Korea’s miraculous modernization was a result of the state’s

active control in the market.
Ironically, the Korean government’s aggressive globalization campaign
in the 90s ended up increasing its status as the controller or the orchestrator
of the national economy, which resulted in the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis.
Ironically and ostensibly, in the face of the SAPs mandated by the IMF in
1997, Korea’s authoritarian developmentalism was officially replaced by
neoliberal free market principles. However, it is important to scrutinize
whether or not Korea’s state-led developmentalism actually gave its power to
market-oriented neoliberalism since the market itself still is “state-con-
strained and state-regulated” (Yeung 2000, 139). Rather, neoliberalism is
internally combined with the developmental state to the extent that an emer-
gent combination of neoliberal economic management and authoritarian state
configures (Harvey 2005; Peck and Tickell 2002). Since the market is con-
figured within institutional frameworks and rules by the state as its condition
of possibilities (Foucault 2008), the state is an integral part of the neoliberal
program via a construction of minimal social safety nets, while providing
private sectors with industrial fundamentals like mandatory education, infra-
6 Chapter 1

structure, and legal frameworks that allow easy lay-offs (OECD 2000a;
2000b; World Bank 2002). In this respect, since developmental states always
facilitate competition, free trade, and open-export market practices, Harvey
(2005) indicates neoliberalization “therefore opens up possibilities for devel-
opmental states to enhance their position in international competition by
developing new structures of state intervention” (72).
By the same token, the state has intensively promoted free market ortho-
doxy in the name of economic recovery from the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis
and Korea’s subjection to the neoliberal SAPs by the IMF. Actually, not
having been able to cope with ever-escalating competition in the labor-
intensive manufacturing industry in which Third World countries offer the
least expensive wage, most malleable labor policies, and other subsidies, the
Korean government initiated its strategic promotion of the neoliberal culture
industry since the Kim Young-sam administration (1993–1998). Since Presi-
dent Kim Dae-Jung’s administration (1998–2003), the state has actively im-
plemented an industrial model of cultural policy, which highlighted the eco-
nomic potential and value of culture as an important source of national
wealth. As a benchmark for dictator-President Park’s cultural policy to facili-
tate the illicit government’s industrialization projects in the 60s and 70s, the
Kim administration enforced the “five-year plan for the development of cul-
tural industries [in 1999], the vision 21 for cultural industries [in 2000] and
the vision 21 for cultural industries in a digital society” in 2001 (Yim 2002,
41). In this respect, the state has been in charge of investing in cultural
content, creating a new marketplace, promoting creative content develop-
ment, and marketing the culture industry overseas (Choi 2013). However, as
a means to meet challenges from global neoliberal capitalism while provid-
ing an infrastructure for market innovation and development, the state trans-
formed itself from a direct mobilizer or controller of the industry to a new,
“indirect” coordinator that channels particular economic sectors to a new one
(H. Cho 2000). In other words, updated with the neoliberal rhetoric of market
autonomy, the state renovated its relationship with the culture industry by
providing indirect funding, such as establishing educational institutions,
holding events for local talents to debut, providing governmental venues to
promote the culture industry domestically and globally, and proving tax ben-
efits. Though the state government and the market have different sets of
interests and goals based on their own autonomy and relationships, both have
closely intertwined to utilize and exchange cultural, material, and symbolic
resources to develop and maintain the national economy (Evans 1995).
Therefore, the post-IMF Korean government should be regarded as the
“‘neo-statist’ developmental regime” that maintains initiatives and intervenes
in market coordination and implements market-friendly policies and regula-
tions (Hart-Landsberg and Burkett 2001, 421; Kalinowski 2008).
 Popular Culture as a Strategic Field of Neoliberal Intervention 7

To be more specific, the right-wing, conservative administrations of Lee

Myung-bak (2008–2013) and Park Geun-hye (2013–2017) exponentially ex-
panded developmentalist approaches to the culture industry by increasing
governmental budgets, reconfiguring governmental agencies and setting
agendas. Specifically, the Contents Industry Promotion Law has strategically
funded overseas promotion of K-pop including in the North America and
Europe (Jin 2014). As a major governmental body, the Ministry of Culture,
Sports, and Tourism (MCST 2011) has taken a charge of constructing Hallyu
as the nation’s strategic, new economic growth engine. MCST implements
the

promotion of the Cultural Content industry through cooperation among

government agencies by operating the Cultural Content Industry Promotion
Committee in the Office of the Prime Minister; and establishment of a stable
financial environment by creating a fund for the production of global media
products . . . [and] development of creative professionals through planning and
marketing, project-linked training programs, and exchanging students with
renowned educational institutes in other countries. (17)

In this context, the state revenue for its culture industry has steadily risen
from 5,726 billion Korean Won in 2005 to 6,900 in 2010, which is equivalent
to 6.2 percent of GDP. Specifically, based on the Framework Act on Cultural
Industry Promotion, the Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA) was es-
tablished on May 7, 2009, in order to aggressively develop and promote
profitable cultural commodities in the global market. As a collective of vari-
ous state institutions and agencies like the Korea Broadcasting Institute, Ko-
rea Culture and Content Agency, Korea Game Industry Agency, Cultural
Contents Center, and Digital Contents Business Group of Korea IT Industry
Promotion Agency, KOCCA commands a comprehensive plan from devel-
oping human resources to supporting a “development of specialized culture
technologies from design to production, the commercialization of contents,
and the promotion of various overseas expansion projects to develop the
content industry into an export industry” (KOCCA n.d.). The Content Indus-
try Promotion Act of 2010 deploys more assertive administrative support to
emphasize monetary benefits of cultural “content” enterprises like online
game development. Furthermore, the government has provided the industry
with financial supports such as tax breaks and lending loans (Ministry of
Strategy and Finance 2012). Those governmental measures indicate how
much K-pop’s recent success has benefited from a continuity of Korea’s
decades-long developmentalism.
The state has actively promoted Hallyu as an export item to keep its
national economy afloat. Institutionally, the Hallyu Culture Promotion Or-
ganization and the Korea Foundation for International Culture Exchange
(KOFICE) were founded to further facilitate overseas promotions and ex-
8 Chapter 1

ports of Hallyu products in 2012. Practically, the Korean Wave Index, creat-
ed by the MCST in 2010, quantifies how Korean culture has been consumed
and favored by different foreign countries so that the industry can modify
export portfolios and strategies to cater to each country’s selling points and
perspectives. In turn, with theses state initiatives, in 2011, K-pop achieved a
revenue of $3.4 billion, and its export reached $180 million, a 112 percent
increase compared to 2010, with almost 80 percent annual growth since 2007
(Naidu-Ghelani 2012). Establishing the Priority Sectors criterion to support
new economic growth engine sectors, the Export-Import Bank of Korea an-
nounced it would provide loans and credit guarantees worth $917 million to
help spread K-pop and other Hallyu-related products (Na 2013). For exam-
ple, a sizeable part of the government’s fund for the “2013 Popular Music
Production Support Project,” designed originally to assist independent musi-
cians for promoting diversity, went to several K-pop idols such as Girls’ Day
and Hyorin of Sistar, who have been manufactured and marketed by major
K-pop industry leaders (MoneyToday 2014). The KOCCA, the fund adminis-
trator, maintains that the decision was necessary in order to facilitate an
overseas promotion of K-pop, since Korea’s economy became heavily de-
pendent on export after the 1997 IMF crisis (Crotty and Lee 2006). Amongst
17 fund recipients, 7 went to major K-pop management companies, claiming
approximately $500,000 from $888,000, and negating the raison d’état of the
governmental policy. In this respect, contrary to Lisa Lewis’s (1990) argu-
ment that a poor economy threatens the prosperity of the music industry,
posing “dim prospects for female musicians” (69), the beginning and success
of K-pop female idols coincided with Korea’s neoliberal developmentalism
during its worst economic recession.
More than just an export item, K-pop became a comprehensive marketing
tool to help raise overseas market recognition of Korean brands. In order to
conflate K-pop’s global popularity with Korean manufactured goods’ qual-
ity, the Korea Trade Promotion Agency with another governmental agency,
the Korea Trade Insurance Corporation, signed a memorandum of under-
standing to assist small companies with less than an annual export revenue of
$50,000 by giving “free marketing and financial consulting to the companies,
as well as insurance discounts” (J. Kim 2014, n.p.).
Furthermore, K-pop has been deployed as an item of destination tourism
in Korea. Through state-private partnership, or state-corporate nexus, with
uses of various governmental venues, the state has hosted several internation-
al K-pop events like the Annual K-Pop World Festival. Though the festival is
planned and organized by multiple government bodies, such as the MCST,
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the KOFICE, and the Presidential
Council on Nation Branding, the media publicize it, conglomerates like Sam-
sung fund and engage in PR, and the municipal governments recruit tourists
for the event. In this regard, K-pop has been a center of strategic relations
 Popular Culture as a Strategic Field of Neoliberal Intervention 9

between the state, the society, and the market while the neoliberal service
industry has become a major field of economic growth in post-IMF Korea.
Thus, emphasizing the role of intellectual property and creativity and reduc-
ing any cost of production and logistics, K-pop is a new economic model
which procures a faster, higher profit margin than the traditional manufactur-
ing industry, like automobiles, as a “distinct spatiotemporal configuration” of
the post-IMF Korean economy: “The sharper the differentiation between
these two temporalities grows (with dematerialization/digitalization), the
more abundant the business opportunities become” (Sassen 2001, 268).
As a reminiscence of authoritarian business practices during the active
developmental era, the management and production style of the K-pop indus-
try is almost identical to that of the manufacturing industry, which led to
export-oriented national development. It is characterized by the “Fordist re-
gime of accumulation” which operates through a “hierarchical bureaucratic
form of work organization, characterized by a centralized management; and
vertical integration, driven by a desire to achieve cost efficiency in produc-
tion and exchange” (Gibson and Kong 2005, 544). Likewise, dominated by a
few giant talent agencies, SM entertainment, JYP Entertainment, and YG
Entertainment, the K-pop industry utilizes an economy of scale, based on
vertical integration of music production and promotion and its subsequent
outcome of market concentration. Not only fully utilizing a vast pool of
audition participants and trainees to formulate idol groups, but also selective-
ly deploying each group member separately according to his/her assigned
and manufactured image in various commercial media events (Lie 2012; H.
Shin 2009), the K-pop industry has rendered highly homogenized, predict-
able music commodities, female idols, whose only aim is to make viable
financial profits.
Most distinctively, Gil-sung Park’s (2013b) model of K-pop production,
“globalization-localization-globalization” which 1) outsources a creation of
songs and choreography by foreign artists, 2) trains K-pop performers by
local personnel, and 3) distributes its products to foreign markets, is the exact
same mechanism the export-driven manufacture industry had relied on. Ko-
rea’s traditional developmentalism rested on 1) foreign raw resources, tech-
nologies, and machineries that were processed by 2) Korean local workers,
and 3) foreign consumer markets to sell its processed commodities. “Connect
and develop” as K-pop’s mechanism of manufacturing creativity, in which
“the internal process of innovation or creativity is often bypassed in favor of
borrowing, buying, or outsourcing creativity and innovation to external com-
munities” (20), is a K-pop version of a neoliberal manufacturing business
model that relies on Korea’s local labor market which provides a “stable of
top performers at a relatively cheaper cost” (25). Then, the matter of original-
ity and creativity is completely equivalent to that of financial capability to
buy a song from overseas practitioners, leaving domestic artists mere perfor-
10 Chapter 1

mative technicians. The K-pop industry has imported foreign resources and
then reverse engineered them until local corporations can come up with
acceptable variants to sell to the market (L. Kim 1993). In others words, the
K-pop industry has followed in the footsteps of Korea’s labor-intensive,
export-oriented manufacturing industry where unwed, female workers con-
stituted the vast majority of workforces (Monk-Turner and Turner 2001). In
this respect, while Timothy J. Dowd, Kathleen Liddle, and Maureen Blyler
(2005) indicate American female musicians benefit decentralized production
activities through musical diversity, K-pop female idols are a result of the
oligopolistic K-pop industry that utilizes a centralized production system to
produce and market seemingly diversified, yet homogenized musicians. Un-
like Motown girl groups benefitted from an expansion of decentralized pro-
duction in the U.S., the success of K-pop female idols has been possible by
the K-pop industry’s highly concentrated production practices.
The nature of K-pop’s emergent character is found from how Korea’s
industrial demands have shifted from a manual sweatshop workforce to neo-
liberal service and affective labor. In other words, by the K-pop industry’s
aggressive replication of the traditional business strategies used by Korea’s
labor-intensive manufacture conglomerates that ushered in the Miracle, K-
pop female idols stemmed from the industry’s response to the nation’s shift-
ing market conditions wrought by the IMF crisis. Like its predecessors
decades ago, the contemporary K-pop industry takes advantage of a hege-
monic model that produces quickly profitable, homogenized, disposable
commodities from a highly concentrated, hierarchal production system
which integrates in-house procedures of artist recruiting, training, image-
making, composing, management, contracting, and album production. In this
respect, the idols severely lack any creative autonomy or authenticity, to the
extent that they “execute what has been conceived for them; they wear what
they are told to wear; they sing what they are told to sing; and they move and
behave as they are told to move and behave” (Lie 2015, 141). In other words,
as much as Korea’s manufacturing industry giants achieved their fortune by
exploiting cheap, docile, and abundant workers from the 60s to 80s, the K-
pop industry capitalizes on the competitive spirits, perseverance, and physi-
cal strength of young trainees and idols who dream of being successful and
famous.
In sum, the Korean government has subsumed culture as a mere instru-
ment for economic profit, and in turn, strengthened the country’s internation-
al competitiveness (Jin 2006; Nam 2013). Thus, contrary to its rhetoric,
neoliberalism works best in a strong regulatory state, especially in Korea’s
dirigiste mode of state-led capitalist development.
 Popular Culture as a Strategic Field of Neoliberal Intervention 11

K-POP: STRATEGIC INNOVATION FOR NEOLIBERAL

DEVELOPMENT

Considering that music is a product of larger structural conditions (Cloonan

1999; Negus 1999), it is important to acknowledge that K-pop was incepted
in the middle of a state-led aggressive globalization frenzy (hasty member-
ship attainment of OECD in 1996). In turn, its global popularity coincided
with the government’s forceful neoliberal efforts to expand its economic
territories by ratifying multiple Free Trade Agreements (FTAs), especially
with the U.S., in 2007. As an allegory of the Korean economy that relies on
export for its economic, political, and social development and maintenance,
K-pop is mainly produced and/or played by Koreans for the purpose of
product exportation in the post-IMF Korean economy (Oh and Park 2012; G.
Park 2013b). Ever since, branded as a trendy and fashionable benchmark, or
a spin-off from Western music—to be more specific, American popular mu-
sic with urban African American influence—K-pop becomes an umbrella
category that overwhelms other existing genres of Korean popular music. In
this regard, Korean popular music’s diversity, in terms of content, form, and
production, has decreased as three major K-pop management companies, SM
Entertainment, JYP Entertainment, and YG Entertainment, dominate the
market, which goes against the rhetoric of neoliberalism that canonizes free
choice and unlimited competition.
The industrialization of culture and a commercialization of popular music
have been a tenet of neoliberal knowledge/information-based economy:
Likewise, K-pop was incepted as a part of Korea’s neoliberal strategies for
economic development. Given the fact that cultural commodification has
existed since the Renaissance (Cowen 1998), what is special in the surge of
K-pop comes from the state’s integral role in intensifying its scope and
power in the name of post-IMF national competitiveness and economic de-
velopment. In the K-pop industry, it has intensified to the extent that a formal
boundary between culture and economics and art and commerce became
obscure, if not obsolete (Hesmondhalgh and Pratt 2005), and culture became
a mere marketing strategy to promote the state and to host foreign capital
(Gibson and Kong 2005). In this respect, K-pop is regarded as a culture
technology (CT) for revitalizing Korea’s postindustrial, service-oriented neo-
liberal economy along with the five strategic technologies such as informa-
tion and communication technologies (ICTs), bio-technology, nano-technol-
ogy, and environmental technology (Shin 2009). In this respect, Soo-man
Lee, CEO of SM Entertainment, is boastful of his CT manual that mandates
components

necessary to popularize K-pop artists in different Asian countries . . . [like]

what chord progressions to use in what country; the precise color of eyeshad-
12 Chapter 1

ow a performer should wear in a particular country; the exact hand gestures he

or she should make; and the camera angles to be used in the videos. (Seabrook
2012, n.p.)

Actually, K-pop contributes to raising the confidence of Korea’s neoliberal

service industries such as private dance and singing academies, tourist-driven
shopping malls with K-pop fashion items, cultural content production, and an
increasing exportation of consumer products that the idols endorse or use (P.
Kim 2011; Mahr 2012). The Korean government’s strategic support and
promotion of ICTs and the culture industry is a distinctive case in point.
Practically, ICTs are not only a major arsenal for speculative financial trans-
actions but also a basis for commodification of the cultural.
Among Hallyu items, K-pop is the most strategic cultural commodity,
developed through rigorous market research and experiments (Shin and Kim
2013). K-pop idols require high initial investment, costing about $5,000 per a
trainee a month with multiple years of training in foreign languages, dance,
singing, and acting (KpopStarz 2013). For example, it cost a total of $2.6
million to scout, train, and debut a member of SNSD (Chan 2012). As a
means to squeeze profit margins over their initial investment, the K-pop
industry exploits minors’ affective labor while beginning the star manufac-
turing process as early as 5 years old and rigorously training for up to 7 years
under “slave contracts” which last up to 17 years (Williamson 2011). In this
regard, as opposed to their glittering stage persona, K-pop idols in general
are hyper-exploited workers who have been disciplined in military camp-like
training facilities “without any sustained rest or relaxation, in a state of
semipermanent sleep deprivation . . . [occasionally resulting in] physical
injury and illness, not to mention mental stress” (Lie 2015, 126).
Guy Debord’s (1994) society of spectacle captures how K-pop has con-
tributed to strategic innovations for neoliberal development, characterized by
the production and consumption of images, staged media events, and consu-
merism. Via K-pop’s glossy, sexualized spectacles, everyday experiences are
mediated and conditioned to the extent that the spectacle constitutes social
relationships based on and mediated by images, and it is integral to consu-
merist imperatives of market capitalism. Textually, equipped with highly
crafted visuals as a manifestation of ideal beauty and propriety (S. Lee 2012),
K-pop is filled with color, play, camaraderie, and love, which forces the
audience to focus on a positive, rosy future of society. In this respect, consid-
ering that the capitalist economy is dependent upon a seamless continuation
of consumption, K-pop idols are a cultural linchpin that teaches and provides
cues to utilize commodities as a means of self-transformation into someone
better like the idols, mobilizing individuals to be a steady force of neoliberal
consumerism, while invoking an asocial fantasy of evading established rules
and romanticism of narcissistic pleasure as a cultural amnesia. Considering
 Popular Culture as a Strategic Field of Neoliberal Intervention 13

how women, who used to be confined to the domestic sphere, have been
summoned to be active, conspicuous consumers in today’s neoliberal econo-
my (Kendall 2002; T. Kim 2003; Nelson 2000), K-pop female idols are not
only explicit commodity consumers themselves but more importantly inter-
pellate female audiences to be boastful consumers effectively. Thus, K-pop’s
relentless repetition of fantasy enforces a feedback loop upon its audiences
that entraps them in the eternal return of always wanting more. Thus, the
overwhelmingly visual nature of K-pop is an example of Michael Wolf’s
(2004) “entertainment economy,” which transforms the Korean soundscape
into a subcategory of the neoliberal service economy.

EMERGENCE OF K-POP FEMALE IDOLS: THE POSTER-

CHILDREN OF THE NEOLIBERAL CULTURE INDUSTRY

According to statistics on Korea’s biggest music chart, Melon, between 2005

and 2013, a total of 244 different K-pop idol groups have come and gone,
(130 all-boy groups, 103 all-girl ones, and 11 coed ones). In 2013 alone,
there were 30 new idol groups, and it is difficult to find solo musicians on the
chart, where 7 to 8 spots out of 10 were taken by idols for last 5 years. With
SNSD and Wonder Girls debuting in 2007 when K-pop became increasingly
Americanized (Lie 2015), the number of all-girl idol groups has been grow-
ing, by at least 10 new groups per year (KpopStarz 2013). These figures do
not include those not ranked on the chart but working behind the scenes, and
the number would be even higher if we consider the total number of wan-
nabes and trainees. According to a recent study (Chang 2018), there are
about a million employees in more than 1,000 talent agencies in the industry.
In sum, K-pop has become one of the most dominant fields of development
and growth in Korea.
An increasing proliferation of K-pop idols discloses how contemporary
Korea is conditioned and runs on a limited number of sociocultural path-
ways, ruling out anything not considered profitable or fashionable. The phe-
nomenon symbolically represents a neoliberal replacement of labor-intensive
industry by a service one that is feminized in order to capitalize on the
gendered-nature of production and consumption in post-IMF Korea (Gonick
2006). In this respect, the first K-pop female idol group, SM Entertainment’s
S.E.S., marked the beginning of the systematic management of female bodies
and their imagery in 1997. This came as an effort to shore up the Korean
culture industry and market to overseas audiences, since the local economy
was devastated by the 1997 Asian Financial crisis. In turn, this strategy is
similar to the way in which the Korean popular music industry promoted
female dancers and musicians at various clubs for U.S. soldiers in the post-
14 Chapter 1

Korean War era for economic as well as cultural endeavors (Kim and Shin
2010).
Deploying various styles and feminine images from innocent and cute to
sexy and mature, S.E.S. made an earnest effort to break into the Japanese
market, but was not favored as much as in Korea. Afterwards, BoA, another
of SM Entertainment’s female idols, saw success with her first Japanese
album, Listen to My Heart, which was first ranked in Japan’s Oricon Daily
Chart and Oricon Weekly Chart in 2002. By teaming up with a major Japa-
nese music label, Avex, BoA was successful in marketing and promoting her
Japanese albums, such as Listen to My Heart (1.3 million copies sold in
2002), Valenti (1.3 million in 2003), and No. 1, (1.4 million in 2004). This
success prompted the Korean Culture and Information Service (KOCIS
2011), a government agency, to regard K-pop as a strong strategic item for
export businesses, accounting for $180 million in profit.
As the most sought after, and globally well-known K-pop female group to
date, SNSD debuted as a group of nine girls chosen by SM Entertainment in
2007, an event that coincided with the initiation of negotiation of the FTA
between Korea and the United States (KOR-US FTA). As a product of years
of conditioning during rigorous traineeship periods of five to seven years, the
girls each have their own “talent” and attractive appearance, whether that is
her face, body, or image: With SM Entertainment’s complete direction,
everything from the girls’ outfits, hairstyles, makeup, dance moves, gestures,
and romantic relationships are completely controlled to gain the audience’s
favor. The phenomenal success of their song, “Gee,” with its addictive,
catchy hooks and fast beats decorated by amicable, easy-to-follow “crab
dance” choreography, brought the group to international popularity in Janu-
ary 2009, and subsequently motivated SM Entertainment to aggressively
deploy SNSD to market to overseas audiences. As used in fishing, the
“hook” in K-pop is used to catch or trap audiences’ audiovisual sensibilities.
As a psychological as well as commercial tool that mesmerizes individuals’
attention and mind by a captivating repetition of catchy sing-along phrases
and beats that creates their affective responses, the hook in K-pop exerts an
ideological function that “furthers the dramatic action, or defines a person or
place” (Kasha and Hirschhorn 1979, 29). The hook in popular music helps
formulate popular memory, and subsequently consciousness (Shepherd
2003), by its addictiveness once it sticks to audiences’ ears, eyes, and minds.
Likewise, the song topped all of Korea’s major music charts within two days,
and the music video gathered one million views on YouTube in less than a
day. SNSD followed up with more award-winning, instant hits with catchy,
easy-to-follow tunes, rhythms, and dance moves.
SNSD assumed a particularly important role that reinstated K-pop female
idols as the central figures of Korean popular culture after more than five
years of male idols’ dominance in the music industry (2002–2007). More-
 Popular Culture as a Strategic Field of Neoliberal Intervention 15

over, with SNSD’s transnational popularity, K-pop became a priority cultural

commodity to export to Asian countries after Korean TV drama and films,
which Jin (2014) coins Hallyu 2.0. In this respect, Kosin and Yi (2015)
maintain SNSD is the most important contributor to reviving Hallyu with the
“perfect storm for fans to become addicted” to its appealing physicality,
perfectly synchronized group dancing, and flawless style (n.p.). Ever since
January 2009 with its single “Gee” as the year’s best-selling single of 2009 in
Korea, SNSD has become a synonym for the canonical K-pop female idol,
and female power and success. SNSD’s subsequent single, which was re-
leased in June 2009, “Genie: Tell Me Your Wish” became another hit in
many Asian countries as well as Korea, and led to the group’s first concert
tour in China, Taiwan, and Japan. As an official debut song in Japan, SNSD
released a Japanese version of “Genie: Tell Me Your Wish” in September
2010, and later a Japanese version of “Gee” in October 2010. Mainly with
these two successful singles, SNSD was coronated as the “Idol of the Na-
tion,” after winning the title of “Artist of the Year,” at both the 2009 and the
2010 Seoul Music Awards consecutively. As an index of its influence, SNSD
has continuously ranked high in various public opinion polls: The group
received the Musician of the Year award for three years in a row from 2009
to 2011, and ranked in second place in 2012, fifth place in 2013, second place
in 2014, and third place in 2015 (Gallup Korea 2015). The idol group re-
claimed the number one spot in Forbes Korea’s 2014 Power Celebrity 40
after winning the position in 2011 and 2012, and second place in 2010 and
2013 (Benjamin 2014). SNSD was selected as one of the five acts that best
represent K-pop in a poll administered by the Korea Creative Content Agen-
cy (Jackson 2015).
K-pop idols are a media industry unto themselves: They are not just
singers, but celebrities, who act, endorse, model, and advertise. Likewise,
SNSD’s appearances in various media platforms made them omnipresent
media figures who demonstrated global popularity and appeal by appearing
in multiple commercial endorsements in Asia. In turn SNSD’s success is
scrutinized in terms of effective Korean business models like Samsung and
Hyundai. As a main promotion strategy, SNSD has appeared on the coun-
try’s major variety TV shows like Infinite Challenge to promote new songs
or album releases, and to showcase each member’s personality, character,
interest, and so on. Individual members also have their own media busi-
nesses; for example, Tae-Yeon is a radio music show DJ, Yoon-Ah is a well-
known drama actress, and Jessica and Tiffany are musical performers. Fur-
thermore, as a total promotion operation, SNSD has hosted its own reality
TV shows, such as Girls Go to School, Right Now: It’s Girls’ Generation,
Factory Girl, Girls Generation’ and the Dangerous Boys, and SNSD behind
the Story. There is a double feedback loop between SNSD’s initial media
exposure as performers and the publicity the group amasses from advertise-
16 Chapter 1

ments, which again feeds positively into their celebrity status. From this
perspective, K-pop idols are treated as an immediate cash-cow, deployed in
multiple commercial activities, such as television dramas, movies, and prod-
uct endorsements, rather than just relying on the plummeting profit margins
of album sales. SNSD has successfully publicized itself as a singular neolib-
eral cultural commodity, (re) defining what it means to be a successful K-pop
idol.
As a manifestation of the nexus between the state and the industry, SNSD
has been deployed in the state’s various official events and ceremonies as the
nation’s representative cultural icon. For example, Korea Tourism Organiza-
tion (KTO), a governmental agency that promotes Korea’s tourism overseas,
hypes SNSD as an exemplary of Korea’s popular culture that sets a “global
standard for girl idol groups” (n.d., n.p.). In November 2010, the state hosted
the 2010 G20 Seoul Summit, an international forum where twenty major
world economies’ governments and central banks gathered to discuss the
global financial system and the world economy. SNSD was extensively mo-
bilized as a part of the state’s PR practices, including being a member of the
G20 Star Supporters and Talking to the G20 Leaders (Chun 2010). More
extensively, SNSD assumed numerous endorsement duties for the state like
Ambassador for Gangnam District Office in 2012, Honorary Ambassadors
for 2010–2012 Visit Korea in 2011, Ambassador for Incheon Airport Cus-
toms in 2010, Ambassador for the Incheon World Ceramics Festival in 2009,
and Volunteer Ambassador for the Seoul City Government in 2007, to name
a few. In turn, as a token of the state’s appreciation and recognition, SNSD is
the only K-pop group that received the Prime Minister’s Award at the 2011
Korean Popular Culture and Arts Awards, organized by the Korea Creative
Content Agency (KOCCA), a state government agency, for its successful
overseas publicity and popularity as a means of PR practice for Korea. With
all of these accolades, the Korea Post officially published and sold the SNSD
postage stamps in August 2012 (Kang 2012).
SNSD’s 2012 American debut has been used as a compelling rationale for
the state’s aggressive neoliberalization initiative, which was culminated with
Korean President Lee Myung-Bak’s visit to the White House to nudge Presi-
dent Obama to sign the KOR-US FTA. SNSD’s strategic debut on CBS’s
Late Show with David Letterman on January 31 and ABC’s Live With Kelly
on February 1 played a significant role in distracting the public’s attention
away from serious issues with the KOR-US FTA. Claiming that Koreans
should be more competitive and aggressive in the global marketplace, the
mainstream Korean media celebrated that SNSD explored and “conquered” a
new, uncharted marketplace that would bring Korea economic fortunes.
Thus, more than a global cultural commodity, the group became an Althus-
serian ideological apparatus to justify and perpetuate the myth of competition
as the sole source of international success to rebut the dangers of the FTA.
 Popular Culture as a Strategic Field of Neoliberal Intervention 17

Therefore, SNSD is a major allegory of neoliberal Korea where its econo-

my, politics, cultural forms, modes of everyday experiences, and social rela-
tions are increasingly reconfigured by various activities of K-pop idols. With
fast beats, addictive hooks, and salient rhythms that do not allow audiences
to contemplate, K-pop is an episteme of neoliberalism, which overwhelms
people not just by its neck-breaking speed of transforming society into a
grand marketplace but, more importantly, with its simple ideological pitch
that instigates people’s desire to be rich, popular, and successful like the
idols. In other words, just as neoliberalism mesmerizes people with an un-
realistic valorization of market logic, K-pop has captivated audiences by
seamlessness, breathtaking choreography, and appealing, sexy appearances
of K-pop performers.

K-POP AS NEOLIBERAL SOCIAL POLICY

As discussed above, neoliberalism is far from a retreat of central govern-

ments; rather it is a market-driven state reform in order to guarantee a maxi-
mum functionality of market principles and a commodification of social life
at large (Moran 2003). To achieve a better neoliberal reconfiguration, neolib-
eral social policy seeks to fend off any possible anticompetitive dimensions,
by forcing individuals to confront and endure socioeconomic risks personal-
ly, as opposed to traditional soical policy that aims to compensate, nullify, or
absorb possible negative effects of economic liberalization.
Likewise, K-pop can be recognized in Andy Pratt’s (2005) notion of
neoliberal social policy: As a popular form of social inclusion based upon the
individual’s desire to be successful and rich within the existing global econo-
my structure, K-pop contains socially dissatisfied, alienated, yet musically
aspiring youths, encouraging them to stick with the neoliberal mantra of self-
endurance, self-discipline, and self-development as the key factors for suc-
cess. By preaching a possibility of social mobility based on their musical
talent rather than conventional means such as studying, the post-IMF neolib-
eral society encloses at-risk individuals, who do not pursue education as a
main means of socioeconomic mobility, and keeps them in the established
system by a dream of being successful in the neoliberal culture industry. In
this respect, John Lie (2015) indicates that “K-pop stardom has become [the]
South Korean dream, a beckoning and lucrative opportunity for young, non-
university-bound South Koreans” where there are extremely few well-paying
stable job opportunities for them (132). For example, as one of the most
celebrated and promoted stories of unconventional success by K-pop, con-
tenders of K-pop audition programs have become a staple of the music indus-
try’s propaganda that instigate the public’s desire of being successful and
famous. The dramatic success story of Huh Gak, who won first place on a
18 Chapter 1

popular K-pop audition program, MNet’s Superstar K2 on October 22, 2010,

was permeated to preach a neoliberal mantra that individuals have to be
persistent and hopeful even in the devastated socioeconomic conditions of
post-IMF Korean society. Despite being uneducated, underemployed, and
unappreciated, Huh Gak, who dropped out of middle school due to family
issues and financial difficulties, became an icon of a windmill success in the
K-pop industry, and in turn encouraged individuals to keep motivated and
resilient, enduring all the economic and social inequalities and injustices. A
constant flow of aspiring contenders to K-pop themed audience programs
along with an army of K-pop idol wannabes and trainees then form a large
pool of potential talents for the culture industry, which (re)produces a con-
centrated and hierarchal structure of Korea’s previous manufacturing indus-
try conglomerates, thus, channeling young people’s social energy to the com-
petitive market economy, and in turn achieving social inclusion goals (Scott
2011).

K-POP IDOLS: GOVERNMENTALITY AND NEOLIBERAL REGIME

OF TRUTH AND LIFE

Neoliberalism is an implementation of market-oriented techniques of govern-

ment in the realm of the state and the personal, and in turn, constructs neolib-
eral subjects who are active, responsible, competitive, and self-interested. In
this active formation of subjectivity, a neoliberal agent is an “entrepreneur of
himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own produc-
er, being for himself the source of his own earnings,” in contrast to the
classical liberal person of utilitarian exchange based upon his/her needs
(Foucault 2008, 226). To explain an active personification dynamics, Michel
Foucault (2008) uses a notion of “human capital” as a neoliberal regime of
truth and life that conditions individuals’ behavioral rules and codes to pur-
sue any activity, which increases their capacity to achieve their goals, create
self-interest, and engage in competition. Thus, neoliberalism affects itself as
a form of biopolitics that (re)produces neoliberal subjectivity, and transforms
society into a massive market (Foucault 2008; Hardt and Negri 1994). Privat-
ization and deregulation are key tenets of neoliberal political strategy in order
to govern individuals through a discursive invention of self-interest, invest-
ment, and competition in all social spheres (Hardt and Negri 2001, 2004).
Thus, neoliberalism should be regarded not only as the political economy of
marketization in society, but also, more importantly, as a biopolitical subjec-
tification of individuals (Foucault 1995) in an effort to internalize particular
forms of responsibility produced by market imperatives (Nealon 2008).
Neoliberal governmentality simultaneously works in a macrostructural
manner through state policies and in a micro-technological level through
 Popular Culture as a Strategic Field of Neoliberal Intervention 19

individuals governing themselves by naturalizing neoliberal rationalities as

the basis for their conduct (Binkley 2007; Lemke 2001; Rose et al. 2006). In
this regard, the notion of governmentality provides a better heuristic optic to
the K-pop phenomenon, by explaining the music genre as a cultural and
ideological apparatus that helps condition and govern individuals’ thought
and behavior in a nexus between power relations and subjectification pro-
cesses. As a synecdoche or an ethos (Barry et al. 1996) of neoliberal Korea
that implies particular mentalities and governing manners, which are realized
and practiced in individuals’ concrete thoughts, feelings, behaviors, habits,
and perceptions, I argue K-pop idols are a form of everyday pedagogy that
tells people how to understand, articulate, and argue on social values and
practices through specific lexicons and principles of neoliberalism. As such, I
examine how K-pop helps implement the government of others (subjectifica-
tion: “how one is objectified as a subject through the exercise of power/
knowledge”), normalization of the neoliberal value system, and the govern-
ment of one’s self (subjectivation as a “relation of the person to him/herself”)
(Rosenberg and Milchman 2010, 66). In this respect, like Binkley (2006), I
argue that the recent popularity of K-pop has acted as a micro-mechanism for
individuals to naturalize neoliberal governmentality and become active, vol-
untary agents of neoliberalism.
In tandem with the state’s supports, the K-pop industry has implemented
its private, economic goals as a public agenda of national development, exer-
cising Foucauldian biopolitics which (re)produce and proliferate neoliberal
subjects. A concept of discipline, especially docility-utility (Foucault 1995)
is permeated in K-pop idols who have been conditioned through years of
training, and audiences who internalize and glorify their favorite K-pop stars.
This process functions as a method of controlling and subordinating the
idols’ individuality and characters to the industry’s entrepreneurial goals and
principles on the one hand, and moreover, permeates and intensifies a neolib-
eral government of self-managers in the fabric of individuals’ daily lives on
the other (Nam 2016). Idols, especially female idols, are under an agency’s
airtight surveillance to the extent that they are forced to go on an extreme
diet, surrender any use of personal communication devices, and even endure
corporal punishment in a dormitory training center. As a means to control
and maintain an imaginary availability for a romantic relationship to the
public, female idols are strictly prohibited from having a romantic relation-
ship. Actually, through an extraordinarily long trainee period, female idols
have internalized and reinforced a subordinate self-image that is contingent
upon the male gaze and desire as witnessed by the rampant, explicit sexual-
ization of female idols. Just as the Korean state mobilized and deployed
young, docile female workers into the bottom of the hierarchy of capital
accumulation during its rapid industrial period (H. Kim 2001), from audition
to training to debut, K-pop female idols are conditioned as an obedient,
20 Chapter 1

disciplined, and sexualized labor force, directly manufactured by male corpo-

rate elites in the K-pop industry. Especially since there are abundant idol
wannabes, trainees, and idols voluntarily or involuntarily accept harsh work-
ing conditions as a precondition for them to be successful in the industry. K-
pop management agencies enjoy picking candidates who are most obedient.
Going through these intense idol-manufacturing processes in the K-pop in-
dustry, the idols actively internalize, embody, and realize what the (male)
industry leaders ask and want them to do.
Furthermore, as a means to perpetuate neoliberal governmentality in the
public, the K-pop industry broadcasts seemingly raw video footage that
shows how the idols undergo military boot camp style training procedures,
and it plays an important role in normalizing the brutal conditions of compe-
tition, self-development, multitasking, and flexibility as a general social en-
vironment that fans themselves have to overcome. In turn, the industry helps
create docile social subjects who endure political and economic instabilities
and risks. In this respect, as a mundane, popular mechanism to penetrate a
neoliberal self-government of the populace, reality TV shows, such as Real
Wonder Girls, 2NE1 TV, and Big Bang TV, provides an experimental, train-
ing ground for the government of the neoliberal enterprising self (Ouellette
and Hay 2008). The nationwide popularity of K-pop audition TV programs
such as Super Star K, K-pop Star, Great Birth, and Korea’s Got Talent, and
the surge in people’s applications for the programs, indicates how the neolib-
eral governmentality of competition and success is widespread in Korea,
seeing that there were cumulatively over two million applicants for Super
Star K, season four (August 17–November 23, 2012). In this respect, K-pop
idols, who are important role models for fans, are an effective tool for condi-
tioning thoughts and behaviors, producing autoregulated or autocorrecting
selves who are free yet fulfill neoliberal ideals of rational and self-respon-
sible individuals, competitive and flexible workers, and self-calculating con-
sumers.
As neoliberalism has marketized what was thought to be unmarketable to
the extent that their “private life—the lack of it, to be precise—[becomes]
part of the commodity” (Kang 2015, 60), K-pop female idols are successful
in intensively expanding economic profiteering into the previously unex-
plored or underexplored manipulation of female sexualities by images of
girlish cuteness, innocence, and delicate sexuality. As such, SNSD’s massive
fan base includes sam-chon fans. These middle-aged male fans indicate how
the group has deftly exploited Korea’s gendered virtue of aegyo, which is a
complex quality of ideal female coquettishness combined with decency, hu-
mor, submissive sexuality, and affective readiness for male counterparts.
Although aegyo has been considered and practiced by Korean women to
serve male counterparts for ages, it has been confined to private, domestic
relationships between couples. Moreover, there was not a case of systematic
 Popular Culture as a Strategic Field of Neoliberal Intervention 21

mass production, marketing, and distribution of aegyo as an affective com-

modity prior to K-pop female idols like SNSD.
Just as the 1996 Telecommunication Act, a neoliberal deregulation of
media ownership, directly caused the proliferation of aggravating porno-
graphic media representations of female pop stars in the U.S. (Levande
2008), there is a skyrocketing intensification of sexually explicit portrayals
of K-pop female idols as a cultural symptom of Korea’s growing neoliberal-
ization. As Korea’s neoliberalization intensifies and the number of K-pop
female idols multiplies, the idols’ escalating competition to grasp audiences’
attention has led to the images of women becoming increasingly explicit.
Differently put, the mere fact that there are a growing number of K-pop
female idols does not mean that they have successfully achieved and exerted
autonomous (sexual) agency; however, by the industry’s hierarchal decision-
making procedures, they perform a seemingly positive role of active female
(sexual) subject, which is planned and prepared by the managerial elites,
rather than embody and enact it by themselves. In other words, increasing
numbers of female idols face a double bind as they are presented as active
subjects while being re-objectified, and in turn lead female audiences to
believe they too can commend active (sexual) subjectivity. However, this
process does not change, but further reproduces the existing patriarchal gen-
der hierarchy.
As an indicator of the idols’ double gender bind, SNSD’s human capital
lies in their attractive appearances and charming behaviors that beget teenage
followers. Considering that consumers automatically become producers or
carriers of neoliberal ethics of self-development and self-competitiveness
(Foucault 2008), SNSD’s appealing, sexualized visual images and lifestyle
have conditioned Korean women to imitate or emulate them by purchasing
the same or similar commodities. As an ensemble of consumer products,
SNSD’s images are systematically and strategically promoted and marketed
with the help of various commodity merchandise such as clothing, jewelry,
shoes, and cosmetics. The idols render a “wider and more pervasive produc-
tion of the self . . . [which is] built from the array of possible forms of
consumption and expression that these types of consumption provided for the
individuals” (Marshall 2010, 36, emphasis original). To show how K-pop
idols are seamlessly woven into neoliberal commodities, there are numerous
online shops and communities where SNSD’s fashion items are introduced,
promoted, and sold globally. Among others, www.style.soshified.com, a sub-
section of www.soshified.com which is the most popular, comprehensive
SNSD fan community with well over 200,000 active members and 176 staff
members, stands out by a monthly average of 1 million visitors and 10
million page views internationally. Claiming to provide a complete list of
“what Girls’ Generation wore or what items they were seen with” (n.p.), the
online site is an extensive advertising outlet where virtually all aspects of
22 Chapter 1

SNSD’s everyday lives are commodified and marketed, integrating SNSD

into the neoliberal consumer economy. Basically, it teaches audiences what
to buy and how to use lifestyle commodities so that they can express pseudo-
individualities, and in turn shape their identities as an outcome of stylistic
self-fashioning and improvisation in a neoliberal consumer culture of seduc-
tive images and sensations. What is noteworthy is that there is a tutorial
category where users, as self-reliant everyday experts, post seeming self-help
know-how to follow or emulate the idols’ fashion styles on “Get This Look,”
“Hair Tutorial,” “Make-Up Tutorial,” “Outfit of the Week,” “Reviews,” and
so on. By acquiring, customizing, and personalizing commodities promoted
by SNSD, the vernacular experts keep up with a current, trending consumer
lifestyle and actively practice biopolitics in which self-development, self-
realization, self-glamorization, and personal well-being are an ongoing neo-
liberal life project. In other words, hosting a participatory genre of peer
tutorials in styling issues, the site encourages fans to exercise their free,
capable agency in neoliberal self-fashioning and self-renovation opportu-
nities and requirements, and in turn, governs them by teaching them how to
govern themselves as neoliberal, self-reliant lifestyle subjects.
SNSD’s influence on fans’ lifestyle choices and self-promotion strategies
go beyond unobtrusive measures to the extent that fans pursue plastic sur-
gery. For example, K-pop Combo, which is a common or sometimes manda-
tory plastic surgery for double eyelids and a higher, pointier nose amongst
the idols, is an easy, rampant measure for the fans to look cute and amicable,
associated with an ideal aegyo quality. More specifically, SNSD Plastic Sur-
gery stands for “some of the best and carefully done plastic surgical proce-
dures of the world” by its capability to maintain “natural looks” (SNSD
Plastic Surgery n.d., n.p.). Not to mention numerous nonsurgical procedures
like Botox injections, skyrocketing rates of plastic surgery amongst Korean
females proves the idols’ biopolitical power, which revolves around a sensu-
al image of an “ideal new feminine subject demanded by neoliberalism”
(Francis 2013; Gonick 2006, 11).
Considering the first plastic surgery was done on a Korean prostitute who
wanted to appeal to American soldiers in 1961 (Stone 2013), plastic surgery
in Korea is instrumental to financial betterment through getting a better job
or a raise. Due to bleak job-market prospects coupled with the proliferation
of K-pop and beauty industries in the daunting post-IMF economy, an ever
increasing number of Koreans accept and are willing to surgically transform
their bodies to look alike K-pop female idols in the hopes of being success-
ful. Though individuals ostensibly exercise their “free choices,” personal
accountability, and self-empowerment as ethics of neoliberal citizenship, this
neoliberal logic of human capital has increasingly made the population a
mere object of profiteering, and furthermore, autoregulates and autocorrects
consumers who are confirmative to the status-quo. By consuming various
 Popular Culture as a Strategic Field of Neoliberal Intervention 23

beauty commodities and services, female audiences, who are the main engine
of neoliberal consumerism, try to change their appearances and images as a
means to accumulate their human capital, which ultimately confines them to
rapacious commercialism. By doing so, they become active, neoliberal agent,
by practicing personal responsibility, self-development, and self-enterprise
as ethics of “good” citizens who comply with predetermined, gendered path-
ways and are obedient consumer-workers in society. In this respect, SNSD is
a popular, effective form of neoliberal biopolitics that employs “technologies
of subjectivity . . . to induce self-animation and self-government so citizens
optimize choice, efficiency, and competitiveness” (Ong 2006, 5).
On the other hand, this increasing portrayal of active female subjectivity
is a seemingly natural response to a broader socioeconomic trend that wit-
nesses a growing number of highly educated, well-paid professional women:
in other words, an increasing female consumer power. With music videos
replete with high-end consumer products like Bentleys and Ferraris, SNSD’s
extraordinary emphasis on luxurious commodities “mark out moments of
audience empowerment and subversive identity formation,” purely based on
dubious, symbolic satisfaction (McRobbie 2008, 534). For example, SNSD’s
music video “I Got A Boy” exemplifies how the idols have promoted consu-
merism by implanting a glossy heteroglossia of fashion and romantic fantasy.
Multiple changes in the idols’ outfits, dance moves, conceptual themes, and
music tones represent how the music video is a tidal wave of commodities. In
other words, girl power in SNSD is an instrument to entice female audiences
into the consumer product market. However, these seemingly empowering
representations further alienate and reduce Korean women by revealing per-
vasive economic and social insecurities that they face in their everyday lives.
In other words, unless female audiences symbolically satisfy themselves
from consuming media fantasies of girl power, they are subject to conform-
ing to the “regular consumption of products for fear of repudiation by others,
the production of the normative, unquestioning and quiescent female subject
by means of the commodity form” (536). Consequently, SNSD is an innova-
tive governmental tool that perpetuates and maintains the status-quo by
preaching a pleasurable consumption and participation in mediated fantasy of
girl empowerment.
However, audiences sometimes carve out crucial alternative uses of K-
pop music for their sociopolitical causes. For example, chanting SNSD’s
“Into the New World,” students at Ewha Women’s University protested
against the university’s controversial plan to establish Future LiFE (Light Up
in Future Ewha) College, which aimed to grant official bachelor’s degrees
pertaining to “new media production,” “wellness,” and “hybrid design” for
working women without prior college education credentials. Blaming the
university for selling diplomas for commercial gain, around 300 students
began to occupy the Main Hall, where the president’s office is located, on
24 Chapter 1

July 28, 2016. On July 30, 2016, when students expected to meet the univer-
sity president, they encountered 1,600 police officers, and were forcefully
dismissed instead of having a civic discussion with the administration. While
resisting the police, the students sang the song in a synchronized mode in-
stead of typical protest songs. By criticisms and pressure from other univer-
sities, students, and the public (Ko 2016), the university announced that the
plan had been rescinded on August 3. Considering “social movements are
non-routine forms of ‘popular’ politics” (Steinberg 2004, 4), K-pop can be
ambivalent in its applications in people’s concrete lives. Therefore, it is a
meaningful incident that K-pop music became a part of the students’ victori-
ous protests. In other words, with the biopolitical nature of K-pop, which has
infiltrated every corner of individuals’ code of thought and conduct, the
students’ critical appropriation of SNSD’s song indicates the open, rather
unpredictable potential of popular culture in society. On the other hand, even
though the students exhibited some critical agency to utilize the neoliberal
cultural device for their critical cause, their way and cause of waging protests
are still confined to a neoliberal mantra of individualization, competitiveness,
and homo economicus: The protesters rejected any solidarity offered by other
university students, social movement organizations, and political parties as a
manifestation of the neoliberal canon of individualization based on one’s
own interests. In this respect, the students’ protest could also be considered
as a consumer movement that aims to maintain a commodity’s values by
keeping unqualified consumers from buying the educational product.
As examined so far, rather than a cultural phenomenon, K-pop female
idols are a neoliberal manifestation of commodified femininity constructed
by the industry with a “positive” twist, which is “girl power” or “female
sexual empowerment” (Frost 2005; Gill 2008; Gill and Scharff 2011;
McRobbie 2009). Emerging from a nexus between neoliberalism and devel-
opmentalism, the female idols are a moving mannequin of the fashion and
cosmetics industries, who “[have] been and [are] increasingly a pedagogical
tool and specifically a pedagogical aid” in perpetuating the zeitgeist of the
neoliberal consumer economy (Marshall 2010, 36). In this respect, SNSD is
an economic stunt by the K-pop industry and the state’s neoliberal social
policy as a means to regain national economic competitiveness and confi-
dence. Therefore, with K-pop’s economic success, the Korean government is
both omnipresent and minimal: universally engaged to naturalize neoliberal
principles and maximally disengaged by having private talent agencies enact
its policies.
 Popular Culture as a Strategic Field of Neoliberal Intervention 25

GIRLS’ GENERATION NOT ON THEIR OWN TERMS: FROM

FACTORIES TO PERFORMANCE STAGES

Manufactured and marketed by SM Entertainment, SNSD as the most suc-

cessful K-pop idol girl group is not an exemplar of girl power, since it is an
exemplar of how women are objectified and commodified (Radin and Sunder
2006) as a strategic political-economic ploy by the state and the industry. As
a neoliberal social policy that is more concerned with the state’s economic
competitiveness and growth than its deterioration of living standards, K-pop
is one of the most successful models of Korea’s dirigisme mode of capitalist
development through exploiting a cheap, docile, abundant, willing workforce
(Escobar 1995). Thus, it is Korea’s signature neoliberal service economy
which provides the state with global competition as a political legitimation,
and universalizes governmentality by its conditioning of “the human body
[with docility-utility], human body parts [for sexuality], and human behavior
[of competition and enterprise] as commodities” (J. Lee 2010, 12). As an
automated embodiment of governmentality, K-pop idols are the most salient
example of alienation, but by being adored, celebrated, and respected as role
models of the neoliberal economy. Thus, while K-pop female idols osten-
sibly promote female empowerment at least in their increasing public dis-
plays in the entertainment industry, they are only able to reproduce and
perpetuate a dominant nexus between patriarchal gender hierarchies, devel-
opmental capitalism, and neoliberalism (Epstein and Turnbull 2014). In this
grand scheme of neoliberal hegemonic construction, K-pop female idols’
young, amicable, sexualized bodies convey “the political unconscious,” ex-
emplifying what is important, what to think, and how to govern oneself
(Jameson 1981, 142).
In the working process of the Miracle on the Han River, the rhetoric of
self-empowerment, self-responsibility, and voluntarism was effectively de-
ployed to legitimize Park Chung-Hee’s developmental dictatorship
(1961–1979). As the nation’s ethos, the sociocultural rhetoric ceaselessly and
effectively mobilized rural, unwed women to work as an obedient, docile,
cheap, disposable workforce on the sweatshop floors of textile factories.
Now, the same ethos is spectacularly and sensationally deployed in post-IMF
neoliberal Korea through the glossy, mesmerizing visuality of the K-pop
industry. Consequently, since “[p]olitics (in the broad sense of relations,
assumptions, and contests pertaining to power) is what links value and ex-
change in the social life of commodities” (Appadurai 2005, 42, emphasis
original), it is no coincidence that the impeached former President Park
Geun-hye, daughter of dictator-President Park Chung-Hee, declared that the
Second Miracle on the Han River would be realized through Korea’s popular
culture.
26 Chapter 1

NOTES

1. Portions of this chapter were previously published in “K-Pop Female Idols: Culture
Industry, Neoliberal Social Policy, and Governmentality in Korea,” by Gooyong Kim, in The
Routledge Handbook of Global Cultural Policy, pgs. 520–537, published by INFORMA UK
LIMITED in September 2017. Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.
2. Derogatory terms that indicate “factory girl.” See Shin, K. 2002. The Discourse on
Women in Korea: Episodes, Continuity, and Change. The Review of Korean Studies 5: 7–27.
 Chapter Two

K-Pop Idol Girl Groups as Cultural

Genre of Neoliberalism
Patriarchy, Developmentalism, and Structure of Feeling/
Experience in K-Pop

On September 3, 2014, Eun-B, a 21-year-old female idol of Ladies’ Code,

died in a car accident, and other members were injured, including RiSe, who
fell into a coma for four days and passed away after a series of intense
surgeries on September 7. The accident occurred very early on a rainy morn-
ing when the group was in transit back to Seoul after finishing a performance
at a local TV station in Daegu. It was reported that the management compa-
ny’s overbooking practice resulted in the accident. This process involves
idols constantly being forced to stage performances from various local ve-
nues around the clock without a break or proper rest. Considering a study that
reports how, especially novice female idols confront extreme working condi-
tions accompanied by a frequent coercion to provide sexual services as a
bribery or a rite of passage to the stardom (National Human Rights Commis-
sion of Korea 2010), this accident is a glimpse into the ways in which the K-
pop industry manipulates its female idols without considering their safety or
will for its economic imperative to secure maximum profits. Thus, the acci-
dent summarizes that the current working conditions of the contemporary K-
pop idols are no better than those of female workers in sweatshop factories
during Korea’s rapid industrialization period from the 1960s to the 1980s.
As opposed to the current literature that focuses on what is new and
unique in K-pop and Hallyu in general, I strive to reveal both continuities and
emergents from both macro and micro properties in the industry and its
products. 1 As a macro, structural examination in the previous chapter, I
27
28 Chapter 2

examined how K-pop became prevalent within a preexisting set of political-

economic and industrial backgrounds, that is, a continuity of developmental-
ism in the neoliberal culture industry. In this chapter, I analyze the phenome-
non from another continuity: the nation’s centuries-long patriarchism. Since
the recording industry both creates a new culture and gets influenced by a
broader sociocultural environment where its creation takes place, I critically
reconsider any historical continuities and leaps in the music genre by exam-
ining if there is any relationship between K-pop female idols and the nation’s
centuries-
long patriarchy that has influenced the business culture of the industry. To
that end, I utilize Raymond Williams’s (1977) typology of cultural systems:
the dominant, the residual, and the emergent. Examining a system of cultural
production where there are “complex interrelations between movements and
tendencies both within and beyond” the existing sociocultural legacies and
contexts (121), I investigate how the idols have emerged in the cultural
process of Korea’s patriarchal neoliberalism, which retains Korean’s histori-
cal legacy of gender-based development. In other words, considering that the
“very concept of genre promises to transform historical specificity into for-
mal universality” (Elliott and Harkins 2013, 1), I investigate how and why K-
pop female idols have been successful, while Western girl groups like the
Spice Girls resurfaced but briefly demised in the early 90s. By doing so, I
aim to reveal how a proliferation of K-pop female idols as a formal univer-
sality that commodifies sexualized female bodies within neoliberal, patriar-
chal Korean society functions as a historical specificity of Korea’s neoliberal
culture industry.
Based on Suk-Young Kim’s (2016) argument that K-pop does not have a
firm reference point to its aesthetics but “flexibly associates itself with old
and new, local and global, while interweaving both retrospective and antici-
patory vectors” to make a competitive commodity (137), I investigate K-pop
female idols’ continuities from previous girl groups in the 60s by examining
production processes, visual and sonic characteristics, and business models.
While their glossy visual appeal by impeccable physicality, the latest fashion,
and synchronized choreography are being celebrated as K-pop’s idiosyncra-
sy, this perceivable attraction is not new, but an appropriation of Motown
Record’s successful marketing strategy of girl groups as well as previous
Korean counterparts in history. As a resurrection of girl groups that were
prevalent in both the U.S. and Korea in the 50s and 60s, K-pop female idols
disclose Korea’s immanent and present cultural-economic formations in its
diagnostic relationship to the society since the “singer is the image of the
spirit of a people,” and popular songs embody its belief system (Pavletich
1980, 4). While the American girl groups articulated the zeitgeist of egalitar-
ian hope and social progress in the 60s (O’Brien 2012; Pavletich 1980), K-
 K-Pop Idol Girl Groups as Cultural Genre of Neoliberalism 29

pop female idols are an episteme of neoliberalism that endeavors to transform

the entire society into a grand marketplace.
Like Motown’s girl groups set a tradition of “black public taste that was
taken seriously as an expression of a general aesthetic” (Early 1995, 4), I
contend the K-pop industry has also manufactured and legitimated a popular
ideal of female subjectivity in post-IMF Korea. Thus, since American girl
groups influenced teenage girls’ perceptions and behaviors on various issues
(Douglas 1994; Stos 2012), understanding the dominant representation of K-
pop female idols provides a useful optic for hegemonic femininity at the
moment. Based on the political economy of Korea’s rapid industrialization
and its post-IMF neoliberalization which set parameters of cultural produc-
tion by a dynamic interaction with the nation’s preexisting cultural, industri-
al, and political traditions such as Confucian patriarchy and developmental-
ism (or developmental dictatorship) as examined in chapter one, I argue the
success of the idols discloses Korea’s immanent and present economic and
cultural formations in its diagnostic relationship to the society, based on
Raymond Williams’s (1977) notion of genre as the “practical and variable
combination and even fusion of what are, in abstraction, different levels of
the social material process” (185). By understanding how K-pop female idols
became a dominant force in economic, cultural, and social domains in Korea,
I reveal Korea’s constant reterritorialization between the private and the
public, the emerging and the entrenched, the welcoming and the hierarchical,
personal identification investment and collective emotional structure, and the
marginalized and the mainstream’s effects on women’s place in society.

CULTURAL GENRE OF KOREA’S NEOLIBERALISM

As an interpretative allegory that contains a “deeper underlying, and more

‘fundamental’ narrative, of hidden master narrative” (Jameson 1981, 28), K-
pop female idols are considered the dominant, popular genre of Korea’s
neoliberal culture industry. As a sociocultural text of the nation, they perform
a “function of inventing imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to unresolvable
social contradictions,” which is Korea’s daunting post-IMF economy (79).
Differently put, they are a synecdoche of the gendered nature of Korea’s
development, representing a neoliberal replacement of manual production by
an immaterial service industry that is a feminized sector (Gonick, 2006).
Thus, the idols embody a dominant episteme of Korea’s contemporary socio-
cultural and politico-economic conditions. In this respect, I believe the idols
are “semantic raw materials of social life and language . . . the historicity of
structures of feeling and perception and ultimately of bodily experience,
[and] the continuation of psyche or subject” (Jameson 1981, 147). To better
understand their sociocultural functionality, which is established by neoliber-
30 Chapter 2

al rationalities that advocate for unrestricted competition as a priori of pos-

sibility for development and prosperity, I analyze how the idols proliferate a
neoliberal value system as a fundamental aspect of the Korean people’s
collective thinking and goals in the myriads of tokens and elements, typifca-
tions, figures, and norms as cultural common sense or ideal.
For example, I infer that K-pop’s dominant features like perfectly syn-
chronized, military-style choreography, fast-beat hook sounds and lyrics are
carefully calculated to appeal to Korean audiences already conditioned by
residual legacies of Confucian patriarchy, military dictatorship, and fast in-
dustrialization. K-pop’s emergent character stemmed from the Korean cul-
ture industry’s response to the nation’s shifting market conditions and de-
mands that shifted from a manual sweatshop workforce to affective, service-
oriented labor wrought by the nation’s increasing neoliberalization. As an
emergent structure of a new cultural genre, K-pop strategically rearticulated
Korea’s residual culture of patriarchal gender relations to a growing demand
of the service sector economy. While reinterpreting the traditional Confucian
code of ethics and disseminating a new set of entitlements in inclusion and
exclusion, K-pop still retains the residual value of strict gender stratification
that keeps young women at the bottom of the hierarchy. In this respect, K-
pop female idols as a dominant cultural genre of neoliberal, patriarchal Korea
can be better understood within a continuum between Korea’s predominant
legacy of patriarchy and developmentalism that forced female workers to be
a docile, disposable labor force and the dominant modality of neoliberal,
service-oriented market rationality since 1997. While K-pop idol girl groups
ostensibly seem to promote female empowerment in Korean society, at least
within the realm of the entertainment industry, via carefully calculated dis-
courses of neoliberalism and patriarchism, they are only able to reproduce
and perpetuate a dominant nexus between the traditional gender hierarchies
and neoliberalism. In this grand scheme of neoliberal hegemonic construc-
tion, the idols’ young, amicable, sexualized bodies convey “the political
unconscious,” exemplifying what is important, what to think, and how to
govern oneself (Jameson 1981).

MOTOWN RECORD’S GIRL GROUPS IN THE 60S: PRETEXT

K-pop’s signature attributes in musical vocabulary (catchy hooks and easy

refrain), choreography, matching outfits, and their middle-class respectability
are not unique, but were invented and utilized by Motown Records in its
market strategy for girl groups in the 60s. Motown girl groups manifested
conformity or uniformity by their physical appearances and sexuality, rather
than artistic ingenuity or talent by merely enacting what male producers
provided in the industry (Cyrus 2003). Decorated with ingredients for “mass
 K-Pop Idol Girl Groups as Cultural Genre of Neoliberalism 31

market success: fewer moving parts on stage, lots of well-crafted hooks and
cute, carbonated lyrics” (Hirshey 2001, 50), The Shirelles pioneered the gen-
re of physical and visual uniformity and aural homogeneity in 1961. Instead
of artistic creativity or ingenuity, girl groups and their fans distinguish them-
selves from others by different colors, fashion accessories, dresses, and hair-
styles. Along with an assembly-line training system, Motown implemented a
formulaic approach to create songs: “never overdo the hook; make sure the
song has a hummable melody, which means that it should be like something
the public’s heard before” (Early 1995, 56). Importantly, Motown first im-
plemented the human capital management approach that trained members of
girl groups to retain charm, finesse, glamour, taste, and grace. In Motown’s
“factory-type operation” where they relearned every mode of daily behaviors
like, how to walk, talk, sit, dress, put on makeup, and smile, girls had to stay
“docile, malleable, amenable to being taken in hand by a paternal company,
hammered into a mold calculated, yea, guaranteed to please” (Pavletich
1980, 105). As a role model for adolescent female fans who constituted a
major purchasing power that allowed teenage girls to form camaraderie
(Douglas 1994), Motown girl groups were “the fairy tale ideal” that taught
female audiences how to behave, decorate, please, and win the dream of
getting the romance (O’Brien 2012). As an invitation to consumer participa-
tion, Motown girl groups’ visual representation of sameness and belonging
encouraged the audience to develop self-identification with characters and
performers, and this affirmative visual message confirmed “what it means to
be female, [and offers] messages about belonging, about possibilities for
participation, about the possibility for success” (Cyrus 2003, 190).
As much as Motown changed popular culture, its girl groups were condi-
tioned by various cultural and social contexts. Motown girl groups’ success
was conceived as a “personification of a broad and compelling black tri-
umph, a symbol of black freedom, assertion, and achievement” along with
the various progressive social movements in the 50s and 60s (Early 1995,
44). Likewise, the Korean counterparts were rendered within Korea’s coloni-
al or military subordinations: Korean girl groups with a synchronized
choreography in matching uniforms were first introduced by the Japanese
imperial culture industry in the 1910s, but saw new venues in American
military camp towns immediately after the Korean War (1950–1953). Post-
war girl groups like Kim Sisters, Pearl Sisters, and Arirang Sisters relied on
their physical appeal in fashionable outfits like miniskirts, hot pants, and
sleeveless tops, and legitimated the influence and preeminence of American
popular culture. However, with the authoritarian developmental policies of
Park Chung-hee (1961–1979) and new military regime of Chun Doo-hwan
(1980–1987), female physicalities were redirected from the performance
stage to factory floors to support and realize masculine nationalist develop-
32 Chapter 2

ment. As briefly reviewed above, girl groups in both the U.S. and Korea were
conformative in their sociocultural functions.

THE RESIDUAL: GENDER-BASED NATIONALIST

DEVELOPMENTALISM IN K-POP

Korea’s developmentalism has relied on its labor-intensive, export-oriented

industrialization that was based on a constant, abundant flow of cheap,
young, docile workers since the 60s (Lie 1992). As examined in chapter one,
Korea’s fast industrialization, epitomized as the Miracle of the Han River,
was possible by concerted efforts between the state and the market through
an active optimal combination of patriarchal gender hierarchy and masculine
developmentalism. To be more specific, patriarchal nationalism played a
major role in mobilizing female workers and was mainly utilized by the
authoritarian military government (Kim and G. Park 2003). Planned out,
assisted, and directed by the government, export is an integral part of nation-
al development, and has been systematically managed by providing compre-
hensive subsidies, exemplified in chaebols, mammoth conglomerates like
Samsung and Hyundai created and guided by the state. Female workers are
the vast majority workforce in the main engine of economic development,
which is labor-intensive, in manufacturing goods like textiles, clothing,
shoes, and electronic goods by cheapest wage (Monk–Turner and Turner
2001). Specifically, 80 percent of female manufacturing workers were em-
ployed in the export-oriented sector in the 70s, which accounted for 70
percent of total export revenue in 1975 (U. Cho 1985). However, these wom-
en suffered from dehumanizing “super-exploitation” characterized by strict,
militaristic discipline, sexual and physical abuse, long working hours, high
industrial accident rates, and low minimum wages on sweatshop work floors
without basic humane working conditions, such as proper ventilation and
lighting. Considering there has been a wide income gap consisting of 45.1
percent in 1972, 42.9 percent in 1980, 52.4 percent in 1989, 56.8 percent in
1994, 63.1 percent in 1999, and 64.2 percent in 2003 (Kim and I. Park 2006),
exploitation of young, female workers is an integral part of Korea’s “miracu-
lously” rapid industrialization.
An important socioeconomic implication of the recent surge of K-pop
idol girl groups can be found in the generally adverse employment conditions
of female workers who were “first laid off during the 1997–1998 crisis . . .
[and] remain concentrated in smaller enterprises and ‘temporary’ jobs” in
post-IMF Korea (Hart-Landsberg and Burkett 2001, 423; Kim and Finch
2002; Kim and Voos 2007). While Motown girl groups exemplified how the
industry commercialized the most vulnerable social subjects, that is African
American teenage girls, K-pop female idols have been promoted by their
 K-Pop Idol Girl Groups as Cultural Genre of Neoliberalism 33

precarious social conditions in the Confucian gender hierarchy in Korea. To

serve a post-Fordist regime of production, K-pop idols have proliferated and
normalized neoliberal modes of flexible, mobile, immaterial labor in the
service, information, finance, and culture industries, producing a neoliberal
way of life and culture (Virno 2004). As an eventual result of the governmen-
tal policy that aims to revive the national economy, create new employment,
and boost national morale to catch up with the ever-volatile neoliberal global
economy (Pratt 2005; Scott 2012; Scott and Craig 2012), K-pop is a new
industrial item produced by the Korean culture industry, completely revers-
ing Adorno’s (1991) lamentation on the commodification and marketeering
of cultural artifacts. “K-pop is merely a brand, part of Brand Korea that has
been the export-oriented South Korean government” (Lie 2012, 361). Thus,
as exemplified by the impeached former President Park Geun-hye’s inaugu-
ral speech, the current proliferation of K-pop female idols should be regarded
as a contemporary version of patriarchal developmentalism through a sys-
tematic mobilization and exploitation of young, docile females in the neolib-
eral culture industry.

THE (PRE)DOMINANT: PATRIARCHAL GENDER HIERARCHY

While “capitalism, consumerism, and popular culture superseded Confucian-

ism” in neoliberal Korean society (Lie 2015, 85), I maintain Confucian patri-
archism has still been influential. Though there has been progress against a
patriarchal demarcation of space between male public sphere and female
domestic, the Confucian gender discrimination is still operative as a residual
element. Specifically, sociocultural control over female bodies, which is
based on strategic calculations of masculine political economic interests, is
an active, effective mode of its functionality (T. Kim 2003). Although this
cultural value has somewhat been washed off in society’s official narratives,
patriarchal gender discriminations/exploitations as the major pillar of tradi-
tional Korean society “have had to be incorporated if the effective dominant
culture is to make sense in these areas” (Williams 1977, 123). In this respect,
it indicates that K-pop female idols as a dominant cultural genre does not
necessarily negate or overcome traditional gender discrimination. Just as the
Korean state mobilized and deployed young, docile female workers into the
bottom of the hierarchy of capital accumulation during its rapid industrial
period (H. Kim 2001), through audition to training to debut, today’s K-pop
idols are conditioned as an obedient, disciplined, and sexualized labor force,
directly manufactured by male corporate elites in the K-pop industry to serve
the interests and needs of capital. In the “existing patriarchal relations of
power and domination by securing anew the consent of women to existing
social and political arrangements” (McRobbie 2008, 544), K-pop trainees/
34 Chapter 2

idols are under the complete control of the industry, and have internalized
and reinforced a subordinate self-image that is contingent upon the patriar-
chal desire of imagined femininity as witnessed by the rampant, explicit
sexualization of female idols (Epstein and Turnbull 2014). Rather than exert-
ing female power and emancipation, K-pop idols are suffering from the
internalization of sexualized, fabricated images of femininity that mostly
focus on emotion and sexuality as a response to patriarchal desire of ima-
gined femininity. For example, SNSD’s “The Boys” was manufactured and
embodied by men, from its creative procedure to the stage production: SM
Entertainment chairman Soo-man Lee, American choreographer and song-
writer Teddy Riley, and Korean songwriter Young-jin Yoo. In this regard, K-
pop female idols can be better understood in Korea’s predominantly residual
element of patriarchal sexism, and (re)production and proliferation of the
dominant socioeconomic value system of capitalism.
While Korea has been modernized in a short period of time since the
1960s, there have not been significant improvements in women’s lives in
society. Constant eruptions of misogynistic, hate crimes, such as Gangnam
Station Murder, exemplify a hostile condition of women's lives in Korea.
Opposition to their progress in economic participation since the late 1990s,
has forced them to remain subject to the traditional gender hierarchy, as
“evidenced by the persistent deference by wives to their husband’s status and
role, son preference, and strong kinship bonds” (Park and Cho 1995, 132).
While the recent surge of the female idols ostensibly overcomes the tradi-
tional demarcation of social spaces between a superior male public sphere
and an inferior female domestic one, their success is still contingent on the
patriarchal system in the industry and the public’s rating. Under Confucian-
ism, based on a strong patrilineal kinship system with emphasis on filial
piety, female sexuality is confined to procreation purposes only, without
allowing any room for pleasure; however, men are able to exploit it as far as
their economic and political conditions permit (Deuchler 1992). In this dou-
ble standard of sexuality, chastity and purity were the most valued feminine
virtues as a part of women’s devotion to men and the family. While this rigid
dismissal of female sexuality has loosened up since the 1990s, Confucianism
still exerts strong influence to the extent that Korea’s feminist advocates
have to use Confucian discourse, especially chastity ideology, to defend
victims of sexual crimes (Y. Shim 2001). Rather, as seen in an explicit
sexualization of K-pop female idols, female sexuality is actively commod-
ified and exploited to serve patriarchal capitalism.
Women’s incongruous status has been ingrained in the nation’s pursuit of
capitalist modernization. While female identity was “turned into a stage for
politicizing national desire” since Korea’s annexation to Japan in 1910 (Jager
2003, 44), the traditional gender hierarchy and expectations have not been
entirely discarded, but updated and transformed to accommodate the nation’s
 K-Pop Idol Girl Groups as Cultural Genre of Neoliberalism 35

changing needs. When dictator-President Park Chung-hee tried to accom-

plish a “self-reliant economy” through industrialization that “inevitably in-
volves Westernization, which is at the same time perceived to be a threat to
national [masculine] identity” (S. Moon 1998, 37), Korea’s patriarchal elites,
who consider women as subjectless bodies to reproduce offspring and pro-
vide labor power, mobilized them as a corporeal resource for rebuilding and
proliferating the national prosperity. Up until the onset of the 1997 Asian
Financial Crisis that begot the K-pop industry, the nation’s patriarchal au-
thority maintained strict control over female sexuality (Choi 1998); however,
post-1997 crisis neoliberal elites have incorporated American cultural hege-
mony, that is explicit sexualization of female bodies in the culture industry.
In other words, while postcolonial nationalism vilified Westernized women
as potential traitors to the “patriarchally constructed nation” (25), post-1997
crisis leaders set up a new national sentiment that female chastity is a dispos-
able resource to advance the national economy. In other words, sexualized
female bodies as a “suspicion of conspiracy against the already disempow-
ered Korean men” (25) gave way to the neoliberal mantra of profitability in
the hypersexualized bodies of K-pop female idols. Therefore, while there is a
growing presence of female talents in the industry, it has less to do with their
growing economic, political, and social rights than the nation’s patriarchal
strategy of turning them into a nationalist “agent politicizing love, loyalty,
and family bonds for the nation” in crisis (Jager 2003, 56).
Likewise, patriarchy is still intact in K-pop’s business practices. As much
as Motown promoted a family myth that made talents feel that joining it was
like being adopted by a big, loving family, the K-pop industry demands its
idols to grant their loyalty and obedience to their agency that is presented as a
“father, an older brother, an uncle, a coach, a teacher, a guardian, an author-
ity figure motivated by something other than making money from his acts”
(Early 1995, p. 31). This wondrous necessity of family myth was vindicated
by Korea’s nationalism that indicates society and state are an extension of
family. Going through an intensive and extensive training period, the idols
have internalized and enacted the most repressive notion of femininity that
forces them “into corporeal experiences of femininity that sprang from the
middle-aged” male decision-makers in the industry (Warwick 2007, 57).
This behavioral, bodily gender script has not only regulated the idols them-
selves, but also conditioned the female audience by showing standardized
visual images that tell what clothes, body shapes, movements, facial expres-
sion, and emotions are required to survive in the most Confucian, patriarchal
society.
Themes of harmony in K-pop idol groups’ signature collective choreogra-
phy can be traced back to the Korean state conglomerate’s manipulation of
the Confucian values of harmony, solidarity, and cooperation during the
nation’s period of rapid industrialization. K-pop music videos are decorated
36 Chapter 2

with highly skillful group choreography, sense of harmony, and coherence.

Since dance is a corporeal pedagogy that delivers “symbolic gender meaning,
punctuates phrases of the acquisition of gender knowledge, [and] instills
discipline” (Hanna 1988, 75), K-pop female idols’ hyper-synchronized dance
choreography reproduces and reinforces the Confucian mantra of female
conformity. This corporeal pedagogy of dance gets even more effective with
K-pop’s easy-to-follow choreography that allows audiences to enact it, and
in turn fulfills a broader governmentality function in the population. Espe-
cially when fans gather in public places for dance flash mobs, the kinetic
imposition of K-pop makes the audience entrain to the gestural hook of the
music’s conformative ideology. With “kinetic listening,” in which individu-
als develop a muscle memory of the music’s messages, “imagining what it
might be like to play what they are hearing” (Keil 1995, 10), K-pop’s behav-
ioral, bodily script gets even more distinctive and effective. This flawless,
synchronized group movement is a well-crafted commercial version of the
Confucian worldview, which emphasizes fulfilling preconceived and ex-
pected role-playing in a hierarchical social structure based on gender and
class in Korea.
The ubiquity of sexualized uniforms in K-pop further indicates a patriar-
chal demand on female bodies, that is affective, obedient, and corporeal. As a
symbol of female workers’ affective, immaterial labor and non-threat to the
nation’s patriarchy, the female idols in uniforms homogenize themselves as
an erotic spectacle. As a sartorial symbol of conformity, the idols’ matching
uniforms apply a tangible regulation on the female performers’ bodies, which
is imposed by external authority by eradicating individuality and personality.
Since the uniforms of K-pop female idols have been the major signifier of a
given idol group, an idol is replaceable as far as an overall image/concept of
the group can be maintained. With this interchangeability of K-pop idols, the
subordination of individuality to the uniform not only regulates the idols, but
further proliferates conformity to audiences by giving a false sense of mem-
bership and security when they buy the idols’ paraphernalia. In other words,
as a cultural police activity to re-claim masculine authority, a spectacle of the
idols in uniforms is a repressive response to women’s growing presence and
influence from a sudden abundance of female workers.
As a residual character of Korean industrialization, K-pop idol girl groups
have proliferated and naturalized gender discrimination in terms of pay and
position: “It is ironic that discriminatory measures contributed to the coun-
try’s rapid economic growth and, in turn, growth itself deepened discrimina-
tion” (K. Park 1993, 134). Therefore, a mere increase in female participation
does not necessarily improve issues of gender inequality, as the structure of
gender subordination based on global capitalism and Confucian constraints
persists. Therefore, combined with a residual, Confucian gender hierarchy,
the dominant cultural genre represents how Korean society has been preoccu-
 K-Pop Idol Girl Groups as Cultural Genre of Neoliberalism 37

pied with the unchecked desire of economic growth by systematic commod-

ification of femininity, conditioned by the neoliberal ideals of economic
capacity during the market-driven IMF’s SAPs (Christensen 2013).

THE EMERGENT: NEOLIBERAL STRUCTURE OF FEELING/

EXPERIENCE

K-pop has become one of the most effective tools to capture audiences’
attention, and in turn, has been an effective model of communication, deci-
sion-making, and labor relationship. As a dominant hegemony, K-pop is a
powerful everyday pedagogy that shapes popular, public sentiments to ac-
commodate the capitalist logic of profit-making. As Foucauldian govern-
mentality, the idols are an effective presentation of the modus operandi in
Korea’s neoliberal capitalism. Thus, they should be analyzed with a social
consciousness that “the ‘human imagination,’ the ‘human psyche,’ the ‘un-
conscious,’ with their ‘functions’” are structured, realized, and experienced
in affective and somatic ways (Williams 1977, 130). In other words, the
music genre provides a “structure of experience” that constitutes “affective
elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but
thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present
kind, in a living and interrelating continuity” (132). Exploiting (male) audi-
ences’ expectations of sexualized female representations, K-pop female idols
reconstruct and perpetuate patriarchal gender hierarchy as a “practical con-
sciousness” for both male and female subjects’ “thought as felt and feeling as
thought” in neoliberal Korea. Therefore, what is an emergent neoliberal fea-
ture in K-pop female idols comes from the K-pop industry’s systematic com-
modification of female sexuality and affective labor that conditions the idols
to display sexuality and sensuality imagined by the male industry leaders.
As a primary realm of neoliberal biopolitics, affects or affectionated bod-
ies, as either topic or optic, are constantly produced, circulated, and con-
sumed as a mode of the microphysics of power at the content-specific level
and in the discursive construction of K-pop. Considering affect as an “opera-
tional set of dispositions toward the self in the world given by sensory per-
ception, emotion, and feeling” (Clough and Halley 2007, 69), the hyper-
visual nature of K-pop female idols is a cultural apparatus of neoliberalism
that provides the audience with a somatic ensemble of discourse and regula-
tions on their everyday behaviors. In this respect, with highly sexualized
visuality, K-pop female idols are the latest and most effective reverse exam-
ple of Theodore Adorno’s (1990) insistence that female voice has to be
present with the singer’s physical body that carries it: While Adorno believes
female voice could never represent the female self in the gramophone era, the
spectacle-oriented K-pop and its music videos perfectly realize the physical
38 Chapter 2

nature of femininity. As Roland Barthes (2012) indicates, the presence of the

body is the most important aspect of music. In this respect, K-pop’s visuality
functions as an affective pedagogy that conditions audiences to learn and
perceive the world by sensory stimuli: “Felt realities, sensed truths, guts that
advise and hearts that remember, tears and smiles are what have begun to
reconstitute social discourse along the semantic axis of affect” (Reber 2012,
68). In other words, considering affect is a cultural logic of market capital-
ism, and female bodies are commodified as sexual objects and regulated by
the industry (Gill and Scharff 2011; Lieb 2013; McRobbie 2009). K-pop
female idols are a form of cultural capital to redefine and evolve people’s
desire for sexy, attractive female images as a technology of sexiness in Ko-
rea’s patriarchal capitalism (Frost 2005; Gill 2008). Considering that cultural
text is imbued with different representations of the real, the imaginary, and
the desired (Jameson 1981), cutthroat competition as a desired qualification
of neoliberal personhood is epitomized by the female idols’ sexualization,
explicit nudity, and provocative gestures. In turn, this cultural manifestation
has come from an increasing competition between idols, who are asked to
further perpetuate a commodification of sexualized female bodies by the
male-dominated K-pop industry. In this respect, coining “girl industries,”
Yeran Kim (2011) argues that the idols are constructed and consumed as a
neoliberal brand and commodity.
Jane Caputi’s (2003) notion of “everyday pornography” further explicates
how K-pop female idols support an affective dynamics of the gender-based
microphysics of power as neoliberal structure of feeling and experience in K-
pop. Pornography does not only refer to an explicit, X-rated depiction of
sexual intercourse, but more importantly indicates any representations that
systematically and strategically objectify, exploit, and degrade female bodies
and subjectivities. By supporting the “sexual politics of the status quo,”
everyday pornography not only legitimizes patriarchal gender hierarchy, but
also “infuses practices of consumerism,” aggression, and objectification
(435). For example, how K-pop female idols always practice highly syn-
chronized choreography should be understood as a sociopsychological con-
firmation of stratified social hierarchy between the idols and (male) audi-
ences: Highly synchronized choreography à la mode of mass military games
evokes pre-determined social positions of hierarchy, submitting young, ap-
pealing female performers as mere objects of the audience’s visual consump-
tion. In this respect, SNSD’s successful music DVD for their Japan debut,
New Beginning of Girls’ Generation, which sensually thematized military
uniforms, suggests how the group carefully appropriates subconscious and
nostalgic celebrations of militarism in Japan and Korea. It was largely suc-
cessful on two accounts: Their military uniforms granted the group symbolic
empowerment, which combined the physical and mental strength of the mili-
tary and the sexual sensitivity of female bodies as a cliché of female empow-
 K-Pop Idol Girl Groups as Cultural Genre of Neoliberalism 39

erment. On the other hand, the military uniforms provided male audiences
with a sexual fantasia of subordinated femininity, which is guaranteed by the
military’s rank and file system. Alternatively, sexualized females idols in
military uniform signify that, in order for women to gain power and influ-
ence, they still have to dress provocatively, even if they are in a position of
authority like a military officer. Likewise, uniforms are one of the most
popular or demanding props for male sexual fantasy, which is prevalent in
pornography. In this respect, considering the historical background of Ja-
pan’s total colonial exploitation for thirty-six years (1910–1945), SNSD’s
Japan debut strategy is accordant with how “sexualized hierarchy, not only
between the sexes under male supremacy but also between [the] socially
unequal—sexually fetishized, enslaved, and colonized” is actively exploited
in the K-pop industry (440).
K-pop female idols’ strategic deployment of cuteness further perpetuates
a pornographic nature of male supremacy, since an infantilizaiton of women
is an integral part of patriarchy: “In everyday pornography, sexually objec-
tified women are shown in poses and clothing that suggests that they are little
girls” (Caputi 2003, 441). Posing cute is a gendered biopolitics that condi-
tions females to be weak and subordinate to the sum of male desires, influ-
ences, domination, and exploitation. For example, SNSD’s first major hit
music video, “Gee,” illustrates how female subjectivity and sexuality can
only be activated and realized through the male gaze and male affection. By
depicting how female mannequins become animated and act cutely in both
behavioral mannerisms and atmosphere, the music video objectifies the im-
age of the innocent, good girl next door as an adult male sexual fantasy. By
doing so, SNSD fetishizes a symbolic construction of childhood innocence as
a mere sexual object, while its violation is regarded as a goal in the sexual
politics of the patriarchal status quo. This glorified representation of submis-
sive gender roles further normalizes the patriarchal ideology, since gender
gets “tenuously constituted in time—an identity instituted through a stylized
repetition of acts . . . in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments
of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self” (Butler
1988, 519). Thus, being cute is a gendered biopolitics that expects females to
be weak, innocent, and subordinate to the sum of male desires, influences,
domination, and exploitation.
As a sociocultural amnesia, K-pop female idols have perpetuated appeal-
ing, cute, sexy images, and distracted audiences from real problems around
them. Just as a promotion of Kawaii helped alleviate social tension during the
90s’ economic depression in Japan, the K-pop industry deployed female
idols’ cutesy sexuality in the wake of Korea’s devastated economic status
since the IMF crisis. In other words, giving a carefree, cheerful atmosphere
of childhood nostalgia, cuteness appeals to emotionally depleted audiences
who look for something that could satisfy their desire for affection-rich rela-
40 Chapter 2

tionships. Thus the K-pop industry provides affective commodities so that

consumers can satisfy what they are deprived of in the neoliberal economy
that demands their affective, service labors. In this respect, creating a sophis-
ticated ambiguity between cute and sexy, K-pop female idols appeal to both
male and female audiences by providing the former with the sexual fantasy
of submissive, yet sexually active, appealing female entertainers and the
latter with a model to emulate in order to become successful within a set of
conflicting gender expectations from patriarchy and neoliberalism. Thus,
portrayed as self-determined, successful, and empowering entrepreneurial
girls, K-pop female idols embody marketable, profitable human capital by
“providing an image of the ideal new feminine subject demanded by neolib-
eralism” (Gonick 2006, 11), and in turn, interpellating audiences to choose a
predetermined, gendered pathway as an obedient consumer-worker.
Consequently, as an example of Raymond Williams’s structure of feeling/
experience, the everyday pornography of K-pop female idols has actively
served to (re)produce both the pre-dominant/residual culture of patriarchal
sexism, and the dominant, hegemonic exploitation of female affect as a
means of economic development. Through pornographic objectification, K-
pop’s symbol of female sexual empowerment is a mere excuse for the com-
modification of sexualized female bodies, based on the “myth that power is
attained when one’s body is on display” (Levande 2008, 302). Even if there
is some sense of female agency when a woman shows off her well-toned,
shaped body, her sexual power does not mean anything since the sexual
empowerment does not constitute autonomous subjectivity. In other words,
without negating or renegotiating patriarchal gender hierarchy, to claim sex-
ual empowerment within the existing power structure is to deceive women to
satisfy male desire by “compliance masked in defiance: taking your clothes
off to be heard” (305). In sum, as “inalienable elements of a social material
process . . . seen as the articulation (often the only fully available articula-
tion) of structures of feeling which as living processes are much more widely
experienced” (Williams 1977, 133), K-pop female idols are a dominant mode
of contemporary Korea’s social experiences that hegemonically legitimate
and (re)produce semantic categories of what is necessary, desirable, and
required in the name of economic success.

CONCLUDING REMARKS: K-POP IDOL GIRL GROUPS AS

EPISTEME OF NEOLIBERAL KOREA

Considering popular singers promote ideas and issues that their audience is
prepared to accept (Pavletich 1980), K-pop female idols have reinforced
traditional conformative patriarchal gender ideals and norms, or given a false
sense of female empowerment by explicit sexualization, which in turn up-
 K-Pop Idol Girl Groups as Cultural Genre of Neoliberalism 41

dates and perpetuates the dominant gender stereotype. By doing so, they
articulate Korea’s dominant mode of social dynamics, that is patriarchal
neoliberalism. As a response to the 1997 Financial Crisis and the nation’s
subsequent neoliberalization, K-pop female idols are a culturally expressed
structure of social experiences that systematically commodify young, docile
female bodies in the process of transforming the social and material bases of
Korean economy. According to Williams’s (1977) notion of the structure of
feeling/experience, K-pop female idols are “effective formations of most
actual art [that] relate to already manifest social formations [i.e., patriarchal
industrial capitalism], dominant or residual, and it is primarily to emergent
formations (though often in the form of modification or disturbance in older
forms) that the structure of feeling, as solution, relates” (134, emphasis origi-
nal). In this respect, K-pop idols are a synecdoche of patriarchal, neoliberal
capitalism that embody how “capital is constantly exploiting different forms
of labor force, constantly moving between the sexual division of labor in
order to accomplish its commodification of social life” (Hall 1997, 30). In
sum, K-pop female idols, as the dominant cultural genre, are a popular repre-
sentation of neoliberal Korea’s “social formation, explicit and recognizable
in specific kinds of art” (135). Within the exploitative managerial structure of
Korea’s culture industry, K-pop has implemented a neoliberal “political
economy that enacts radical redistributions of capital upward through radical
redistributions of development downward” (Elliott and Harkins 2013, 6). In
other words, it is the industry’s stakeholders who rake in large profits by
forcing female performers to risk their safety and lives, as with the Ladies’
Code tragedy, while spreading and perpetuating ruthless competition and
self-entrepreneurship as a source for personal achievement in an audio-visu-
ally enticing performance of K-pop idols. In conclusion, as a dominant cultu-
ral genre, K-pop female idols are a cultural manifestation, or a symbolic
embodiment of neoliberal developmentalism that is sustained within the na-
tion’s century-long Confucian patriarchy.

NOTES

1. A different version of this chapter was published in a special issue on Korea by Telos:
Critical Theory of the Contemporary. K-pop Idol Girl Groups as Cultural Genre of Patriachal
Neoliberalism: A Gendered Nature of Developmentalism, and the Structure of Feeling/Experi-
ence in Contemporary Korea. Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary, 184(Fall 2018),
185-207.
 Chapter Three

Between Hybridity and Hegemony in

K-Pop’s Global Popularity
A Case of Girls’ Generation’s American Debut

SNSD’s January 2012 debut on two major network television talk shows in
the United States warrants critical reconsideration of the current discourse on
cultural hybridity as the basis of K-pop’s global popularity. 1 Prior to Psy’s
“Gangnam Style” phenomenon, SNSD’s “The Boys” was the first time a
Korean group appeared on an American talk show. It marked a new stage in
K-pop’s global reach and influence. With a surge of other K-pop idols gain-
ing global fame, especially in Japan, China, and other Asian countries,
SNSD’s U.S. debut is evidence of K-pop’s global marketability by being
presented in the U.S. music market, the heartland of pop music. Especially,
since Korean songs have expressed, emulated, and/ or referenced to a “pleas-
ure of, and the envy for, American modernity, symbolized by the economic
and military strength” (Fuhr 2017, 45), the debut was more than just a cultu-
ral or media event, but also sociopolitical in its implications. In this respect,
Young-mok Kim (2012), consul general of the Republic of Korea in New
York, cheerfully maintains that K-pop idols are “really Korea’s secret weap-
on” as its new emerging soft power “through a blend of Western tradition,
Asian talents and their own investments” (n.p.). SNSD’s breakthrough in the
U.S. music market is symbolically considered as Korea’s prowess in terms of
cultural power. Thus, the debut should be reassessed in its wealth of social
implications. In this chapter, to better understand the phenomenon, I examine
how scholars have treated K-pop’s global popularity in terms of cultural
hybridity and then argue that one has to consider hybridity’s broader socio-
historical and politico-economic contexts. In other words, understanding how

43
44 Chapter 3

Korea’s rapid post-IMF neoliberalization and culture industries “define and

delimit the significance of cultural” production (Elliott and Harkins 2013, 2),
I argue that SNSD’s American debut discloses Korea’s value transformations
that entail a commercialization of popular culture, specifically, a commodifi-
cation of sexualized young female bodies in their diagnostic relationship to
the society.
As examined in the previous chapters, K-pop has become one of the
driving forces of economic developments as well as a dominant cultural
genre in post-IMF neoliberalized Korea. As a culture technology for boosting
Korea’s postindustrial, service-oriented neoliberal economy along with other
strategic technologies, like ICTs (H. Shin, 2009), K-pop has been part and
parcel of people’s daily lives: K-pop and its idols are omnipresent from
commercial films and TV dramas to political campaigns and governmental
PRs to diplomacy. In this context, the existing K-pop scholarship explains
the phenomenon through cultural hybridity theory (Ryoo 2009; Shim 2006).
Overall, cultural hybridity is a counterargument against imperialist globaliza-
tion. Rather than Korea’s entertainment market being dominated by
American popular culture, the K-pop industry is believed to successfully
practice a counterflow of cultural production from non-Western countries to
Western ones in its “indigenized and hybrid versions of American popular
culture” (Joo 2011, 496, emphasis added), not only for domestic cultural
consumption but also, more importantly, as an export item.
To prove an alternative perspective, since popular music has “created,
circulated, recognized and responded to” (Negus 1999, 4) larger structural
conditions, I investigate how K-pop has become a global phenomenon in its
place within contemporary Korea’s broader political, economic, and cultural
histories. As a cultural manifestation of “general social, political, and epis-
temic shifts” (Stokes 2004, 48), in which “alliances between commercial and
political factors [are] formed and dissolved as hybrid styles” (Allen 2003,
229), one must critically take into account the nation’s broader structural
transformations since the 1990s. In this respect, it is suggestive that K-pop
began when Korea was subject to a massive socioeconomic neoliberalization
mandated by the OECD in 1996 and the IMF in 1997, and its global popular-
ity coincided with the country’s aggressive neoliberal efforts to expand its
economic territories by ratifying multiple free trade agreements, especially
with the U.S. in 2007.
While the meaning of cultural hybridity is always in flux with multiple
interpretations, I examine how it helps K-pop enjoy popularity and profit in
post-IMF neoliberal Korea, where American hegemony has permeated in
virtually every corner. Since hybridization is constituted and contested in a
complex overdetermination of power, and local sensitivity should be the core
quality of genuine hybridity with its “mutant result of fusion and intermix-
ture” (Gilroy 1993, 6), I investigate whether K-pop exercises a cultural com-
 Between Hybridity and Hegemony in K-Pop’s Global Popularity 45

mand of locality that is reflective of Korean people’s everyday lives in its

creative expression. In other words, since music is one of the most salient
sites for hybridization as either cultural exchange or commodification (Heb-
dige 1987; Lazarus 1999), hybridity in K-pop must be discussed within con-
crete cultural, economic, political, and social backgrounds of production and
by its actual content.
While Korea became a major non-Western country that commands ex-
ports of diverse cultural products since the 2000s (Jin 2016), whether or not
K-pop contains local sentiments and creative characteristics is an open ques-
tion that warrants critical examination. Moreover, considering that Korea is
subject to the U.S.’s desires and influence and its popular culture has grown
within American popular culture references since 1945 (Fuhr 2017; Lie
2015; Yoshimi 2003), the existing cultural hybridity discourse misses Ko-
rea’s unequal relationship with the United States. With this asymmetry in
mind, it is imperative to scrutinize cultural hybridity as a byproduct of cultu-
ral hegemony and a constitutive result of sociocultural and politico-economic
arrangements between two countries. Concerning Aijaz Ahmad’s (1995) cor-
respondence between postcoloniality and hybridity, by neglecting historical
realities of inequalities in resources and developments, hybridity in K-pop
literature exaggerates a mere locality of cultural production: By doing so, it
neglects that K-pop stays inside the modus operandi of Western cultural
production to the extent that domestic and “metropolitan sections of [neolib-
eral] capital can be integrated” (12) culturally. In this respect, as examined in
chapter two, K-pop should be understood as a specific site of emergence that
bears earlier histories and experiences in the structural asymmetry of power,
resource, and privileges.
To that end, I investigate whether K-pop fulfills the main purpose of
cultural hybridization, that is, an active negotiation with global cultural hege-
mony for a creative alternative, 1) by historical and political economic analy-
ses of the K-pop industry, and 2) by textual analyses of exemplary K-pop
music videos, SNSD’s “Gee” and “The Boys.” By doing so, I strive to
understand K-pop’s cultural hybridity in terms of both its intrinsic quality
and its content to test whether hybridity in K-pop creates new, local creative
sensibility that “is free from U.S. domination” (Jin 2016) and within structu-
ral contexts of the culture industry. As Kellner (1995) advocates a multi-
perspective approach for more “comprehensive and inclusive approaches to
culture” (174), this method helps overcome an increasing divide between
descriptive studies of media texts and critical, systematic investigation into a
structure of media production, circulation, and consumption. Thus, with a
combination of political economy of the media, critical textual analysis, and
investigation into socio-ideological effects of the cultural genre within the
existing networks of power and domination, I endeavor to understand the
genre as a cultural manifestation of Korea’s extensive neoliberalization,
46 Chapter 3

which plays a referential role in individuals’ leisure activity, socialization,

identity formation, and value system. Subsequently, I hope to provide con-
structive critique that helps further the growth of the K-pop industry and the
quality of its content.

U.S. HEGEMONY IN THE FORMATION OF KOREAN SOCIETY

Korean society can be dissected through trajectories of Americanization be-

cause American military, economic, political, and cultural influences have
been intertwined and have worked simultaneously since the U.S. Army
landed to establish a military government in 1945 (Cumings 2005; Hart-
Landsberg 1998). A majority of Koreans believe the U.S. is the national
savior from the Communist invasion (the Korean War), from poverty
through economic aid, and from premodernity through technology and indus-
trialization. Accordingly, the U.S. has been considered more than just an
advanced Western country, rather a mythical utopia, which becomes part and
parcel of the Korean people’s collective imagination, desire, and memory
(Kroes 1999; Lie 2015). In this respect, Korean culture and society have been
in a volatile process of “hybridization” with the U.S. to the extent that
American culture, as a constellation of American values, identities, and tradi-
tions, permeates and is conceived as Koreans’ recognition and expectation of
a better world. In regards to emergences and successes of various Korean
popular music genres and styles since 1945, when the nation was “liberated”
from Japanese empire but soon occupied by the U.S., American popular
music and culture, which sprouted from the U.S. military bases and camp
towns, have constantly been influential, if not determining (Fuhr 2017).
While popular music itself is a cause and an effect of the industrialization
and commodification of music, the post-Korean War popular music in Korea
was oriented to American GIs as the chief consumers who “avidly embraced
formal and informal offerings of reset and relaxation, from sexual services to
musical entertainment” (Lie 2015, 31). For example, Motown’s girl groups,
as a cultural icon of American affluence and global success, were replicated
in Korea in the 50s and 60s while the Korean spinoffs were mainly available
to American GIs who suffered from homesickness and were desperate for
their native culture. While one could argue Korean girl groups could be a
local or hybridized version of American cultural ingenuity, we should pay
closer attention to whether or not Korea’s local form has been successful in
addressing its innate needs and tastes while maintaining cultural autonomy or
identity against the still dominant cultural, economic, and political American
hegemony. While local musicians/performers “dressed and comported them-
selves in line with American expectations . . . in the American zone of
[economic, ideological, political, and militaristic] influence, not only in the
 Between Hybridity and Hegemony in K-Pop’s Global Popularity 47

United States . . . but also across its informal empires—Japan, Vietnam” (Lie
2015, 32), Korean popular music, no matter how much it has been hybri-
dized, has retain a fundamental asymmetric reliance on American hegemony.
Since U.S. popular culture has commanded global hegemony, for Korean
culture industries, emulating American pop values and systems provides a
better chance of success with less market risk. Simultaneously, a localization
of cultural production has been efficiently promoted as a part of transnational
media companies’ strategy to mitigate local resistance against imperialistic
practices of neoliberalism. In other words, localization strategy helps
American hegemony deeply penetrate Korea’s cultural domain by perpetuat-
ing and naturalizing American cultural and business values, structures, and
practices (Jin 2007). While classical imperialism coopted local elites, today’s
transnational media conglomerates “rule through other local capitals, rule
alongside and in partnership with other economic and political elites” (Hall
1997, 28). Rather than destroying local culture, they operate through it in
their localizing strategies. Leaders in K-pop agencies can be regarded as an
example of the “dominated group’s internalization” (J. K. Lee 2010, 30) of
transnational capitalism’s business mantra. This is opposite to the growing
recognition of peripheral countries’ competence to produce and market their
indigenous culture globally as countercultural imperialism (Chadha and Ka-
voori 2000; Sinclair and Harrison 2004; Sonwalkar 2001). Thus, Doobo
Shim’s (2006) appreciation of the surprising box-office success of Shiri, a
local action blockbuster as an alternative to Hollywood, misses the important
fact that the production of local films has become subject to Americanized,
neoliberal financial speculation. It is a more sophisticated, effective way to
control the local cultural domain with less resistance.
In line with America’s ascendancy as the sole superpower and Korea’s
subjection to the IMF’s SAPs, Korean society has increasingly been reformu-
lated by neoliberalism, an American version of global capitalism (Park
2004). The IMF’s all-out assault on the Korean economy allowed foreign
speculative capital to ravage Korean capital and financial infrastructure to the
extent that the latter’s stability and autonomy become dependent on the for-
mer’s mercy. However, the SAP is a matter of a more important “cultural
problem—the problem of defining identity of how to redefine the concept of
‘we’” (Park 2004, 154). It is my contention that, while dealing with the
identity crisis, neoliberal canons like commercialism and competition have
infiltrated into the psyche of Koreans, and popular culture is the most effec-
tive tool to spread neoliberal governmentality. For example, BC Card, a
Korean credit card company, caused a national sensation with its 2001 adver-
tising campaign with a slogan of “Ladies and gentlemen, you all get rich!”
Considering that Korea’s industrialization process coincided with its modern
identity formation, the advertisement sums up how Korea’s sociocultural
value is morphed into crude desire of financial success. In this grand value
48 Chapter 3

transformation, we witness a growing commercialization of culture, in which

the rise of K-pop is one of the most telling examples.
Regarding cultural production as a mode of transnational capitalism
(Hannerz 1997; Nordenstreng 2001), I examined in previous chapters how
K-pop was a part of Korea’s neoliberal strategy that marketized cultural
commodities as an export item when the local economy was devastated by
the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. This strategy is similar to the way in which
the Korean popular music industry began in the post-Korean War era, when
local musicians performed at various clubs for U.S. soldiers (P. H. Kim and
Shin 2010; Lie 2015). K-pop stemmed from when Korea’s industrial de-
mands had shifted from a manual workforce to affective, neoliberal service
labor in the 1990s. By the industry’s aggressive replication of the traditional
business strategies used by Korea’s labor-intensive manufacturing conglom-
erates in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the contemporary K-pop industry
produces quickly profitable, homogenized, disposable cultural commodities
from a highly concentrated, hierarchal production system that integrates in-
house procedures of artist recruiting, training, image making, composing,
management, contracting, and album production. By discipline through years
of training, especially docility-utility (Foucault 1995), the industry colonizes
its talents by controlling and subordinating their individualities and charac-
ters to its entrepreneurial goals. Idols, especially female idols, are under an
agency’s perennial control to the extent that they are forced to go on an
extreme diet, surrender any use of personal communication devices, and even
endure corporal punishment in a dormitory training center. To maintain an
appealing image to the public, female idols are strictly prohibited from hav-
ing romantic relationships. Through audition and an extraordinarily long
trainee period to debut, K-pop female idols are conditioned as an obedient,
disciplined, and sexualized labor force, directly manufactured by male corpo-
rate elites to serve the interests and needs of capital. Rampant, explicit sexu-
alization of female idols is a case in point.
Thus, K-pop delineates how hegemony employs an ideological double
play in local culture production. As much as it allows “counter-hegemonic”
practices on a local level, it masks and perpetuates the dominant hegemony
by sophisticated predatory labor conditions in K-pop production and, in turn,
establishes the local culture industry as a cultural hegemon. In this respect,
exerting cultural hegemony through exporting cultural products is an old
version of cultural imperialism; rather, in neoliberal globalization, indirect
ways are a more effective and “sustainable” practice of controlling local
cultural production, instituting cultural hybridity as a code name for a new
phase of cultural hegemony. Practiced through local elites’ voluntary inter-
nalization of American hegemony in consumerism, commodification of cul-
ture, and sexualization of femininity (Schiller 1996), the K-pop industry
complicates the evasive characteristic of Americanization. With mechanistic
 Between Hybridity and Hegemony in K-Pop’s Global Popularity 49

interpretation of cultural hybridization that fetishizes local cultural produc-

tion, the dominant K-pop scholars mask neoliberal hegemony.

HYBRIDITY: THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF TRANSNATIONAL

CAPITALISM

According to Homi Bhabha (1994), hybridity comes from the in-

betweenness of elite emigrants’ national and cultural identities. They have to
constantly (re)negotiate themselves, engaging in a mutual, simultaneous re-
construction and destruction, a process that nullifies a canonical, essentialist
notion of cultural authenticity. Literature on K-pop’s hybridity focuses on its
dexterity in mixing the ideal of American pop culture with what is consid-
ered to be Koreanness like Han, a centuries-long pent-up feeling of remorse,
high sensibility, and Confucian family values, as an alternative for Asians to
seek emotional and cultural closeness. While K-pop takes the dominant
American pop canons, Woongjae Ryoo (2009) indicates that K-pop retains a
“fuller affinity for the region’s character” (140) in terms of its capacity to
express soulfulness. Since American culture is too foreign and Japanese cul-
ture carries colonial connotations, Asian people’s enthusiasm for K-pop is
rooted in their desire for shared temporal, historical, and cultural values and
experiences (Iwabuchi 2001).
Concrete hybridity is a result of local agency’s dialectic interaction with
the hegemonic power of transnational forces by “mitigating social tensions,
expressing the polyvalence of human creativity, and providing a context of
empowerment in which individuals and communities are agents in their own
destiny” (Kraidy 2005, 161, emphasis added). As much as colonialism repro-
duces or sustains itself through hybridization with the colonized, hybridity is
not only an integral part of colonial discourse but also the colonized’s chance
to resist the colonialism (Parry 1994). In this respect, rather than a mere
existence of hybridity, a manifestation of critical agency and cultural locality
in hybridization is the most important qualification (Brah and Coombes
2000). Since cultural/aesthetic practices “develop and emerge as types of
implicit (i.e., nonpropositional or nonverbal) knowledge [which is] created in
response to lived experiences in a particular social location,” appreciating
cultural works without paying due attention to dominant institutional struc-
tures of cultural production results in “epistemic violence” (James 2016). Put
differently, to correctly understand how cultural hybridity is rendered within
the global structure of cultural, economic, political, and military hegemonies,
one has to scrutinize a concrete set of cultural production structures that
engender different qualities of hybridity and in turn whether a concrete hy-
bridity reflects or overcomes the dominant hegemony.
50 Chapter 3

However, I indicate that there is an embryo of theoretical complicity in

consumerist capitalism in Bhabha’s (1994) fallacy, which replaces imperial-
ist connotations with a mere semiotic practice of cultural consumption. Like
Janice Radway (1991) celebrates the symbolic, individual pleasure of resis-
tance from reading romance novels without practicing any real-life struggle
against patriarchal structures, Bhabha exults in the subversive power of the
subaltern’s cultural practices against the imperial domination of cultural,
economic, and political ideologies. Thus, to avoid this empty, illusory cele-
bration of cultural consumption, one must critically dissect the political econ-
omy of local culture production structured or motivated by transnational
capitalism so that we do not fall into “endorsing the cultural claims of trans-
national capital itself” (A. Ahmad 1995, 12). To correctly reinscribe the
social imagination and “cultures of postcolonial contra-modernity” (Bhabha
1994, 6, emphasis in original), one must address a changing mode of transna-
tional capitalist cultural production. Otherwise, cultural hybridity that origi-
nally is colonial subalterns’ transformative political project loses “revolu-
tionary potential since it is part of the very discourse of bourgeois capitalism
and modernity” (Van der Veer 1997, 104). With the undebatable fact that
American pop culture has gained global dominance, no matter how innova-
tive or creative K-pop can be, it is still referenced to American pop as an
archetype of global pop styles and genres (P. H. Kim and Shin, 2010; Lie
2012, 2015). In this respect, Jan Nederveen Pieterse (1995) maintains that
relationships of “power and hegemony are inscribed and reproduced within
hybridity . . . [and] hegemony is not merely reproduced but refigured in the
process of hybridization” (57). Thus, to correctly appreciate how K-pop is
culturally hybrid, one must understand how the music genre has exerted its
local, critical agency within its concrete contexts of production, promotion,
and consumption.
In other words, for cultural hybridity to be successful in articulating local
sentiments and agency, K-pop must reconfigure and represent lived experi-
ences of the local population. While the music’s look and style are sophisti-
cated and cosmopolitan, they do not necessarily represent “local melodies,
current township lingo, and topical subject matter” (Allen 2003, 237; Born
and Hesmondhalgh 2000). Put differently, while K-pop has excessively in-
corporated American popular music genres, such as electronic dance music,
rap, and R & B, it is doubtful whether the musicians have maintained their
cultural autonomy against the neoliberal business imperative of the industry.
As the consistent rampant practice in K-pop, dissociation between creative
production of the music and the singers/performers who put on a show indi-
cates a negative perspective on the meaning of hybridity in the music genre.
In this regard, rather than a dialectic, critical, and expressive response to
sociocultural and politico-economic changes since the 1997 Financial Crisis,
K-pop is a vernacular articulation of the hegemonic culture industry’s modus
 Between Hybridity and Hegemony in K-Pop’s Global Popularity 51

operandi, which marketizes the previously unmarketable. With fundamental

asymmetries and dependencies, as much as the K-pop industry promotes its
locality of musical production, which aims for exports/global consumption,
ironically it deepens cultural dependence on American hegemony (Guilbault
et al. 1993). In turn, the current discourse on hybridity in K-pop “ideological-
ly justifies, naturalizes and cements the hierarchical and exploitative relation-
ships . . . [and] continues to mediate Northern metropolitan hegemony”
(Stokes 2004, 60; Waterman 1990).
Therefore, the current hybridity literature retains what Aijaz Ahmad
(1995) criticizes postcolonial intelligentsias for: a “characteristic loss of his-
torical depth and perspective” to “rapid realignments of political [economic]
hegemony on the global scale” (16). Without critical agency, hybridity in K-
pop means “voluntary” subsumption into the American popular culture hege-
mony, which is already determined by histories of asymmetries (Araeen
2000). Otherwise, this blind celebration only confers an “unlimited freedom
of a globalized marketplace . . . [where] commodified cultures are equal only
to the extent of their commodification” (A. Ahmad 1995,17). In this respect,
without any reference to Korean people’s common aspirations, experiences,
feelings, and lives, K-pop reduces them to lowest common denominators,
that is, addictive beats and rhythms, and explicit sexualization of female
bodies for a universal neoliberal market transaction.
However, the dominant scholarship (Ryoo 2009; D. Shim 2006) cele-
brates K-pop’s global popularity as an amelioration of fear from Western
cultural imperialism, and considers hybridity a major tool for cultural
counterbalance to Western cultural hegemony. Claiming that there are multi-
directional cultural productions from conventional peripheries, Woongjae
Ryoo (2009) boldly maintains that the phenomenon is a “clear indication of
new global, and regional, transformations in the cultural arena” (147) as a
sign of overcoming American cultural hegemony. Furthermore, while ne-
glecting the politico-economics of K-pop production that has been dispropor-
tionately conditioned by American cultural and technical criteria, Ryoo ad-
mittedly attributes the K-pop industry’s implementation of the American
standard of media liberalization and culture industry to K-pop’s success. In
this respect, Ryoo’s (2009) dramatization of local production should be re-
garded as what Arjun Appadurai (1990) criticizes as “production fetishism,”
an illusion of local cultural productive power in contemporary transnational
capitalism, disguising “translocal capital, transnational earning-flows, global
management and often faraway workers” (306). Likewise, while the original
use of Hallyu indicated how local Chinese audiences enjoyed Korean popular
culture, its current usage romanticizes and fetishizes the place of production,
which is concerned more with the local site of production than a genuine
local sensibility in the hybridized cultural production and concrete individual
appreciation of K-pop overseas.
52 Chapter 3

For Doobo Shim (2006), K-pop’s hybridity was epitomized by the emer-
gence of Seo Taiji and Boys, who mixed various Western music genres and
invented a unique Korean flavor. Appropriating American genre formulae,
the band successfully exemplified how to exert local agency’s active, crea-
tive capacity to express local sentiments, issues, and traditions and in turn
engendered a broad practical transformation in Korea’s soundscape. In
retrospect, at the band’s astronomical debut in 1992, no one would prove a
plagiarism allegation of its single “I Know” from a German band, Milli
Vanilli’s “Girl You Know It’s True.” However, over artistic innovation,
Shim’s cultural hybridity focuses on industrial transformation: expanding
Korea’s music market scale, boosting album sales, fortifying record compa-
ny’s roles and, most importantly, heralding a birth of Korea’s talent agencies
and the manufacturing of current K-pop idols. This industrial nature of hy-
bridity is consummated by Lee Sooman, the founder and CEO of SM Enter-
tainment, who invented K-pop’s star-manufacturing industry. Determined to
“transplant” MTV-style American pop music to Korea after encountering
Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative” in the early 1980s (Seabrook 2012), Lee
has extensively researched and experimented on a financially profitable idol
group project, exerting a total control on idols’ personal and professional
lives. And this factory model of K-pop production achieved market success,
culminating in SM Entertainment’s accomplishment by being listed on the
KOSDAQ stock market as the first time of its kind (D. Shim 2006). Thus, K-
pop is a new economic model that procures a faster, higher profit margin than
the traditional manufacturing industry (e.g., automobiles) as a “distinct spa-
tiotemporal configuration” of Korea’s neoliberal economy.
In this respect, the current K-pop scholarship on hybridity is severely
“limited to describing the Korean mainstream media’s co-opting of a hybrid
strategy” (D. Shim 2006, 40) and an exemplar of transnational capitalism’s
strategic rhetoric that “actively and systematically seeks to capitalize on
cultural fusion” (Kraidy 2005, 90). Likewise, rather than an “unpredictable,
fluid, and creative form of hybridization that works to sustain local identities
in the global context,” (Ryoo 2009, 114, emphasis in original), current K-pop
idol groups, as a systematically administered, factory-produced commodity,
are formulaic by using American cultural hegemony, which is a hypersexual-
ization of (female) bodies and glorifies consumerism to catch audiences’
attention to create economic profit.
Under this economic imperative, K-pop idols are deployed into a broad
spectrum of different commercial activities, such as endorsements based on
their assigned imageries and perceived fan demographics. Having multiple
members in K-pop groups is not so much for artistic necessities as for profit-
making imperatives. For this reason, K-pop idols are both corporeally visual,
which comes not only from their skillful choreographies but also their manu-
factured physical attractiveness to commercialize girlish, fair, delicate, cute,
 Between Hybridity and Hegemony in K-Pop’s Global Popularity 53

sexy faces and tall, slim, and well-toned bodies. If some members do not
score expected commercial profit, they are either replaced with others or
forced to undergo more harsh tasks, including plastic surgery. In this grand
scheme of neoliberal hegemony, K-pop female idols’ young, amicable, sexu-
alized bodies convey “the political unconscious” (Jameson 1981, 142), ex-
emplifying what is important, what to think, and how to govern oneself. With
Asia’s rapidly growing consumerist appetite, especially in China, K-pop has
profited from applying the hegemonic industrial practice of market research
and commodity development by “talent management, financing and market-
ing, including such characteristics as quick and sensational sell, wide promo-
tion, youth appeal, corporate synergy and cross-promotion” (Nam 2013,
218). SM Entertainment’s SM Town Concerts in Los Angeles, Paris, and
other Asian countries are a case in point.
As an aesthetization of neoliberal market frenzy, which omnivorously
searches for anything profitable, hybridization in K-pop is a celebration of
boundless market expansion in diverse markets. SNSD’s music videos indi-
cate its trajectory of localizing marketing strategy targeted to various profit-
able audiences, using the temptress troupe to appeal to American audiences
as the marketing strategy of “The Boys.” However, with its failure in both
Asian and American fandoms, SNSD now tries to recapture its traditional
Asian fan base with a tried and true mixture of good, innocent girl imagery
and temptress imagery in “I Got a Boy,” exemplifying that the group is a
synecdoche of hegemonic globalization that “cannot proceed without learn-
ing to live with and working through difference” (Hall 1997, 31). In sum, K-
pop’s hybridity in neoliberalism is a slick business strategy to market
pseudo-Koreanness that is stylized, packaged, and commodified for global
consumption, which has less to do with real lived experiences, feelings,
imaginations, inspirations, or histories of Korean people. However, the main
purpose of this book is not to blame SNSD for its failure to truthfully repre-
sent Koreanness in K-pop, but to indicate sociocultural phenomena caused
by the industry’s factory-style manufacturing, which is strategically deter-
mined by financial interests of industry elites, and in turn alienates musicians
and audiences alike.
Therefore, K-pop’s hybridity has to be understood not as a cultural term,
but as an industrial strategy. Also, it is congruent with the post-IMF Korean
government’s cultural policy that aims to promote a commercial competitive-
ness of the cultural, while the pre-IMF one aimed for mitigating the negative
impacts of Western culture such as commercialism, materialism, violence,
and sensuality (Yim 2002). Thus, if there is anything about K-pop’s hybrid-
ity, it would be the industry’s capacity to produce hybrid cultural commod-
ities that appeal to global consumers (S. Lee 2012; H. Shin 2009).
54 Chapter 3

SNSD’S AMERICAN DEBUT: STRATEGIC MARKETING OF ASIAN

FEMALE SEXUALITY

Analyzing SNSD’s stylistic and thematic developments in terms of Kristin

Lieb’s (2013) life cycle model for female popular music stars, I reconsider
that SNSD’s debut fully embodies American cultural hegemony and con-
forms to patriarchal capitalism. To satisfy and further consolidate the patriar-
chal gender hierarchy indicated in Laura Mulvey’s (1975) notion of the male
gaze, SNSD has maneuvered its gendered looks and behaviors:

In order to become and remain a dominant female popular music star, one
must start off as a good girl; “cute,” “innocent,” “stable,” and “fun.” From
these she cycles into a temptress phase, where she and her handlers make her
sexuality and “hotness” more salient in her public image. (Lieb 2013, 90,
emphasis in original)

Actually, with “The Boys,” SNSD’s original image as pure, innocent, and
cute teenage girls evolved into a collective image of an aggressive subject/
object of sexual temptation, donned with sexually provocative and form-
fitting clothes. SNSD commodifies female bodies by carefully crafting eroti-
cized cuteness and playful sexualization, meeting expectations from both a
patriarchal gender hierarchy and neoliberal commercialization of sexuality:
Being innocent and sexualized at the same time is a hallmark of K-pop
female idols’ positionality.
With SM Entertainment’s transnational pool of composers collecting the
most marketable songs for international audiences, SNSD’s American debut
project had an in-depth degree of foreign intervention from its production
stages, such as American composers Teddy Riley and Busbee. Entering its
temptress phase, SNSD’s U.S. debut was deliberately constructed to market
sexualized Korean females to various U.S. audiences: an older demographic
of men on The Late Show with David Letterman and women of various ages
on Live with Kelly. The main rationale to use those talk shows was based on
successful Korean experiences with K-pop idols’ guest appearances on varie-
ty TV shows, which have successfully served their promotional efforts. Stra-
tegically, SNSD attempted to market the traditionally strong purchase-power
audience segment in the U.S., just as its previous mega hit, “Gee,” was
possible mainly due to obtaining adult male fans. Thus, Letterman’s show, as
one of the longest running late-night talk shows, would be a nice American
venue to further SNSD’s global market reach.
Comparing SNSD’s two music videos, “Gee” and “The Boys,” I analyze
SM Entertainment’s strategic manipulation of SNSD’s image from the good
girls into the temptresses to the point that it might become applicable to the
American audience. As SNSD’s first major hit and emblematic of the
 Between Hybridity and Hegemony in K-Pop’s Global Popularity 55

group’s cute looks, “Gee” was originally intended for local consumption in
Korea, but spontaneously became an international hit through SNSD’s online
fandom and YouTube. While “Gee” appeals to Korea’s traditional model of
aegyo—submissive, vulnerable, and erotic femininity—the most prevalent
theme in SNSD’s American debut is the Dragon Lady, an aggressive, visibly
sexual (and sexualized) domineering female as the temptress. An examina-
tion of BoA, 2 SNSD’s direct predecessor, and her U.S. debut with the music
video for “Eat You Up,” further supports my argument that SNSD’s
American debut was a result of SM Entertainment’s strategy of marketing
Korean female bodies to the extent that American cultural “symbols and
myths have been translated into an international iconographic language, a
visual lingua franca” (Kroes 1999, 470). Even after experiencing failure in
BoA’s 2008 U.S. debut, SM Entertainment’s strategy to fit the Western
imaginary of Asian women is still evident in SNSD’s debut, since it is struc-
tural in the K-pop industry’s formulaic business strategy. Emulating the Jap-
anese idol-manufacturing system, which prioritizes appearance and visuality,
SM Entertainment is obsessed with making the idols attractive and appealing
to American audiences. Furthermore, as the Japanese culture industry strate-
gically disposed of its local cultural characteristics to market to Western
audiences (Lu 2008), K-pop has also de-Koreanized its content for its global
marketing ploy (E. Y. Jung 2009; Lie 2012). Thus, both BoA and SNSD
could not provide American audiences with unique Koreanness as a creative
hybrid experience while emphasizing a superficial adaptation of hegemonic
American genres and styles; however, this seeming hybridity was not created
by the idols (or performers), but manufactured by K-pop industry leaders’
desire to expand the business territory and their imaginaries of the idols’
marketability to American audiences.
SNSD’s “Gee” music video was released on January 5, 2009. The song,
dance, wardrobe, hand motions, and facial expressions of the girls conform
to the Korean concept of aegyo, or infantilized cuteness and eroticism, deco-
rated by the members’ dexterous exercise of girlish behaviors, like clenching
their fists around their cheeks combined with shy smiles and shrugging
shoulders. By using patriarchal female decency and coyness, the “Gee” mu-
sic video was able to appeal to pan-Asian audiences. For instance, “Gee”
shows no direct contact between the girls and their crush, and their dance and
outfits are subtly sexy in a delicate, girl-next-door way without showing any
cleavage or excessive bare skin. Aegyo in “Gee,” as an example of cultural
proximity in Confucian Asia, retains broader socio-politico-economic impli-
cations. For example, there are parallels between aegyo and Japanese kawaii,
since both are gendered performances executed by women and girls for the
benefit of male affective and sexual needs. As a symbolic compensation for
Korean males’ depressed self-confidence, aegyo has been promoted in gen-
der relations, expression, and style since Korea’s economic devastation in
56 Chapter 3

1997, similar to kawaii during Japan’s economic depression. In this respect,

SNSD’s other hit, “Genie,” whose theme is based on a Disney cartoon char-
acter—Genie, the royal servant who realizes its master’s dream—symboli-
cally soothes adult male fans’ depressed morale in Korea’s post-IMF econo-
my.
Produced by famous American singer-songwriter and producer Teddy
Riley, “The Boys” was released by SNSD on December 19, 2011, in Korean,
followed by the English version on December 20, 2011. The music video is
devoid of any storyline and instead focuses on the visuality of the idols’
dance moves. Also, the video’s monochromatic scheme and cold colors, like
cobalt blues, silver, and black, play an important role in projecting SNSD’s
mature, sophisticated, and sexy aura. It is my contention that SNSD’s U.S.
market strategy hinges on its embodiment of Western racial fantasies, that is,
the Dragon Lady image of an aggressive, visibly sexual (and sexualized) and
domineering female (a temptress) with a hint of the China Doll image, a
submissive and vulnerable female with a wholesome, erotic aura (the good
girl). By incorporating nuances of American individualism through various
outfits and close-ups, SNSD deliberately attempted to relate the video to the
American audience, focusing on sexualized bodies through sexually sugges-
tive dance moves and flirtatious behaviors, such as batting their eyes, wink-
ing, caressing their faces, and tilting their pelvises to the side and backward,
which highlighted their curved body shapes. Undulating, maiden-like body
movements objectified their bodies as an object of male gaze and fantasy. Its
emphasis on slim, elongated legs, highlighted by signature short pants with
arms akimbo, fetishizes female body parts as a commodity that invites a
sexual fantasy of male audiences to the extent that SNSD strategically uses
hot leather pants, associated with sadomasochistic sexuality, accentuating
sexual power or independence. Using English lyrics as an instrument to
reconstruct Asian female singers’ sexual identity (Benson 2013), SNSD im-
plemented a more active, sexualized femininity. Compared with more sub-
missive lyrics in Korean such as “You are my hero” or “Show your power,”
an English version retains an assertive, subjective femininity as the song’s
chorus repeats, “Girls bring the boys out.” Conformity to U.S. cultural hege-
mony is most evident in the video’s “packaging” and production by Teddy
Riley. The differences between its Korean and English videos highlight
SNSD’s overall U.S. debut strategy, which focused on the girls as sexualized
(and racialized) objects rather than individual artists. The most significant
difference between the videos occurs at 4:17, as the English version changes
perspectives, zooms in more, and applies a lighter filter so that the girls’
clothes appear more provocative.
Thus, cultural hybridity in SNSD’s U.S. debut was a subjugation of the
Korean female artists to the sum of the Western imagination of submissive
Asian femininity as “phantasms of orientalness” (Shimakawa 2002, 17).
 Between Hybridity and Hegemony in K-Pop’s Global Popularity 57

Rather than each member’s musical talent, SNSD promoted lively, sexual
imagery of appealing, beautiful young ladies, as “looks are actually the most
important aspect of a female pop star’s [success]” (Lieb 2013, 102). Consid-
ering the group’s formation with nine young girls with different image and
talent profiles, SNSD realizes Negus’s (1999) term “portfolio management,”
or flexible branding for an open interpretation as a risk diversification strate-
gy to reduce market uncertainty.
However, somewhat divergent features suggest that SNSD is not a mere
replica of hypersexualized Asian women in Western media, as indicated by
Shimizu (2007). As a representation of high-class femininity, characterized
by their slim, well-toned bodies and fancy dresses, SNSD is strategically
positioned to market elegant and chaste Asian femininity with a hint of active
sexual appetite as a new cultural commodity in the American market. While
the girls are wearing different outfits and shades of color, there is a unifying
sexual, yet modest, subtle, and elegant, seduction theme that occurs by re-
taining conservative Korean values. For example, proclaiming themselves as
the goddess Athena, SNSD is proud to help male counterparts with power
and wisdom, reaffirming the submissive, subordinate nature of traditional,
patriarchal femininity.
As examined so far, hybridity in SNSD’s American debut exists in SM
Entertainment’s market strategy that appropriates cultural components from
diverse localities. While the life cycle model is a strategic adaptation over
female singers’ age, SNSD’s American debut indicates how the K-pop indus-
try deploys a different ethnicity and nationality as an appealing point in
pursuit of earning the American male gaze, replicating tried and true
American cultural hegemony. By marketing an all-English song with a guest
performance on the Late Show with David Letterman, SNSD attempted two
things at once: breaking into the U.S. pop music market by using stereotypes
of Asian female sexuality, and marketing the event as a symbol of their
popularity and talent in an effort to further consolidate their domestic market
share.
For this vapid, formulaic practice of cultural hybridity that is indistin-
guishable from hegemonic American popular music, SNSD’s debut received
a lukewarm reception from U.S. media, as opposed to SME’s statement that
it was critically acclaimed. A similar pattern occurred when Korean media
claimed a “success” of the SM Town Live World Tour in Paris in June 2011
as K-pop’s foray into Europe; however, French local media were skeptical or
ignorant of the event. Analyses of various U.S. media between February 1
and March 31, 2012, revealed that the prevailing sentiment views SNSD
through racial and sexual stereotypes of Asian women’s bodies, as seen
through the Western male gaze. For example, an article from the Internation-
al Business Times features a picture of SNSD with famous actor Bill Murray
taken right after SNSD’s stage performance on the Late Show with David
58 Chapter 3

Letterman. This feature is not about the group’s musical talent or perfor-
mance, but a glorification of their sexualized bodies. As a simulation of a
man’s womanizing fantasy, Murray is posed in the midst of nine attractive,
young, exotic Korean women who are presenting cute, intimate, and tempt-
ing body language around and with Murray. The Wall Street Journal covers
SNSD’s live performance on Letterman by focusing on SNSD as uniform
sexual objects, characterized as sexualized and alluring Asian temptresses. In
this regard, quite contrary to the notion of hybridity as a quintessential result
of local agency’s dialectic interaction with the hegemonic power of trans-
national forces, SNSD’s U.S. debut suggests that the group used the Western
fantasy surrounding Asian women’s racialized sexuality and fetishism.
While the Western media focused on SNSD’s debut by portraying its
members as sexual objects, Korean counterparts focused on the group’s
achievement in the U.S. as a result of their hard work and genuine talent.
This disparity may be SME’s intentional marketing strategy to appeal to the
Western audience by capitalizing on the culture industry’s “ever more vora-
cious desire for all things ‘different’” (A. N. Ahmad 2001, 80) while main-
taining that SNSD, as Korea’s national girls, earned their success on the
world’s biggest music platform through cosmopolitan “motivation toward
upward mobility in transitional society from Asian or developing economies
to modern and Western economies” (Jang and Kim 2013, 95).
Therefore, whether it spotlights aegyo in “Gee” or girl power in “The
Boys,” SNSD is a commercial entity of Korea’s patriarchal neoliberalism
that exemplifies an important set of interactions between the commodifica-
tion of female sexuality and the industrialization of popular music. Specifi-
cally, the modus operandi of SNSD revolves around how female bodies and
appearances have constantly been redefined and updated by commercial me-
dia’s marketization of sexy, attractive female images (Frost 2005; Gill and
Scharff 2011; McRobbie 2009). In turn, Korean media’s promotion of “girl
power” or “female sexual empowerment” is a type of hegemonic manipula-
tion that defines how a sexual subject should look and provides a technology
of sexiness in the given patriarchal capitalism (Gill 2008). In this respect,
SNSD represents a comprehensive marketing package of young, attractive
female talents that has transformed each member’s personality into a neolib-
eral commodity targeted to various audience segments, from teen girls to
middle-aged men (Y. Kim 2011). Consequently, rather than cultural hybrid-
ity, SNDS’s American debut is an embodiment of American hegemony
through “Western technology, the concentration of capital, the concentration
of techniques, the concentration of advanced labor . . . and the stories and the
imagery of Western society” (Hall 1997, 28). What makes SNSD’s U.S.
debut noteworthy comes not from its cultural, performative contribution, but
from its marketing strategy that conforms to how transnational capitalism has
implemented globalization.
 Between Hybridity and Hegemony in K-Pop’s Global Popularity 59

FROM “GEE” TO “THE BOYS”: SURROGATE OF U.S. CULTURAL

HEGEMONY

In fact, Korea has become one of the strongest producers of local culture by a
deft exercise of hybridity—blending the global and the local. The total reve-
nue K-pop has generated from exporting to various countries proves its suc-
cess as a new powerhouse in the cultural counterflow. However, the industry
has not overcome a stark asymmetry of cultural, economic, and political
resources and influences between Korea and the U.S.; rather, it keeps condi-
tioning K-pop to further perpetuate American hegemony. Still, K-pop is not a
mere replica of American pop culture; rather, it is the product of a systematic
value structure that has conditioned Korean society to consider anything
American as the most desirable ideal to be emulated. In this respect, Dal
Yong Jin (2016) aptly maintains that “transnational cultural flow of local
popular culture [itself] should not be an explanation for the flow of culture
from Korea” to other countries (59).
Therefore, a superficial analysis of cultural hybridity misses important
structural issues, like the political economy of the local media industry and
the highly elusive nature of hegemony within local sites of cultural produc-
tion. The neoliberal logic of commodifying the cultural, the growing transna-
tional flow of cultural commodities, and the governmental deregulation of
the media industry are major factors contributing to the K-pop phenomena.
In this respect, an uncritical, descriptive notion of cultural hybridity in the
current K-pop scholarship, for example, Doobo Shim (2006) and Woongjae
Ryoo (2009), is

placed at the service of a neoliberal economic order that respects no borders

and harbors no prejudice toward cultural and ethnic difference that can be
harnessed for [economic] growth . . . [by] a profit-driven strategy that actively
and systematically seeks to capitalize on cultural fusion and fluid identities.
(Kraidy 2005, 90)

Consequently, within the context of the asymmetrical relationship be-

tween two countries, the recent global popularity of K-pop should be under-
stood within Korea’s position in the U.S.’s model of neoliberal capitalism,
suggesting K-pop’s global popularity is a “detoured ‘return’ to the United
States” (J. K. Lee 2010, 31) by the Korean culture industry. In other words,
the popularity of K-pop in Asian countries can be described as an indirect
consumption of American pop music with Korean cultural embellishments:
“It is precisely because there isn’t very much ‘Korean’ in K-pop [that it] can
become such an easy ‘sell’ to consumers abroad” (Lie 2012, 361). As a kind
of self-Orientalist cultural production, cultural hybridity in SNSD’s
American debut case indicates the industry leaders “consciously or uncon-
60 Chapter 3

sciously make [their talents or idols] into, or see themselves, [as] the objects
of Western desire and imaginations” (Tobin 1992, 30) and have not been able
to (re)claim cultural sovereignty or autonomy that enables them to create
unique cultural hybridity in their music and performances by subjective,
critical, and creative reconstitution of Korea’s local imaginaries, sentiments,
and realities. Therefore, the biggest implication of SNSD’s U.S. debut is
twofold: K-pop is an active surrogate of American cultural hegemony and
hypercommercialism that rapaciously commodifies anything marketable, and
Korean society has become exponentially more Americanized while con-
fronting and adapting neoliberal doctrines since the 1997 Asian Financial
Crisis.

NOTES

1. A different version of this chapter was previously published in the International Journal
of Communication. Kim, G. (2017). Cultural Hybridity and Hegemony in K-pop’s Global
Popularity: A Critical Examination on Girls’ Generation’s American Debut. International Jour-
nal of Communication, 11, 2367–2386.
2. BoA’s single, “Eat You Up,” represents two different racialized and sexualized fantasies
of Asian women. BoA’s American debut music video, which initially focused on aegyo qual-
ities, received negative feedback from American audiences. SME remade the video, but the
sexy imagery was out of character with BoA’s previous Korean and Japanese videos; it empha-
sized the Dragon Lady imagery of aggressive, domineering female sexuality to accommodate
and appeal to Western fetishization of Asian women. However, BoA’s Asian fans criticized the
American version as too “Americanized” and focused on her dancing ability, and was more
wholesome (E. Y. Jung, 2009). Thus, SME’s abrupt attempt to market BoA in a different and
more sexualized way failed to attract the American market and alienated her existing fans.
 Chapter Four

Genealogy and Affective Economy of

K-Pop Female Idols
From Cute and Innocent, to Ambiguous Femininity, to
Explicit Sexualization

As a follow-up to chapter three, which structurally examined a trajectory of

hybridization in K-pop female idols’ representation, this chapter traces how
the idols have evolved in terms of their visual themes as a result of specific
cultural, economic, historical, and social events and backgrounds. Music is
an expression of sociopolitical (un)consciousness, and it helps us find out
what is going on in a given society. In this respect, Murray Schafer (1994)
maintains music is an “indicator of the age, revealing, for those who know
how to read its symptomatic messages, a means of fixing social and even
political events” (7). With this diagnostic function, music is a symbolic man-
ifestation of the conditions of cultural, economic, and political possibilities in
society. Like the sound of a mill represented an engine of economic growth
in an agricultural society, K-pop as the latest economic device for Korea’s
national economy plays the “centripetal sounds; they unify and regulate the
community” (56). From this point of view, I examine what messages K-pop
delivers to a general audience, how its meanings are constructed in the soci-
ety, and how we can better understand the nation through examining the
dominant cultural genre. As an important guide to “studying shifts in aural
habits and perceptions” as a condition of cognitive and cultural possibilities
(103), K-pop’s signature fast-paced, bombarding dance beats are a commer-
cial mix of aural brutality and fashionable refinement to the extent that it
overwhelms the nation’s other music genres as an aural monopoly. In this
respect, I examine how representational tonality of female idols has changed
61
62 Chapter 4

over time. Examining how female idols are (re)presented as an icon of the
music genre’s modus operandi, this chapter tries to map out how representa-
tions of female idols are corresponding to the changes of society’s given
norms and values.
With Dierdra Reber (2012), the current focus on affect over reason is a
manifestation of neoliberal episteme that “validates the bourgeois body pub-
lic as the new site and source of economic and political power” (63). As a
primary realm of neoliberal biopolitics, affects or affectionated bodies, as
either topic or optic, are constantly produced, circulated, and consumed as a
mode of the microphysics of power at the content-specific level and in the
discursive construction of K-pop. With the affective turn (Clough and Halley
2007), music videos of K-pop have largely formulated individuals as cultural
consumers who are driven to satisfy their affective needs and wants, which
are produced and promoted by neoliberal popular culture. Considering affect
as an “operational set of dispositions toward the self in the world given by
sensory perception, emotion, and feeling” (69), the hypervisual and affective
nature of K-pop music videos is a strategic device that encompasses “the said
as much as the unsaid” on how neoliberalism works in society (Foucault
1980, 194). By doing so, as an ensemble of discourse, institutions, and regu-
lations over cultural production, they serve a “dominant strategic function” to
address an “urgent need” of neoliberal Korea (195). In other words, what K-
pop videos do to individuals is a pleasurable pedagogy of neoliberal govern-
mentality that conditions them to learn and perceive the world by sensory
stimuli such as emotions: “Felt realities, sensed truths, guts that advise and
hearts that remember, tears and smiles are what have begun to reconstitute
social discourse along the semantic axis of affect” (Reber 2012, 68).
In other words, considering affect is a cultural logic of hyper free-market
capitalism, I argue that a hypersexualization of female bodies in K-pop music
videos is a specific mode of its operation. With affect as an “independent
epistemic modality—a full-fledged mechanism for the reinterpretation of
knowledge of self and world” (Reber 2012, 92), the biopolitics of affect
works seamlessly in the visual language of the bright, lively atmosphere of
K-pop music videos, which mainly deliver bodily feeling, emotion, and af-
fect as a way of knowing the world, and in turn acts as a means of socio-
behavioral control. With fast beats and salient rhythms that do not allow
audiences to contemplate, K-pop instigates people’s desire to be rich and
successful as an ideological pitch, just as neoliberalism jolts people by its
neck-breaking speed of transforming society into a grand marketplace. In
other words, like neoliberalism mesmerizes people with an unrealistic valor-
ization of market logic that is a utopian promise of competition, K-pop has
captivated audiences by seamless, breathtaking choreography and the appeal-
ing, sexy appearances of K-pop performers, and has coaxed them to appear,
behave, and move like the idols.
 Genealogy and Affective Economy of K-Pop Female Idols 63

In this regard, I analyze how K-pop epitomizes neoliberal governmental-

ity by modeling idol singers as flexible, competitive, and entrepreneurial
agents of neoliberalism. As George Yúdice (2003) indicates, music is a con-
tested terrain where different cultural, economic, political, and social inter-
ests compete to make an efficient use of the medium in order to perpetuate,
maintain, or challenge the status quo. Stated differently, in this chapter, I
analyze how K-pop, as a cultural manifestation of neoliberalism’s marketing
the unmarketable for financial success, has represented an episteme of post-
IMF neoliberal Korea. To this end, I reexamine Foucault’s notion of epis-
teme in its capacity to explain how understanding certain ideas, thoughts,
genres, and/or discourse is an essential and effective tool to analyze culture
and society in a given time. As an empirical tool to substantiate this claim, I
analyze three music videos from the three most representative K-pop female
idol groups, S.E.S. (1997–2002), SNSD (2007–present), and Stellar
(2011–present). Based on Foucaultian genealogy, I create a taxonomy of K-
pop female idols that corresponds to major social, economic, and political
events in Korea in 1997, 2007, and 2010, respectively.

AFFECT AS NEOLIBERAL EPISTEME IN K-POP: TAXONOMY OF

K-POP FEMALE IDOLS

With the notion of “homo economicus,” Foucault (2008) maintains that neo-
liberalism universalizes economic logic as the general matrix of people’s
daily behaviors in everything that human beings endeavor to realize based
upon a meticulous calculation of cost for benefit. Thus, neoliberalism is not
only as the political economy of marketization in society, but also, more
importantly, a biopolitical subjectification of individuals (Foucault 1995) in
an effort to internalize particular forms of responsibility produced by market
imperatives and practices (Nealon 2008). In this biopolitical procedure of
neoliberalism, K-pop plays a role on a micro-technological level, where audi-
ences learn how to govern themselves by naturalizing neoliberal rationalities
as the basis for their conducts (Binkley 2007; Lemke 2001; Rose et al. 2006).
As a means to win individuals’ hearts and minds, popular culture has been an
integral part of this neoliberalization by recontouring cultural imaginations of
social well-being, providing “the imaginary relationship of individuals to
their real conditions of existence” (Althusser 1971, 153). In this subjectifica-
tion process by popular culture, individuals are constantly asked to adjust
their subjectivity and identity to the neoliberal ideal of flexibility, adaptabil-
ity, and transformation. As a synecdoche (Barry et al. 1996) of neoliberal
Korea that implies particular mentalities and governing manners, which are
realized and practiced in individuals’ concrete thoughts, feeling, behaviors,
habits, and perceptions, I maintain K-pop idols tell how people understand
64 Chapter 4

and articulate social values and practices through specific lexicons of media
spectacle. In this respect, like Binkley (2006), I argue that the recent popular-
ity of K-pop has played a microphysics of power that conditions individuals
to naturalize neoliberal governmentality and become active, voluntary agents
of neoliberalism. In this regard, the three videos that I analyze show exactly
how neoliberal Korean society demands females conform to changing ideals
of femininity.
Since an episteme is an ensemble of “signs and similitudes . . . [that
reveal] the relations of microcosm to macrocosm” (Foucault 1994, 32), it
reveals a historico-empirical dimension, which provides a changing condi-
tion of possibility of experience and knowledge in a given time and place, as
opposed to Kantian transcendental a priori. Put differently, episteme as em-
pirical a priori sets up a various kinds of knowledge and codes of conducts
for individuals to be recognized as legitimate members of society. In turn, it
makes a certain discourse possible, which is a condition and a product of
sociopolitical practices in a given historical epoch. In other words, as the
“mentality or the ‘framework of thought’ of any given period” (158), epis-
teme conditions possibilities of experience, world-view, and value-system in
a specific epochal and local context. In this regard, as historical a priori of
contemporary Korean people’s expectation and perception, K-pop female
idols allow us to understand disciplinary practices, sociopolitical mecha-
nisms and apparatuses, regimes of truth, and normative rules and values in
society.
Specifically, since “passion overpowers reason in neoliberal discourse”
(Chaput 2010, 3), the emotionally charged, visual nature of K-pop videos
helps sustain a socioeconomically fragmented, divided population stay to-
gether in a “dynamic affective experience” of market capitalism (Vivian
2006, 15). In turn, this affective public (Cloud 2003), since it is not based on
reason, is subject to unstable passions or emotions, which are excessively
fabricated and promoted by the neoliberal culture industry. In this respect,
individuals are mobilized by affective energy that inspires one-dimensional
desires like being popular and rich: Thus, I argue that K-pop audiences are
affectively connected masses. With the sheer amount of K-pop idols and
their music videos, K-pop exerts a dominant affective power since “signs
increase in affective value as an effect of the movement between signs: the
more signs circulate, the more affective they become” (Ahmed 2004, 45). In
turn, due to its increasing energy of affect which transmits between individu-
als (Brennan 2004) and its capacity to precede one’s conscious decisions, K-
pop’s sheer volume conditions individuals’ mindsets and behavior to con-
form to socio-politically constructed norms and values. In other words, as an
“invisible glue that holds the world together” (Massumi 2002b, 217), affect
as episteme envelops individuals’ physical as well as psychological domains
of social lives.
 Genealogy and Affective Economy of K-Pop Female Idols 65

As Foucault (1984) indicates that genealogist effort is not “to capture the
exact essence of things, their purest possibilities, and their carefully protected
identities,” or to presuppose an “existent of immobile forms that precede the
external world of accident and succession” (78), I strive to understand con-
tours, fissures, and fractures, and a topography of K-pop female idols. Since
S.E.S.’s debut in 1997, many K-pop female idols have come and gone with
different concepts, images, and appealing points. While examining “the form
of the elements, the quantity of those elements, the manner in which [the K-
pop female idols] are distributed in space in relation to each other, and the
relative magnitude of each element” (134), taxonomy exhibits an episteme as
a magnitude of the female idols’ dominance in the music genre. To be more
specific, with genesis analysis that reveals a beginning of a concept in K-pop
female idols, taxonomy articulates and classifies identities and differences
amongst them. By establishing “orders on the basis of empirical series,”
taxonomy provides a systematic understanding on female representations in
K-pop from “their proximity and their distance, their adjacency and their
separateness—and therefore the network, which, outside chronology, makes
patent their kinship and reinstate[s] their relations of order within a perma-
nent area” (Foucault 1994, 73). Therefore, in order to better understand how
those idols are similar or different, I map them out by taxonomy based on
their major characteristics: Generation I with innocent, cute concepts, Gener-
ation II with ambiguous femininity, and Generation III with explicit sexual-
ization. As an analysis on a “certain continuum of things (a non-discontinu-
ity, a plentitude of being)” (72), I examine how a taxonomy of the idols can
reconstitute discontinuous representations through temporal reconstructions
in neoliberal Korean society since 1997.

VOLATILE NEOLIBERALIZATION OF THE NATION: 1997, 2007,

AND 2010

Since the 1997 Financial Crisis, the Korean government has deregulated
economic and industrial policies in order to promote private industrial sec-
tors. With the IMF mandates that took control over the Korean economy in
December 1997, the state ended or abated its decades-long control over
industrial conglomerates’ investment decisions, financial market regulations,
transnational capital transactions, and so on. While the crisis stemmed from
the government’s lack of adequate regulation on the finance sector during its
aggressive globalization and liberalization policy since the early 90s, the
IMF’s intervention exponentially exacerbated the problem by further elimi-
nating essential governmental controls by maximizing a flexible labor mar-
ket, and completely opening financial capital market to foreign firms (Crotty
and Lee 2005). Despite the IMF’s dramatic intervention, Korea’s postcrisis
66 Chapter 4

economic performance has been lower than that of the precrisis era mainly
because there was not enough investment and spending from the govern-
ment. Moreover, the country’s economic dependence on commodity exports
has grown larger than at the precrisis period, putting the nation into more
precarious conditions since its manufacture industry became virtually obso-
lete due to rising labor wages and price competition with other developing
countries. What is worse, due to an insecure job market and skyrocketing
income disparities, there is growing social fragmentation with high socioeco-
nomic inequalities and an increasing poverty rate. With extensive deregula-
tion on transnational capital transaction, the Korean financial sector has “be-
come a gambling casino for foreigners” (Crotty and Lee 2005, 421).
Despite growing socioeconomic discontents of neoliberalization, the state
has not taken enough measure to mitigate problems caused by the 1997
Financial Crisis and the subsequent IMF intervention. Rather, the govern-
ment accelerated neoliberalization by officially initiating the Korea–U.S.
Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA) as an apex of postcrisis neoliberal
economic policy in February 2006. While the state maintained it had ac-
knowledged growing predicaments of the neoliberal economy since the 1997
Financial Crisis, the state was groundlessly optimistic, insisting that the
agreement would strengthen its national economic competitiveness and en-
large economic territories where Korean companies do business freely. With
little more than a year of negotiations, the two parties reached a conclusion in
April 2007. Service sector industries such as education, health care, finance,
logistics, and legal services expected to benefit most; however, once consid-
ering the U.S.’s far advancement in those sectors, on top of the preferential
terms it receives, Korea’s prospective performance looks dim if not negative.
According to a governmental study on possible mid- to long-term profits, the
FTA would bring Korea $7.1 billion surplus while bringing $12.2 billion to
the U.S. (Lim 2006). Thus, it is skeptical that the KORUS FTA will bring
any positive contribution to developing or upgrading Korea’s service indus-
try, if not entirely pessimistic. A more troublesome fact was that the govern-
ment neither conducted sound research nor prepared for the plights of the
trade pact: In this respect, the FTA was driven “more by high politics than by
economics” (177). Since the FTA entailed a preferential trade agreement that
integrates the state’s regulatory disciplines on service, investment, intellectu-
al property, governmental provisions and so on (Lim and Torrent 2006), the
KORUS FTA required Korea to adopt American regulatory rules since the
U.S. has far more complex sets of trade and service statutes. On the other
hand, the U.S. conceives of the negotiation as easy and preferable for its
economic and strategic interests based on the fact that 1) Korea has been
militarily and politically dependent on the U.S., 2) the FTA would counter-
balance China’s growing influence in the region, and 3) the U.S. financial
industry can dominate the market (Hart-Landsberg 2011).
 Genealogy and Affective Economy of K-Pop Female Idols 67

Overall, the government’s propaganda that the KORUS FTA would ele-
vate the nation’s economy from a manufacturing industry to a service one
sets political and institutional supports for service industry sectors. Ironical-
ly, this governmental support for the neoliberal service industry is itself
antithetical to the fundamental mantra of neoliberalism, that is deregulation
and privatization. In other words, the KORUS FTA, along with the Korean
government’s subsequent support for the service industry, sets up a neoliber-
al episteme of cut-throat competition that numerous K-pop idols originate
from and rely on at the same time.
In this ideological and political manipulation of the FTA, the Korean
government hosted the G20 Summit talks in 2010 as a symbolic consumma-
tion of the country’s neoliberalization. As a holder of the 2010 G20 Presiden-
cy, Korea hosted the fifth summit and was responsible for preparing summits
and other meetings on November 11–12, 2010. It was the first time such a
summit was held in Asia and in a non-G8 emerging global economy. The
G20 Summit was established in September 1999 as an effort to ward off the
negative impact of economic globalization in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian
Financial Crisis. However, with the 2008 global financial and economic
crisis, the G20 Summit, which was held in Washington, D.C. on November
15, 2008, became globally recognized (Cho and Kelly 2012). As top eco-
nomic or financial officials, participants are from the G7 advanced world
economies: Australia, the EU, the BRIC, and seven other emerging econo-
mies. The G20 economies accounted for 83.4 percent of global GDP in 2009.
The 2010 Summit rendered sizeable economic benefits for Korea as high
as $20.6 billion on top of consumer and tourist spending of $16.2 billion (D.
Lee 2010). However, more than just a monetary achievement, Korea was
able to symbolically capitalize on the G20 Summit as a restoration of the
country’s reputation as a global economic power, which it used to enjoy
before the 1997 Financial Crisis, and an establishment of a proud and compe-
tent member in the global market economy. In this respect, while it did not
provide any alternative to the current neoliberal capitalism (Kalinowski
2010), according to Judith Cherry and Hugo Dobson (2012), the 2010 G20
Seoul Summit was believed to make some degrees of success on important
agendas like “providing leadership on both legacy and new issues, reconcil-
ing tensions in order to ensure the summit’s effectiveness, [and] bolstering
the solidarity of the summiteers” (376). Coining a term, the “G20 Genera-
tion” at the President’s New Year address to the nation (Gowman 2010), the
government preached neoliberal mantras, like financial success and personal
competitiveness, as an ethical code of conduct for Korean people. Thus, as an
allegorical manifestation to keep up with a rosy prediction of the G20 Sum-
mit’s success and the nation’s symbolic stride as one of the global economic
powerhouses, K-pop female idols’ adaptation of explicit sexualization, that is
the dominant modus operandi of American pop music after the Telecommu-
68 Chapter 4

nication Act of 1996, should be considered as a cultural correspondence to

the state’s neoliberal agenda as episteme.

TAXONOMY OF FEMALE IDOLS: INNOCENCE, AMBIGUOUS

FEMININITY, AND EXPLICIT SEXUALIZATION

As the very first K-pop female group, S.E.S. is a trio band formed in 1997,
and was a female counterpart to H.O.T., which was the first K-pop idol band
in 1996. From many perspectives, S.E.S. has set standards to follow for
female idols, especially in the manufactured nature of their talents. S.E.S.’s
debut song, “I’m Your Girl,” in November 1997 was an instant success with
a conformative, traditional image of innocence, cuteness, and modernity. As
manufactured or assigned talent by the agency, SM Entertainment, the group
emphasized the visual nature of the music genre: Except for the main singer,
Bada, two other members, Eugene and Shoo, do not make major musical
contributions to the group except for their physical attractiveness and beauty.
Equally, the agency and the group focused on glossiness in music videos:
Their single “Love” made another parameter for later K-pop female idols.
Rather than the musical talent of the members, the music video explicitly
focused on their physical attractiveness, mainly that of Eugene and Shoo.
Likewise, while Bada sang most of the songs, she was the least popular
member of the group, and subsequently underwent several rounds of plastic
surgery. Particularly, the music video set another standard, that is, to look
Americanized. Spending more than one million U.S. dollars, the music video
glamorized Western, to be more precise, American looks of the members
with a lot of makeup, dyed or bleached hair, and edgy fashion items such as a
beanie hat, all set against signature skyscrapers of Manhattan.
Like Kristin Lieb (2013) indicates that female singers adopt more mature
and sexualized imageries as they grow old, S.E.S. followed the same trajec-
tory over their career, however, to no avail. With their fourth album in
December 2000, they tried a mature, sophisticated image by wearing suits.
Likewise, their music moved away from bubbly cute pop songs to jazzy
ones. “Show Me Your Love” was the first single of the album, and it was a
slow ballad with jazzy instrumental sounds and beats. With their comeback
album, Choose My Life-U in 2002, the sound had strong beats accompanied
by dominant imageries of the members. However, their popularity was not as
high as it used to be, especially when they portrayed innocence and images
with bright primary colors.
As part of Generation II of K-pop female idols, SNSD is an eight-member
band (used to be nine members until September 2014), which made an offi-
cial debut in August 2007. The introduction of SNSD in 2007 was more than
just an expansion of K-pop idol inventories challenging the domination of K-
 Genealogy and Affective Economy of K-Pop Female Idols 69

pop male idols that lasted between 2002 and 2007. While it was considered
as a reinstatement of female idols’ popularity which S.E.S had before,
SNSD’s debut was far more than just the launching a female idol group: As
its name represents, it was the beginning of a new paradigm or era: a simulta-
neous intensification of commodifying girly, cutesy images and the begin-
ning of explicit sexualization of female bodies. Decorated with primary col-
ors and skinny jeans, SNSD’s first major hit song, “Gee,” mesmerized the
country with cute, uplifting crab-leg dance moves that emphasized elongated
legs, which are later bared in a following single, “Genie: Tell me Your
Wish.” With the instantaneous success of “Gee,” SNSD not only became the
most popular K-pop female idols, but more importantly set a representational
standard of femininity for a mushrooming number of female idols shortly
afterwards. Furthermore, with its successful debut and popularity in Japan,
SNSD became more than just an idol group but a poster child of the neoliber-
al Korean economy, which savors extensive and intensive attention from the
media, the government, and the audience alike. With the Japanese success of
“Genie: Tell Me Your Wish,” Nikkei Business, a Japanese economic weekly
magazine, ran a cover with SNSD that was equated with Korea’s neoliberal
business acumen in general (The Chosun Ilbo 2010).
For John Lie (2015), the year 2007 provides a watershed moment in
which K-pop endeavors to emulate the mainstream American popular singers
who mainly deploy sex appeal, while previous female idols like S.E.S. fol-
lowed the formulaic construction of J-pop idols. Ushered in by Wonder
Girls’ 2007 hit song “Tell Me” that restaged Motown girl group musical
sensibilities, Generation II of K-pop female idols began to extensively utilize
what became K-pop’s key features: addictive hooks, integration of lyrical/
musical hooks, easy-to-follow dance moves, and extensive sexualization of
female bodies. As a prototype of Generation II idols as mannequin-like danc-
ing dolls, SNSD has provided music tunes that the audience found easy to
sing along and dance to together. While male idols tend to show off their
exclusive dance skills and vocal talents, SNSD has supplied the audience
who are suffering from intensifying neoliberal competition with something
psychologically and emotionally affordable. Ironically, it was exacerbating
neoliberalization that made Korean people seek for something that can rec-
ompense for personal, financial, and social problems caused by the country’s
rapid neoliberalization. However, it is SNSD as one of the most neoliberal-
ized entities, with its colorful, lively, and cute images, that the audience uses
to try to heal themselves.
While there are many factors contributing to their success and popularity,
in this chapter, I discuss the manipulation of the members’ imageries, that is,
a deft utilization of ambiguity between the traditional cute, innocent girl
next-door and neoliberal commodification of sexualized female bodies. For
this purpose, as the signature model of its musical style and image, which
70 Chapter 4

brought most success and fame, I will focus on the “Gee” music video.
Peppered with spritely, cutesy electropop and bubblegum pop tunes, SNSD’s
lively yet ambiguous femininity has characterized the neoliberal propaganda
of a rosy perspective of the market economy to the extent that the group has
been named as the “Nation’s Girl Group” or the “Nation’s Idol.” The lyrical
theme of SNSD’s songs is mainly teenage dance or slumber party, and repre-
sents an infantilized and sexualized femininity that seeks male attention and
protection.
As part of Generation III, making a debut in August 2011, Stellar is a
four-member idol group whose concept is a sexual provocateur. Releasing a
controversial single, “Marionette,” in February 2014, Stellar has pushed the
envelope in sexual representations which shed cutesy and innocent images
away in K-pop music videos. In leotards, the idols’ body parts are fetishized
in an extreme close-up shots, accentuating explicit sexual innuendos, espe-
cially gyrating, bouncing, and rubbing buttocks in the video. As a teaser
advertisement of the song, the group staged a promotional event, “Guys, I
will do whatever you tell me to do—Marionette” that is basically a stripping
game to get its members naked on Stellar’s Facebook page (Seoul Shinmun
2014). Clad in lingerie that is to be removed by “like” buttons, the idols’
bodies are reified as a prize to be won by affective as well as attentive
investments. Erotic facial and bodily expressions such as pouty lips and
provocative dance moves are exchanged for the audience’s Facebook likes.
Despite harsh criticism, the music video achieved financial success and audi-
ence’s recognition.

TRAJECTORIES OF SEXUALIZING FEMALE IDOL BODIES:

VISUAL ANALYSES

With an increasing number of TV channels designated to popular music

videos in the post-1997 Financial Crisis, which meant an intensifying compe-
tition amongst singers/performers to win the audience’s attention, sexualiza-
tion of female idols is exacerbating. Due to this increasing competition,
“survival of the sexiest” has become a common strategy for commercial
success in the music industry (Andsager and Roe 2003). Specifically, female
singers use sexualization of their bodies as a marketing strategy by fulfilling
the audience’s sexual fantasies. Actually, there is a growing tendency of
being lascivious among Korean television programs, according to a study on
the nation’s three major network TV stations’ music programs between 2006
and 2010 (Kim and Yoon 2011). The dance moves and outfits of female
idols, much more than those of their male counterparts, are getting sexual-
ized and provocative. Considering the main audience of these music pro-
grams is teens, an impact of female sexualization can cause self-
 Genealogy and Affective Economy of K-Pop Female Idols 71

sexualization or self-objectification amongst female adolescent viewers by

internalizing or naturalizing the audiovisual messages in K-pop. In this re-
spect, since female self-sexualization dehumanizes the already marginalized,
if not oppressed, subject socio-culturally and politico-economically, an im-
plication of sexualization is far reaching in Korea, where gender inequality is
highest in the world. Reification or commodification of female bodies in
music videos further perpetuates and maintains sexism and gender-based
hierarchies in society, while indoctrinating gender-stereotypes in adolescents
(Gill 2003; Szymanski, Moffitt and Carr 2010; Turner 2011).
In “I’m Your Girl,” their debut song and first major hit, members of
S.E.S. look innocent, cute, natural, and lively in hip-hop themed baggy,
urban-style clothes with little skin exposure. With a “girl next door” look,
deployment of primary colors such as blue, yellow, or red in their outfits and
in the background reinforces a sense of innocence, playfulness, and energy in
their personalities. With an extreme, close shot of the members’ faces, the
music video begins with members dancing in an all-white room, which sym-
bolizes the group’s concept of purity, innocence, and happiness. The colors
of the background are mainly yellow and blue, which stand for joy, energy
and happiness, and a sense of health and stability, respectively. Moreover,
the bright, upbeat melody and sound make the members look happy and
carefree as their faces are covered in smiles. Different hair dye colors sym-
bolize different personalities of the members; however, they are still natural
and wholesome with little to no facial makeup. The choreography is energet-
ic, playful, and collegial with synchronized hip-hop-themed dance moves.
Their bodies never bend forward enticingly with an emphasized body part,
but in big and bouncy dance moves, which invite viewers to feel just as jolly
and dance along. Even outside of the structured choreography, the girls play-
fully and innocently dance around by themselves. Their facial expressions
reflect the mood of their moves.
As a visual tool to signify each member’s individuality, close-ups on the
singers’ faces are ubiquitous, with occasional extreme close-ups on the eyes,
where many glimmers of light come and go. A visual preeminence of the eye
grants an illusion that the audience looks directly into the singers’ eyes and
knows them personally. Considering a steadfast emphasis on the eye as a
window to the mind or the heart in Korean culture, the extreme close-up
shots on the members’ already big eyes further accentuate their innocence,
purity, or warm personality to the extent that they are reified. While empha-
sis on the eyes is a means to characterize the members’ lively personality
rather than sexual objects, extreme close-up shots still focus on the body part
out of the whole body, and in turn reifies it. Since “[h]appiness becomes
purely discursive, covering up a diametrically opposed reality of ever in-
creasing ill-being” due to the 1997 Crisis and subsequent SAPs mandated by
the IMF (Reber 2012, 87), the lively and happy feeling in SES’s music video
72 Chapter 4

is a popular application of neoliberal positive psychology. In doing so, the

video perpetuates an imaginary, neoliberal worldview of a perfect equity of
happiness, liveliness, love, empathy, and joy in market capitalism, staving
off the harsh reality of economic and social inequalities plagued by poverty,
pain, and despair in perpetual crises of capitalism.
In its beginning stage, SNSD donned a uniform: They declared them-
selves high school students in their debut single, “Into the New World.”
After sporting skinny jeans with spritely primary colors in their first major
hit, “Gee,” SNSD proficiently fused teenage-like innocent gestures and facial
expressions with sexualized, especially elongated, navy uniforms in “Genie:
Tell Me Your Wish.” Exclusive focus on female idols’ legs is one of K-pop’s
unique characteristics used to sexualize female bodies, which is equivalent to
revealing cleavage in the U.S. In this respect, SNSD, especially salient in
“Genie: Tell Me Your Wish,” skillfully exploits sexual ambiguity through
appealing, young girls who are simultaneously innocent, cutesy, happy, and
spritely on the one hand, and sexually seductive and provocative on the other
(Jung 2013; Seabrook 2012). SNSD’s “Genie” music video is ambiguous or
represents a double standard of female sexuality. With a lyrical message of
love and romantic relationships that basically satisfy their partners’ affective
desires, “Genie” retains SNSD’s signature bubblegum pop. The choreogra-
phy is still bouncy with lots of limb movements, which create cuteness and
playfulness and revering body parts in enticing hook melodies.
Compared to S.E.S., SNSD members are obviously sexualized with tight-
er, revealing clothes on a dance stage; however, they still exhibit cuteness
and innocence in different bedroom or party-room settings. With constantly
changing, flashy color tones—mainly with red and pink—a heart-shaped
light with flickering strobes emphasizes the romantic and sensual sentiment
of the video. In between the flashing lights, pink is a constant color through-
out the music video, representing youthfulness, excitement, and fun. With a
complicated and extravagant choreography that focuses on the members’
elongated legs, the video tries to underscore a collective sense of female
empowerment in synchronized moves and outfits. The idols move their bod-
ies at a slower pace and emphasize their curves within the moves. They put
emphasis on their lower bodies, especially legs, pushing them outward slow-
ly. With extreme short pants that reveal the idols’ thighs and direct the
audience’s attention to their crotches, SNSD sings and dances seductively
into the camera, while deploying suggestive gestures like winking eyes, gent-
ly resting their hands on their chests, or waving their fingers into the camera.
Specifically, with elongated and revealed legs, carefully coordinated, exces-
sive leg dance-moves further accentuate seductive uses of the idols’ body
parts.
SNSD’s outfits are the main tool that sexualizes the members: a military
uniform with shorts and high heels. Considering that these fashion items
 Genealogy and Affective Economy of K-Pop Female Idols 73

conflate female sexuality and empowerment with post-feminism, sexualized

military uniforms symbolically maintains female sexuality as what provides
women with power and agency. However, a hint of innocence is still persis-
tent with teenage-like cute behaviors and paraphernalia such as pink bed-
room materials and ponytails. As visual and lyrical message indicate, the
members are still confined to serving patriarchal gender norms that make
females subject to male sexual fantasy, or willing agents who voluntarily
satisfy sexual and affective demands of male counterparts. In this respect, the
seemingly contradictory representation of the members, between sexualized
catwalking mature women on the stage and pillow-fighting teenage girls at a
birthday/slumber party, reaffirms female servitude: The music video begins
by presenting a member as sex fairy behind a genie lamp. As the perfectly
synchronized choreography symbolizes, the members are over-manufactured
to appeal to the audience’s diversifying cultural, yet fantastical appetite over
femininity, to the extent that body parts or images are more important than
other personal qualities.
As part of Generation III, K-pop’s latest development, Stellar’s music
video of “Marionette” represents a charged sexuality from the beginning.
Without any hint of cuteness or innocence and ambiguity, the music video is
full of wild, sexual materials such as naked singers in the bed and the bath-
tub. Its choreography begins with immediate sexual dance moves: The music
video itself begins with nudity. Their first dance move requires them to place
emphasis on their hind parts and move in large circular motions. As this
happens, their hands are behind their backs, as if they are engaging in sexual
intercourse. Immediately following that, they drop their butts to the floor.
Throughout the song, much of their dance moves requires them to touch
themselves on their bottoms, thighs, breasts, and stomachs. They even dance
as bluntly as shaking their buttocks in the camera.
The music itself is not upbeat or lively. With highly revealing outfits, the
idols are portrayed as sex dolls that are fair, tall, skinny, and undressed. The
video begins by showing a naked idol who is barley covered by white sheets
in bed, and she tosses and turns as if she is in distress or in deep thought. As
the woman moves around in the bed, the camera follows her moves with
different angles to cover different parts of her body. As the video goes on, the
idols and back-up dancers begin their choreography, which places an exclu-
sive emphasis on their buttocks. In body suits, panty hose, and high-heel
shoes, they swirl their hips with their hands behind their backs as if they are
having sex in bondage. Once the aforementioned naked woman wakes up,
she goes to take a white milk bottle out of a refrigerator in which there are
many pink ones. While drinking it, she spills it from her mouth to neck,
chest, and breasts. Following the liquid over her body, the video exposes the
idol’s cleavage extensively, which was unprecedented in K-pop music videos
before it.
74 Chapter 4

Clad in tight leotards, the idols’ bodies are closely scrutinized as they
exercise in highly provocative dance routines. Much of the choreography
requires the idols to touch their own bodies, while swaying their hips seduc-
tively and caressing their chests. They sometimes bend over and touch their
own thighs, going so far as to shake their butts and drop them down to the
floor. The previously naked woman who spilled milk over her body is now in
a bathtub, throwing her legs up with such sexual appeal. All of the choreog-
raphy is based around the idols’ bodies, with a lot of rubbing, caressing,
thrusting, and gripping of the body. The video is full of racy tones from
nudity to seductive dancing. The idols do not smile but are serious in their
highly sexualized behaviors. Intense white as the video’s most prevalent
color helps accentuate the idols’ explicit sexuality, making a high contrast to
backup dancers in black. With extensive uses of close-ups or extreme close-
up shots, the video portrays the idols as mere moving body parts that aim to
arouse the audience’s sexual desire.

CONCLUDING REMARKS: FEMALE IDOL BODIES AS

NEOLIBERAL COMMODITIES

Since MTV’s birth, music videos have become an ingrained core element of
contemporary culture. Obviously they send many different messages with
various props, outfits, dance moves, and atmospheres in a given time period.
While tracing a general mode of representations in the videos as episteme, I
extrapolate a broader cultural and societal change over time since 1997. As
examined, representations of K-pop female idols have changed from a cute,
innocent girl next door (S.E.S.), to an ambiguous femininity that has both
cute innocence and sexualization (SNSD), to an explicit sexualization or
commodification of sexuality (Stellar). These changes have corresponded to
general changes in the Korean government’s political-economic challenges
and subsequent policies: the 1997 Financial Crisis, the KORUS FTA in
2007, and G20 Summit talks in 2010, respectively. The videos are each from
a different era and appear to be a reflection of the times or episteme. As time
progressed, women in pop videos became more sexualized. Everything about
their being became increasingly used for sexual purposes.
Considering Dierdra Reber’s (2012) argument that “feeling becomes
‘thought’ in a knowledge of self and world” in a neoliberal episteme (68), a
general affect of liveliness, happiness, and innocence in S.E.S. and SNSD
partially, perpetuates and normalizes a cultural affirmation of joy, pleasure,
purity, warmth, and positivity in consumer capitalism. S.E.S. is an episteme
of neoliberalism that sells what was once nonmarketable, which is innocence,
purity, happiness, and liveliness. With the group, the neoliberal Korean econ-
omy has extensively and systematically marketed the traditional notion of
 Genealogy and Affective Economy of K-Pop Female Idols 75

femininity as a commercial commodity. As the 1996 Telecommunication

Act, a neoliberal deregulation of media ownership, directly caused the pro-
liferation of aggravating pornographic media representations of female pop
stars in the U.S. (Levande 2008), Korea’s two voluntary neoliberal policies,
the 2007 KORUS FTA and 2010 G20 Summit, have ushered in a skyrocket-
ing intensification of sexually explicit portrayals of K-pop female idols as a
cultural symptom of Korea’s intensifying neoliberalization. As Korea’s neo-
liberalization intensifies and the number of K-pop female idols multiplies,
the idols’ escalating competition to grasp audiences’ attention has led to the
images of women becoming increasingly suggestive. Consequently, taxono-
my analyses of K-pop female idols have successfully investigated how the
K-pop industry as Korea’s signature neoliberal industry has incorporated and
perpetuated neoliberal rationalities at a given time.
 Chapter Five

Elusive Subjectivity of K-Pop Female

Idols
Split-Personality, Narcissism, and Neo-Confucian Body
Techniques in Suzy of Miss A

While chapter four examined how representations of K-pop female idols

have changed over time toward explicit sexualization, this chapter analyzes
how a lingering legacy of Confucian patriarchy still requires that the idols
retain the traditional ideal of femininity in their already sexualized bodies. In
other words, this chapter investigates how seemingly contradictory personal-
ities of female idols, that is a co-exhibition of innocence, purity, and whole-
someness and explicit sexuality, became a major trend in female idols be-
yond Generation III. With a surge of female idols in the industry, competi-
tion between them gets intense, and in turn, there have been various attempts
to win the audience’s attention. Explicit sexuality has been salient since K-
pop became one of the most lucrative cultural commodities since 2010 at the
Generation III stage. However, one of the most successful female idols to
date, Suzy, a member of Miss A, has exhibited an interesting character: She
has been praised as an exemplar of innocent and pure femininity and a sex
symbol simultaneously. While she looks innocent, cute, demure, and submis-
sive to the extent that she is infantilized, Suzy is still sexualized and provoca-
tive: The former image was solidified by her role in a popular movie, Archi-
tecture 101, and the latter as a member of Miss A, whose appealing point is
sexual provocation.
Contrary to a growing number of female idols and their increasing influ-
ence in society, there is a dearth of scholarly efforts to explicate intricate
female sexualities in K-pop. In my preliminary research in Philadelphia and
77
78 Chapter 5

Los Angeles, as puzzling it sounds, none of my informants was able to

understand how Suzy’s ambiguous personality was even possible. While
there are celebrities, like Miley Cyrus or Britney Spears, who transformed
themselves to sexualized, mature women from their cute, innocent girl next-
door images, there is no American equivalent to Suzy, who simultaneously
manages two contradictory personalities and commands fame and success.
To address this seemingly inconceivable character of Suzy, I critically con-
sider cultural and social backgrounds that led to a success of schizophrenic
female subjectivity. Along with textual analyses, I examine the issue from a
broader, structural condition of female subjectification in the most Confucian
country in the world. In turn, I maintain Korea’s patriarchy has updated and
maintained its centuries-long gender relations in representations of K-pop
female idols, adapting to changing social conditions since the 1997 Asian
Financial Crisis.
While Roald Maliangkay (2010) once claimed K-pop lacks profanity and
sex, and therefore suits the Confucian morality that led to its pan-Asian
popularity, time has long changed and there are too many female idols ex-
ploiting their sexualities as a selling point. Interestingly enough, this sexual-
ization still retains Confucian gender norms in a different guise. While sexu-
alization is a sign of a “perceived lack of authenticity” in K-pop female idols
(Unger 2015, 27), due to escalating competitions in a neoliberal society (Kim
and Lowry 2005), the recurring theme of female innocence, purity, and cute-
ness within their sexualized bodies is an idiosyncratic feature of K-pop.
Since the visual representation is conditioned by a constellation of cultural,
economic, historical, and ideological forces behind the scenes by the indus-
try’s strategic planning and implementation, it warrants a critical, systematic
examination to understand the K-pop’s historicity and locality. While Unger
(2015, 29) maintains visual appearance as “the determining factor for their
commodification” is the only realm that the idols control, I maintain their
appearance itself, especially their split-personality between innocence and
sexuality, is designed and implemented by the industry. While girlhood is
invented as a social being by consumerism (Tiqqun 2012; Weinbaum et al.
2008), the proliferation of the female idols symbolizes the two contradictory
systems are converged to fulfill a new set of socioeconomic interests. In this
regard, I examine how K-pop female idols, as an Althusserian ideological
state apparatus, perpetuate a hegemonic appropriation of the female body as
an imagined gender relationship in society. As a system of gender representa-
tion that interpellates the audience to take it as self-representation, the idols’
manufactured personalities should be considered as a discursive text from
which one can infer how Korea’s contradictory social configurations have
infiltrated in the idols’ identity and representations. Since today’s women
“present themselves and the reactions to such presentations are among the
most candid indicators of the values and mores of a generation” (Latham
 Elusive Subjectivity of K-Pop Female Idols 79

2000, 1), the idols’ schizophrenic personality further inscribes the country’s
dominant cultural and economic imperatives onto female bodies to the extent
that seemingly norm-defying displays of sexualized female bodies are still in
service to the status quo.
To this end, I dissect a “multiplicity of discourse, positions, and meanings
which are often in conflict with one another and inherently (historically)
contradictory” (de Lauretis 1987, x), by interrogating the concrete visual
narratives behind the idols’ schizophrenic representations. By recontextualiz-
ing them within the country’s two most influential systems of thoughts,
practices, and policies, that is patriarchism and neoliberalism, I probe the
issue as a manufactured impersonation of hegemonic femininity, designed to
address the society’s changing needs, as Sherry Ortner and Harriet White-
head (1981) indicate sexuality/gender is always already imbricated in soci-
ety’s political and economic conditions. With Susan Bordo’s (1992) state-
ment that regards the female body as a site of social control where the
“central rules, hierarchies, and even metaphysical commitment of a culture
are inscribed and thus reinforced through the concrete [corporeal] language”
(13), I maintain that K-pop has embodied Korea’s contemporary ideal of
femininity. Focusing on the dazzling sensory effects of K-pop, which perpet-
uate neoliberal “narcissistic, and visually oriented culture,” I examine how
the culture industry is an integral part of “reasserting existing gender config-
urations against any attempts to shift or transform [gender] power-relations,”
which have grown especially with women’s increasing socioeconomic par-
ticipation, especially since the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis (14).
Differently put, with a powerful interplay of these two dominant ideolo-
gies that configures power relations, I examine whether the idols’ split-
personality carves out an alternative way to contest the condition of tradition-
al gender domination, or still “endorse the terms of their subordination and
[make them] willing, even enthusiastic, partners in that subordination” (Scott
1990, 4). Focusing on the idols’ sartorial and bodily practices and their
accompanying sociocultural implications, I reveal how neoliberal impera-
tives have infiltrated in the idols’ articulations of gender and sexuality, while
inculcating them to be “expected sexual personae” who are available on male
sexual demand (Cook and Kaiser 2004, 223). As a concrete manifestation of
different effects on a physical body, specific behaviors, and corresponding
social relations (Foucault 1990), the idols “enthusiastically perform patriar-
chal stereotypes of sexual servility in the name of [female] empowerment”
(Tasker and Negra 2007, 3). In that regard, I shed critical light on cultural
politics behind the idols’ split personalities, which can “train the broadest
mass of people in order to create a pattern of undreamed-of dimensions” in
conformative social behaviors (Kracauer 1995, 77). By doing so, I provide a
better understanding of the idol’s female subjectivity as a sociocultural con-
80 Chapter 5

struction of multiple, contradicted interests in their spectacularly intelligible

bodies.

K-POP FEMALE IDOLS: CORPOREAL REPRESENTATION OF

GENDER RELATIONS

The split-personality of the female idols is a persistent subtext of the coun-

try’s master narrative of gender hierarchies, which reflects a “fundamental
dimension of our collective thinking and our collective fantasies” about it
(Jameson 1981, 34). Since every representation is a reconstruction of politi-
cal fantasy that arises from actual and potential social relations (Jameson
1995), and more specifically, “construction of gender is both the product and
the process of its representation” (de Lauretis 1987, 5), K-pop female idols
are a sociocultural text that manifests their condition of existence in the
nation’s political-economic and historical contexts. In other words, since
sexuality is constituted by power, and power is maintained by the practice of
sexuality (Foucault 1980, 1990), the idols’ split personalities should be
understood through the nation’s dominant power structure, which is a nexus
between patriarchy and neoliberalism. However, since any imagery is a prod-
uct of an “ongoing contest of representations between opposing social
forces” (Kellner 1995; 2002, 85), its polysemy can be both transformative
and a sophisticated disguise, and in turn, should be critically examined in its
cultural, economic, and political contexts of production. While the idols can
promote female empowerment through creating their own styles and subjec-
tivity, they must be understood in their artificiality manufactured by the
industry.
For example, analyzing the Tiller Girls’ synchronized choreography, Kra-
cauer (1995) indicates the female performers’ precision, regularity, orderli-
ness, and extravagancy in movements are mass ornaments that materialize
the instrumental/technological rationality of capitalism, which “reflects that
of the entire contemporary situation” (78). In this respect, as much as the
“hands of the factory correspond to the legs of the Tiller Girls” (79), K-pop
female idols’ split personalities embody how their subjectivity has been con-
ditioned by the society’s changing needs in a continuity between Confucian
gender hierarchy and neoliberal commodification of sexuality. Thus, I claim
the idols are a neoliberal mass ornament that performs the “aesthetic reflex of
the rationality to which the prevailing economic system aspires,” that is total
commodification of female subject (79). In other words, visual representa-
tions of K-pop female idols host a set of contradictions and ambiguity; thus,
reading them as cultural texts in either an incompetently positive or negative
manner will risk being trapped in the industry’s commercial strategy of sell-
ing the image or neglecting their active, hegemonic nature.
 Elusive Subjectivity of K-Pop Female Idols 81

As examined in chapter two, women’s place in Korea is still subject to the

to traditional gender hierarchy, and their incongruous status has been in-
grained in the nation’s pursuit of capitalist modernization. In this context, K-
pop female idols’ schizophrenic personality is a hegemonic mode of feminin-
ity caught between patriarchal gender hierarchy and neoliberal commodifica-
tion of female sexuality. A schizophrenic structure of female identity thus
exhibits the social condition of female lives under the two distinct world-
views at the same time: They are required to be innocent, cute, and submis-
sive patriarchal women, and active, hypersexualized practitioners of neolib-
eralism. In turn, this rigid, double confinement of female identity does not
grant any room for Korean women to construct their own autonomous sub-
jectivity: At one limit, failing to achieve individual development, a woman
behaves obediently, submissively, and subjectlessly like a little girl, and on
the other, she acts as a temptress and preaches neoliberalism. Thus, the
schizophrenic character of K-pop is a symptomatic revelation of the K-pop
industry’s sociocultural side-effect as a neoliberal update of an old Confucian
formula that takes advantage of female bodies and sexuality in the name of
national development.

SPLIT PERSONALITIES OF FEMALE K-POP IDOLS

Using Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatari’s notion of schizophrenia for a de-
constructed identity to trespass patriarchal capitalism, feminist scholars en-
deavor to claim alternative sexual identities (Baker 2010; Braidotti 2003;
2006; Griffin 2004; Griffin et al. 2013; Renold and Ringrose 2011; Walker-
dine 2003). While agreeing with their purpose, I argue advocating schizo-
phrenic deconstruction as social discourse is one thing, and suggesting it as a
“psychological proposition underlying the existence of the self and the politi-
cal space” is quite another (Eagleton 2008; Glass 1993, 14). Neither does it
provide any transformative tool to dismantle the unified patriarchal subject,
nor do schizophrenic selves have anything “in common with selves decon-
structed in texts” (Glass 1993, 14). Rather, schizophrenics suffer from insur-
mountable physical and psychological pain to the extent that they are
“encumbered by abandonment, isolation, coldness, and death” (13).
To address this misconstruction, I reposition the schizophrenic female
sexuality as a hegemonic construction to reproduce the traditional gender
identity in neoliberal capitalism. Considering subject and its identity are a
concrete product of an episteme that is a constellation of discourse, knowl-
edge, and power (Foucault 1980, 1984, 1990, 1994, 1995, 2008), I examine
how the schizophrenic personalities of K-pop female idols have simultane-
ously incorporated multiple modalities of social controls. As a cultural com-
modity produced by specific sets of economic and social interests, the idols’
82 Chapter 5

split personalities are an embodiment of the industry’s response to increasing

economic, political, and social challenges since the 1997 Crisis.
In other words, considering female subjectivity is configured through a
complex interaction between symbolic and material conditions in society
(Braidotti 2003, 2006), I attribute the idols’ schizophrenic personalities to
Confucian gender hierarchy and neoliberal sexualization. While femininity
has been configured in the “deployment of standardized visual images” (17),
Bordo’s (1992) notion of “‘double-bind’ that legislates contradictory ideals
and directives” between being obedient and self-mastery (18) has been ap-
propriated to address Korea’s patriarchal locality that demands the idols be
sexually innocent, cute, and demure, and play hypersexual and provocative
roles simultaneously in the K-pop industry. This dual, contradictory demand
has intensified patriarchy’s “totally other-oriented emotional economy” (18)
to satisfy male affective and sexual needs. By doing so, the patriarchal affec-
tive economy exhausts and appropriates the counter-hegemonic potential of
women’s increasing economic and social participation since the 1997 Crisis
into the service of maintaining the patriarchal status quo. In its double-
bindedness, which is traditionally Confucian and contemporarily neoliberal,
pure/innocent and sexual, as a marketing strategy for commodified differ-
ences in the industry, the schizophrenic female personality further constrains
a possibility of alternative thoughts and behaviors in women. As a popular
agent of daily gender experiences in the country, the idols exercise a new set
of sexual norms and values, which renew the traditional ones. In this “schiz-
oid double-pull” (Braidotti 2006) of femininity, K-pop female idols are mar-
keted as a result of the industry’s commodification of the previously con-
cealed in the domestic domain while keeping the established patriarchal code
of female conducts and mainstreaming neoliberal sexualization. Thus,
contrary to Emma Renold and Jessica Ringrose (2011) finding that teenage
girls’ trespassing consumptions of sexualized media culture are “schizoid
pushes and pulls” (403), I redirect a critical attention to neoliberal consumer
culture that conditions female audiences to practice schizophrenic gender
norms in their daily lives. In this industry-induced schizophrenic female
sexuality, women have less room to navigate “girls’ more porous molecular
movements which permeate and trouble molar lines” (403).
In reality, the female idols’ split personalities are a corporeal representa-
tion of “sexualized territory offered to the gaze of the dominant power”
(Choi 1998, 26). It is a reaffirmation of Korean patriarchy by legitimizing
female subordination, being innocent, cute, and submissive, and naturalizing
neoliberal imperatives that female bodies are commodities. Thus, the K-pop
female idols’ schizophrenic personality is a strategic outcome of the K-pop
industry for its instrumental functionalities. It boosts neoliberal affective
economy that monetizes an imaginary feeling of male superiority, which
audiences achieve by watching the idols play innocence, cuteness. Simulta-
 Elusive Subjectivity of K-Pop Female Idols 83

neously, it updates and reinforces a gender-based, exploitative human rela-

tionship under capitalism. As much as female bodies and sexuality were
mobilized to accumulate foreign capital for national development since the
Korean War (Jager 2003; K. Moon 1997), they are still manipulated fashion-
ably to legitimate masculinist development. The more the idols’ cute and
innocent behavior are highlighted, the more their sexualization is visually
salient: The further female bodies are displayed as a neoliberal commodity,
the further they need to validate traditional gender norms and expectations to
maintain the dominant cultural and social status quo in the nation. In sum, as
Teresa de Lauretis (1987) indicates a female subject is formulated by a
“multiplicity of discourses, positions and meanings which are often in con-
flict with one another” (x), the split personalities of K-pop female idols are a
carnal imprint of a cacophonous negotiation between the traditional mode of
gender oppression and the current economic hegemony of neoliberalism.

NARCISSISM AND EXPLICIT CORPOREAL VISUALITY IN THE

FEMALE IDOLS

Considering Annie Reich’s (1960) contention that there is a connection be-

tween narcissism and low self-esteem, for the former results from arrested
self-development that leads to the latter, the idols’ hypersexuality can be
understood as a visual note of their “compensatory narcissistic self-
inflation.” Likewise, Stanley Coen (1981) indicates sexualization is a narcis-
sistic defensive mechanism that is “extensively elaborated defensive use of
sexual behavior and fantasy” whose goals and functions are not geared to
subjective sexual pleasure or satisfaction (893). However, since hypersexual-
ity is due to low self-esteem, they tend to push hypersexuality even further in
order to compensate their damaged self-esteem when they fail to get due
recognition from others. From an obsession with sexual innocence due to
lack of a cohesive, well-developed subjectivity, women can turn to hypersex-
uality to disguise themselves as matured female subjects and receive others’
recognition. This vicious cycle drags the K-pop female idol into a humiliat-
ing stage enactment of pornographic dance moves, which results in “vora-
cious [narcissistic] absorption in self needs and the block of their fulfillment”
(Sennett 2017, 10). In turn, this somatic dimension of female narcissism
distorts a notion of sexuality by “enshrining of the body as an absolute sexual
state” and in turn reifying sexual experiences as a mere “market exchange of
intimacies” (11). In this regard, a neoliberal commodification of female sexu-
ality works well in patriarchal Korean society, where woman are insecure
and ask “obsessive questions of whether I am good enough, whether I am
adequate” to conform to the trend (T. Kim 2003; Sennett 2017, 14). Howev-
er, the most devastating social implication of narcissistic women who exer-
84 Chapter 5

cise a never-ending search for immediate gratification is that their restless-

ness not only “prevents that gratification from occurring” (Sennett 2017,
274), but also makes them further conform to and remain uncritical of the
status quo. A social toll of being women carries a burden of constantly
observing others’ outfits and behaviors to conform, and furthermore, being
aware of being watched by others. This double gaze, or internalized gaze,
keeps women vulnerable to changing imperatives of society’s cultural, eco-
nomic, and political needs. For this reason, instead of coming up with their
own sexuality and subjectivity, the female idols just practice the industry’s
demand and their lack of voice and opinion further put them in a narcissistic
mental status, which can only be overcome by others’ attention (Lasch
1979).
While women have to continuously refashion themselves to achieve an
autonomous, self-invented subject in this vicious subjectification (Rose
1998), a phenomenal success of K-pop female idols should be reconsidered
in the context of women’s precarious socioeconomic conditions where “up-
ward mobility becomes a central trope of . . . building upon the long-estab-
lished incitement to women to become producers of themselves as objects of
the gaze” (Walkerdine 2003, 242). Pathologically speaking, women who fail
to develop subjectivity, they tend not to be able to control their sexuality, but
face an unending split between childish sexual innocence and hypersexuality.
While they had to be “modest and submissive [in sexuality], but also strong
and responsible” for domestic matters in a traditional society (Deuchler
1992, 259), the idols now have to be sexually provocative as well as cute and
innocent in their public images. In this regard, the idols are classified largely
as either conforming to or rebelling against this new stereotype, just as tradi-
tional women were “remembered either for their perfect enactment of [Con-
fucian] roles or for their rebellion against them” (281). In this perplexing
schizophrenic bifurcation, both the idols and the audience get trapped in an
unavoidable gap between the ideal and the reality, which leads them to daily
conflicts in coming to a sense of their identity and subjectivity. For this
reason, there are many K-pop idols who have developed psychological disor-
ders (Allkpop 2017).
In traditional Confucian Korea, where sons virtually monopolize parents’
attention and care, a daughter receives parental supports as far as her talent is
recognized and appreciated for upgrading the family’s reputation and wealth.
With her responsibility for filial piety, she tends to do her best so that she can
retain their attention and support. However, since the traditional realms of
power and success such as business, politics, and government are not open
broadly enough to them, girls are prone to exploit opportunities in entertain-
ment and service sectors to advance their status. By the same token, as a
condition for success and popularity, K-pop female idols have to internalize
and embody the patriarchal principle for serving the authorities and elders.
 Elusive Subjectivity of K-Pop Female Idols 85

For example, Sejeong Kim of a female girl group, I.O.I., received a big
applause when she mentioned she would attribute her success to her mother
and grandparents so that she could honor their care and support in her fami-
ly’s difficult past (Y. Baek 2016). Likewise, Suzy of Miss A has also been
complimented on her filial piety by paying off her parents’ debt and buying
them a house and a car. In this respect, in addition to their physical appeal,
K-pop female idols have to exhibit their conformation to the patriarchal
order. Furthermore, female idols have to always show their best respect to
their fans and audiences no matter when and where: otherwise, they become
subject to public outcry and criticism for their “inconsiderate” behaviors
(Hyun 2013). When Yerin of Girl Friend caught a hidden surveillance came-
ra on a male fan’s eyeglasses, she had to make a formal apology for offend-
ing his feelings (S. Baek 2017). However, male idols are immune to this
criticism even when they are not respectful to older female fans or the audi-
ence. Furthermore, in order to confirm the public’s demand for their confor-
mity, the female idols have to show their earnest efforts and sincerity to
exhibit their talent no matter what stage conditions are. Showing the public
that they are doing their very best is a mere condition to win their attention.
On the other hand, when a girl idol does not seem to show her commitment
to the show or makes a mistake during the performance, she becomes subject
to audience’s bullying: On YouTube, when one searches for keywords in-
volving K-pop dance failure or accidents, the results are mainly about female
idols.

SEXUALIZED BODIES IN K-POP: FEMALE BODY TECHNOLOGY

IN NEOLIBERAL PATRIARCHY

With a changed focus of economic activities from manufacturing industry to

affective, service businesses, sexually provocative representations signify
how the culture industry capitalizes the personal attributes of affect and
sexuality by taking them to the public sphere of work and productivity, as
examined in chapter four. In the K-pop industry, the sexual and the economic
coincide and correspond each other to (re)produce and proliferate a patriar-
chal order of economic development: The female idol’s split personality is a
result of it.
While girlhood itself has been commodified in late capitalism (Cortese
2016), the K-pop industry pushes an envelope by not only sexualizing under-
age female idols but also presenting adult females as sexualized little girls.
While women’s “value” decreases as they grow old (Cook and Kaiser 2004),
they, in a competition against underage idols, have to look like little girls
who can sell a submissive image to male audiences. In that respect, as a
mode of neoliberal gender technology, the idol’s split personality “unsettle[s]
86 Chapter 5

or even overthrow[s] the contrast between normative feminine respectability

as an aspirational category and the ‘sluttish’ agentic sexuality” (Griffin et al.
2013, 198). They were presented as if they exert hypersexuality as a means
of self-fulfillment and as if they enjoy being cute and innocent as a means of
expressing inner selves. This is how neoliberal body technology regulates
women by instilling a false sense of agency, as though being free to choose
her own identity occludes structural conditions (Rose 1990, 1998).
While Confucian education used rigorous regimens to inscribe “the ideals
of a male-oriented society” (Deuchler 1992, 258), neoliberalism exploits the
glossy visual dimensions of the idols’ performances to achieve the same
pedagogic goal. The female idols’ sheer ubiquity is likely to consume peo-
ple’s attention and consciousness, “while the production and mindless con-
sumption of the ornamental patterns divert them from the imperatives to
change the reigning order” (Kracauer 1995, 85). Furthermore, since the most
desirable female code of conduct is conformity (T. Kim 2003), K-pop music
videos’ ample affective power interpellates the audience to conform to what
is shown attractively. Pairing seamless choreography with well-matched out-
fits between members, the idols visually represent the Confucian canon of
female conformity and harmony in their designated places, as examined in
chapter two. Considering women are subjectless bodies, whose existence
mainly lies in their physicality, a “synchronization of body movement in
choreographed routines” (Unger 2015, 33) is a corporeal visualization of
their conformity to and internalization of Confucianism en masse. This ob-
sessive visualization of harmony combined with hypersexualization of fe-
male bodies further conditions women to internalize the patriarchal demand
of being sexually available and being aware of being observed. With easy,
repeated moves to follow, such as moving to hooks and beats in a synchron-
ized manner to the extent that the fans “incorporat[e] the music into their
bodies” (33), the idols’ choreography further facilitates audiences’ internal-
ization of patriarchal conformity when performed at clubs or producing
dance cover videos on YouTube.
Uniforms fulfill disciplinary functions on bodies by addressing a society’s
needs in a given time as well as exhibiting masculine authority, power, and
sexuality (Craik 2003; Wills 2000). Likewise, a ubiquity of sexualized uni-
forms in K-pop further indicates a patriarchal demand on female bodies that
is affective, obedient, corporeal, and symbolic. As a symbol of female work-
ers’ affective, immaterial labor in the neoliberal country, the female idols in
uniforms aim to homogenize female subjectivity. The purpose is to regulate
them as an erotic spectacle, because female bodies in uniforms must not be
threatening to the nation’s patriarchy. In other words, as a cultural police
activity to reclaim masculine authority, a spectacle of the idols in uniforms is
a reactionary response to women’s growing presence and influence from a
sudden abundance of female workers.
 Elusive Subjectivity of K-Pop Female Idols 87

ELUSIVE SEXUALITY OF SUZY: FROM “GOOD GIRL, BAD GIRL”

TO “HUSH”

As an optic that allows a critical investigation into “otherwise concealed or

forgotten connections with the past” (Jager 2003, xi), I examine whether or
not, the representation of Suzy’s split personality contributes to a “subjective
construction of gender . . . [opening] a possibility of agency and self-
determination” (de Lauretis 1987, 9). To that end, I reconsider the three most
important moments in her career as one of the most successful K-pop female
idols to date: her debut as a member of Miss A with the song “Good Girl,
Bad Girl” in 2010, her movie debut with a surprising box-office performance
in Architecture 101 in 2012, and her comeback success in the K-pop industry
with the song “Hush” in 2013. Each contributed to her increasing fame,
expanding her opportunities to exhibit her split personality between pure,
innocent, and cute femininity, and explicit sexuality.
Considering that female bodies in Confucian Korea used to be fully cov-
ered and confined to the domestic sphere, dancing female bodies in tight,
revealing clothes like bodysuits, shorts, and short skirts decorated with laces
display their changed status nowadays. This transformation is distinctive in
“Bad Girl, Good Girl,” where the idols dance in a school setting. Donning all
black or black/white clothes with natural-looking makeup as a symbol of
their effort to defy expectations of traditional femininity, the idols assume an
aggressive attitude toward a male counterpart in their acts: They hit a boy
student in the shoulder, brush off the contacted area with contemptuous
looks, and then step on his fallen books. The choice of color in their outfits
indicates their desire for power, authority, or dominance over the male
counterpart. While female affects used to be channeled to address male emo-
tional demand, the idols do not show any facial expressions, showing that
they do not care about the male gaze on them. Rather, claiming how they
look does not represent what they are, the idols declare their own (sexual)
subjectivity. Dancing in a provocative manner in a ballet studio where “good
girls” normally practice the feminine arabesque in classical music, Miss A
appropriates the conventionally perceived womanly behaviors and proclaims
they are “bad girls” who do not conform to traditional femininity. Making
direct eye contact with the camera, the idols look stern and strong while
emitting a sense of rebellion against the patriarchal gaze. The song’s lyrics
blame men for judging girls by their looks: The lyrics read “On the outside,
I’m a Bad Girl. On the inside, I’m a Good Girl. You don’t even know me
well, you only look at me from the outside.” In sum, while still sexualized,
the idols’ powerful dance routines seem to convey a visual message of fe-
male empowerment.
While the video ostensibly depicts the idols as a sexually assertive sub-
jects, cautious analyses of the outfits and choreography reveal a different
88 Chapter 5

layer of meanings behind their audiovisual seduction. They promote a dubi-

ous practice of female liberation from the patriarchy: They promote an unex-
plained aggression or bullying toward a fellow male student, which falls back
into a traditional characteristic of masculine behaviors. The seamless, well-
synchronized choreography in a line format indicates a dominant rationality
of control and manipulation in patriarchy. While there are occasions of indi-
vidualized dance moves, all the group members eventually come to conform
to a pre-determined, collective theme of corporeal arrangement and exhibi-
tion, which is conditioned and determined by their agency. To be more
specific, when an individual member is spotlighted in a given shot, she is
highly sexualized with more provocative outfits and even more provocative
dance moves. In other words, either individually or collectively, the idols
reproduce the dominant patriarchal gender hierarchy through sexualization
and group conformity. While their abrupt, dramatized dance moves could
symbolize their desire to depart from oppressive gender norms, these moves
give way to sexually charged actions, such as groping their own bodies,
dropping down, rolling on the floor, and thrusting and gyrating their bottoms,
and in turn contribute to perpetuating and maintaining the male-oriented
female sexual conduct to satisfy male corporeal desires. Certain body parts
rather than the whole body are emphasized, especially the idols’ bottoms and
bosoms that shake, swing and gyrate; they have been emphasized to reify the
idols’ physicality. In this respect, their unconventional choreography is not to
liberate their sexuality but update and reaffirm the male-oriented dominant
sexuality.
While the message of the lyrics seems to represent a female perspective
of male hypocrisy, they do not present an alternative notion of their feminin-
ity other than indicating that males do not know them. To be more specific,
the lyrical message that the members of Miss A are simultaneously good
girls and bad girls seems to admit they perform schizophrenic subjects who
have to address male demand situationally. In other words, without manifest-
ing why and how their “bad girl” behavior promotes a subjective female
sexuality, Miss A rather capitalizes on male sexual hypocrisy by indicating
they are “bad girls” who serve the male sexual fantasy as a means of achiev-
ing their fame and popularity. Since their effort to claim their subjectivity is
still confined to physicality and seductive action, which were conditioned by
patriarchal industry practices and structure, the idols’ endeavor unfortunately
feeds back to the dominant, hypocritical sexuality in a reverse-benefit mode.
The lyrics read: “I’m something new. Why can’t you see? . . . Drop it like a
bad girl. Love like a good girl.” This is exactly how Suzy of Miss A has been
celebrated for her elusive identity that simultaneously retains a symbol of
purity, innocence, and whole-heartedness as the nation’s First Love and a
sexy queen of K-pop. As for coordination of outfits and makeup between the
idols, there is still an ambiguity between the black clothes that aim to repre-
 Elusive Subjectivity of K-Pop Female Idols 89

sent female empowerment or dominance and light makeup which retain a

symbol of purity and innocence. While dance moves and lyrics try to pro-
mote aggressive female subjectivity, the general tone of the music video is
rather soft and gentle with the warm color temperature of the setting. Conse-
quently, in the affective economy of K-pop, the idols take advantage of the
neoliberal logic of marketing the nonmarketable, which demands that sexual-
ized femininity survive in today’s hyper-capitalism.
Shortly after “Good Girl, Bad Girl,” which established Miss A’s fame
through aggressive female sexuality, Suzy was introduced to the movie in-
dustry. Playing a role as a piano major freshman in the movie, Architecture
101, she became a national sensation with her “staged” image of innocence,
purity, and wholesomeness as the national icon of First Love, and contrib-
uted to the movie’s success. Actually the movie is full of patriarchal mes-
sages in a high production value: In the movie, Suzy was abandoned by her
First Love, who thought she lost her virginity to another college student.
Whether it was true or not, her First Love’s suspicion was good enough for a
breakup. Since the movie became a national sensation, the nation’s obsession
with female chastity and decency got renewed. Now, Suzy became an exem-
plar for the nation’s pure, wholesome female subjectivity.
With the surge of Suzy’s fame and success, Miss A released a new music
video, “Hush,” in 2013, and it is much more carnal in its visual and lyrical
message, in which the idols unapologetically manifest they are “bad girls.”
The song is all about a “secret party” that insinuates sexual activities. Open-
ing with a flood in the room, insinuating that the idols are fully mature to the
extent that they are “wet,” the video visually lavishes sexual allusions and
references. In risqué sartorial materials such as body chains, tight leather
pants, and high heels, the idols wear drastic makeup with eye-catching red
lipstick on their game-faces. With many occasions of touching themselves,
bouncing, pumping, and crouching in sexual poses, the choreography is ex-
plicitly filled with sexual messages. The idols claim a direct, demanding
sexuality: “Kiss kiss kiss baby. Hush hush hush baby. Hot hot make it hot,
and melt me. Give it to me, give it to me oh.” Their bodily and lyrical
messages further complicate and perpetuate the dominant sexuality that re-
ifies females as sex objects.
In K-pop, what the idols can claim for female empowerment is to push an
envelope further to the extent that they shock the audience to create an
illusion of power and autonomy. In other words, the idols reproduce the
patriarchal hegemony of female empowerment as long as they stay within the
dominant gender hierarchy. While it is obvious that Miss A presents a rather
aggressive femininity in their lyrical, physical, and visual measures challeng-
ing conventionally quiet, obedient, passive, and chaste femininity, they are
still within a safe realm of the patriarchal discourse or desire of femininity
and sexuality. Despite a hint of individuality with varied hair dye and colors
90 Chapter 5

of clothes, visual conformity to femininity is evident to the extent that all

four women have slender bodies of a similar height and fair skin. The idols
do not have their own sexual subjectivity; it can only be fulfilled by a male
presence or male sexual desire: “Hurry hurry boy. I want you.” The idols’
aggressive sexuality feeds the male sexual ego, and the lyrics reaffirm the
hegemonic, passive femininity in a guise of aggressive sexuality: “I can’t
stand it, I can’t take it, my heart palpitates, I can’t keep straight.” It is in this
very ambiguity that the video further perpetuates hegemonic patriarchy while
giving a false sense of female subjectivity and empowerment.
When “Good Girl, Bad Girl” was released, Suzy was fifteen years old and
the youngest female idol at her debut, and has been one of the most success-
ful idols with her ambivalent image mixed both with innocence/purity and
sexuality. In “Good Girl, Bad Girl,” she wears a tutu-like skirt, and seems to
be less revealing than other members. However, since she has elongated legs,
the skirt does not cover her body well, but attracts more attention to her body
whenever it waves and exposes her thigh. Especially when combined with
her milky, porcelain skin, the black dress accentuates Suzy’s physical attrac-
tiveness. This visual contradiction gets more salient when her ponytail hair
with bangs, which is typical to teenage girls, is incorporated in the sexualized
visuals, especially with explicit sexual moves, such as holding buttocks and
swinging them sideways, and a pelvic thrust on the floor. This is how her
slippery image gets solidified when her wholesome physical attributes retain
sexual connotations and attractions by being propped in “Good Girl, Bad
Girl.” Later, in a similar manner, Suzy harks back to a visuality of purity and
innocence in the hypersexualized theme of “Hush.” Especially in the subway
car scene of “Hush,” Suzy holds a giant lollipop and wears a white long-
sleeve turtleneck sweater, which gives another layer of reified innocence and
childhood purity, and this fetishism is revealing when Suzy sits upright and
stiff with no facial expression, like a china doll. While Suzy bites to break the
candy tuned in a lyric, “I can’t hold it in any more,” she becomes fully
sexualized, inviting male sexual fantasy of violating innocence. In “Good
Girl, Bad Girl,” Suzy is the most sexualized in a sophisticated and teasing
way; however, she is the most innocent and wholesome in “Hush” for the
exact same reason—that is, her elusive sexuality.

CONCLUDING REMARKS: SECOND SEX FOR K-POP FEMALE

IDOLS?

As examined so far, the female idols are simultaneously empowered and

disempowered in the K-pop industry. As much as they are enabled by their
presence in the K-pop industry, they are still subject to the traditional gender
norms, albeit updated and ameliorated by neoliberal market logic. The
 Elusive Subjectivity of K-Pop Female Idols 91

schizophrenic personality is a salient example that materializes how their

subjectivity has been distorted to conform to the patriarchal gender values
and expectations and to market to an ephemeral taste of consumers in neolib-
eral hyper-capitalism. Cuteness makes the idols weaker than the (male) audi-
ences, and allows consumers to enjoy their imaginary power while assuming
sexual gratification. By doing so, it perpetuates the patriarchal value system
which demands women be kind, gentle, decent, delicate, and in need of care
as well as sexually available. The old formulas of Confucian gender hierar-
chy do not work as they used to nowadays due to modernization: With
neoliberal market imperatives as a strange bedfellow, the old formula con-
spires to create a marketization/commodification of everything as far as it is
sellable in the name of national and economic development. Thus, the
schizophrenic personality of the idols is an emergent allegory of patriarchal
gender exploitation in neoliberal modus operandi.
In this respect, the K-pop industry fashionably complicates Simone de
Beauvoir’s classic lament on women’s subjectless ontological condition in
patriarchal capitalist society: “Humanity is male, and man defines women,
not in herself, but in relation to himself” (2015, 7). In the capital and labor-
intensive industry where all the decisions are made by male business leaders,
the female idols are enacted. No matter how capable, independent, flashy,
and desirable the female idols appear, their astronomical ascendance is no
more than “symbolic agitation; they have won only what men have been
willing to concede to them” (11). De Beauvoir claims that bourgeois women
lack solidarity with female proletarians to transform the patriarchy but ally
with male bourgeois: Likewise, rather than taking an action against the in-
dustry’s slave-like contracts and harsh treatment of trainees and idols, Kore-
an mothers contribute to a surge of wannabe girls who provide the industry
with raw resources and an excuse for unjust treatment. Due to a long habitua-
tion with patriarchy, many women have assumed and exercised men’s point
of view on female realities in society, and K-pop female idols are a recent
exemplar that further reproduces the gender status quo that conditions wom-
en to internalize a patriarchal female ideal who is frivolous, infantile, inferi-
or, subjugated, and demure. In this adverse ontological condition, the idols
are to perform schizophrenic femininity conflated between innocence/purity/
cuteness and explicit sexuality in a narcissistic manner.
Being successful as K-pop female idols seems to promise they can live
both like a man enjoying stardom in the industry and like a woman devouring
fashionable glamour of facial beauty and fancy clothes that feed their narcis-
sistic indulgence. As pseudo subjectivity, the idols’ split personalities are a
visual representation of women’s place in the neoliberal affective economy
of K-pop in the patriarchal nation, where they have to capitalize on their
manufactured appearance and personality, that is, “narcissistic defects: [they]
will appear vain, touchy and a phoney; [they] will treat the whole world as a
92 Chapter 5

stage” (de Beauvoir 2015, 57). As a mass ornament that exhibits a functional
dynamic of society and intermediates a narcissistic nature of appearances,
they perpetuate a sterile vanity of female subjectivities that does not con-
struct herself, but maintains clichés and stereotypes. While conformity is the
most desirable female quality in patriarchy, representations of the idols as a
culmination of male fantasia that is visually pleasing and sexually arousing is
depleting the female sociological imagination for gender equality and justice.
This fake or empty entitlement of the idols originates from a barbed process
of female subjectification where they are not allowed to “stand in front of
man as a subject but as an object paradoxically endowed with subjectivity . . .
as both self and other” (75, emphasis original).
 Chapter Six

Resilience, Positive Psychology, and

Subjectivity in K-Pop Female Idols
Evolution of Girls’ Generation from “Into the New
World” (2007) to “All Night” (2017)

As a continuation of chapter five’s argument that female subjectivity has

been manipulated to conform to patriarchal gender values and expectations,
this chapter examines how K-pop promotes resilience as governmentality
that asks women to endure their misfortune, troubles, pains, and other adver-
saries under neoliberalism. Since the onset of the Reagan administration with
its neoliberal deregulation drives, and especially with a recent financial crisis
of 2008, resilience has become a common stock of individuals’ knowledge
and common sense. Defined as the capacity to recover quickly from crisis or
difficulty, resiliency has been integral to a neoliberal reconstruction of soci-
ety. Along with a deregulation of state policies and growing economic and
security uncertainties, especially since the 2001 terrorist attack, the resilience
discourse has become a code word for a “strategy of permanent, open-ended
responsiveness, integrating emergency preparedness into the infrastructures
of everyday life and the psychology of citizens” (Walker and Cooper 2011,
154). In other words, perpetuating resiliency as individuals’ ideal code of
conducts in the face of ever-deteriorating living conditions, neoliberalism
tries to complete its transformative project that aims to permeate market
value and rationality into every realm of human life, as Harvey (2005) indi-
cates. When a crisis “constitutes a new ontology of life, then resilience has
become a monotonous characteristic of everything” (Duffield 2012, 481).
While resilience discourse has been a staple subject in various disciplines
like international relations, socioeconomic policies, business management
93
94 Chapter 6

(especially to justify financial deregulation), urban planning, public health,

and national security, to name a few (Brassett, Croft, and Vaughan-Williams
2013; Duffield 2012; Walker and Cooper 2011), there is a dearth of literature
that deals with how popular music promotes it in individuals’ everyday lives,
except for James’s (2015) study. A theme of resilience is pervasive in popu-
lar music videos, and disguises subjugation and oppression as a necessity for
individuals’ growth and development: “Resilience discourse is what ties con-
temporary pop music aesthetics to neoliberal capitalism and racism/sexism”
(James 2015, 6, emphasis original). In a reactionary application of Nietzs-
chean self-mastery through hardship, neoliberalism has appropriated resil-
ience as a rite of passage for individuals to become neoliberal subjects, homo
economicus. With a therapeutic narrative of overcoming a damage/obstacle
that will increase human capital, resilience becomes an ideal personal quality
that helps construct a self-reflexive, actualizing, and enterprising neoliberal
subject.
With the birth of MTV, popular music videos have become one of the
most influential tools to spread and normalize the dominant ideology. By
their ubiquity and entertainment properties, they have been an effective
means of neoliberal biopolitics. On the other hand, compared to a growing
scholarly attention to K-pop’s impact in Korea and other countries, there is
no research on how the music promotes neoliberal governmentality in a
pleasurable, affective manner. To fill this intellectual void, I investigate how
the K-pop music video carries visual messages of resilience, and how K-pop
female idols perpetuate governmentality via their affect-charged visuality
and in turn help audiences construct their resilient subjectivity.
As one of the most successful K-pop idols (the most among the female
idols) to date, SNSD has been ubiquitous from performance stage, to com-
mercial endorsements, to governmental events, and in turn influential in
many aspects of individuals’ lives (Ahn 2011). Under the theme of female
empowerment, SNSD made a debut in 2007 with “Into the New World,”
which fantasizes a promise of female success as far as they maintain the
goals and keep trying. While SNSD enjoys fandom evenly from various
demographics, female audiences in their teens and twenties are the most avid
followers of the group. While commercializing traditional feminine charac-
teristics such as cuteness, playfulness, and modesty, SNSD has been influen-
tial in a subjectivation process of both female adolescents and young women.
In the music video of “Into the New World,” SNSD valorizes resilience as a
key to success, replacing institutional/structural issues with a matter of indi-
vidual attributes/character traits, brushing off the concerns, troubles, and
struggles of the majority of women in Korea. Interestingly enough, female
students of a local women’s college in Korea used the song as a protest
agitation song in 2016. After decorated successes as the “National Idol” of
K-pop, SNSD released its 10th anniversary album on August 4, 2017. In “All
 Resilience, Positive Psychology, and Subjectivity in K-Pop Female Idols 95

Night,” SNSD members nostalgically share their experiences, thoughts, and

appreciations regarding their ten-year careers. The music video provides the
audience with emotional or imaginary gratification by showing how girls
who used to be told to be passive, obedient, and inferior get over all the
obstacles and become successful in their careers.
Considering emotion is an essential element of the neoliberal economy
(Vrasti 2011) and what Elaine Campbell (2010) indicates involves “emotion-
alities of rule” as technology of the self that is enacted and realized on and by
emotional terms and stakes, I examine how SNSD’s music videos emphasize
emotional dimensions of the idols’ resiliency as a normative sensibility of
neoliberal female subjectivity, and legitimate the status quo of patriarchal
capitalism. As a cultural mechanism to reproduce female complacency and
subjugation, the female idols instigate audiences’ desire to be successful as
an emotional technology of self-realization. In this respect, the videos can be
considered as a popular mode of “affective technologies for constituting
[neoliberal] subjectivities” (Campbell 2010, 51). In this regard, I investigate
how the videos normalize neoliberal “feminine subjects [who] are expected
to overcome the burdens traditionally associated with femininity . . . [in]
emotional and affective labor on oneself and one’s corporeal schema” (James
2015, 82). By doing so, I examine how visual messages of female resilience
as a cultural embodiment of governmentality naturalize a neoliberal order, a
privatization of systematic problems in society, since female resilience dis-
course shifts one’s consideration from a “dynamics of systems to emphasis-
ing individual responsibility, adaptability and preparedness” (Joseph 2013,
40).

FEMINISM IN NEOLIBERAL SOCIETY: RESILIENCE, POSITIVE

PSYCHOLOGY, AND CULTURE INDUSTRY

In this section, I elaborate Catherine Rottenberg’s (2014) commentary on

why neoliberalism promotes feminism by examining how resilience dis-
course maintains and perpetuates an exploitation of female workers in pre-
carious labor relations. Despite unjust treatments in employment, compensa-
tion, and promotion opportunities, women have become an integral part of
capitalism, especially the neoliberal service economy. Defined as a “system-
atic, widespread, organizational, structural and personal strengthening of
subjective and material arrangements” against any disequilibrium or distur-
bance (Lentzos and Rose 2009, 243), resilience is not only a technology of
the self, but also an organizational rationality of society. As a historical
outcome of structural conditions like cultural traditions, social conventions,
and governmental policies (Walsh-Dilley and Wolford 2015), resilience has
been “forged and sustained through the repeated [mundane] exercises” of
96 Chapter 6

individuals’ everyday lives (Zebrowski 2013, 161). As a hegemonic ploy to

keep female workers in the unfair labor market by perpetuating their positive
imageries (Humphreys 2015), popular culture has perpetuated a dramatic
success story of the oppressed, as exemplified by Oprah Winfrey’s case. In
this respect, women’s “being resilient is to accept responsibility for one’s
individual position in a complex social fabric that is insecure by design”
(Evans and Reid 2013, 94). As Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatte (2002)
indicate that resilience is “the basic ingredient to happiness and success” (1),
resilience has been promoted as a desirable attribute of underpaid, precarious
workers: The more she is vulnerable, the more she has to be resilient to
survive. Therefore, resilience is “most concerned with those deemed most
vulnerable,” and a key strategy “in the creation of contemporary regimes of
power which hallmark vast inequalities in all human classifications” (Evans
and Reid 2013, 92).
As a regulatory mechanism of governmentality that intersects microtech-
nology of subjectivation and macro-technology of institutional and structural
subjectification (Dean 2010; Foucault 1991; Rose 1998, 1999a), resilience
discourse aims to condition individuals as self-responsibilized neoliberal
subjects. With its emphasis on individuals’ adaptability, tenacity, and perse-
verance against externally imposed changes like economic crises, resilience
has been promoted as an ethical ideal of neoliberal subjects and their self-
governance (Brassett, Croft, and Vaughan-Williams 2013; Chandler 2013;
Duffield 2012; Evans and Reid 2013; Joseph 2013; O’Malley 2010; Walker
and Cooper 2011; Zebrowski 2013). The neoliberal illusion of autonomy,
freedom, and self-help conceals structural and institutional constraints
against women since they are “required, to a greater degree than men, to be
engaged in improving and transforming the self” (Baker 2010, 188). With
resiliency, individuals are asked to be responsible for the quality and success
of their lives, embracing and overcoming risks and uncertainties by adapting
and exploiting to their advantage in situations of uncertainty. On the other
hand, by “emergency opportunities that disorder inevitably creates” (Duf-
field 2012, 480), resilience discourse normalizes what Naomi Klein (2008)
calls disaster capitalism. In this respect, as an “optimized technique of the
self” (O’Malley 2010, 500), resilience is a part of neoliberalism’s grand
marketization of society, by naturalizing unstable and risky economic, social,
and political environments and asking individuals to deal with them by them-
selves (Lentzos and Rose 2009). Put differently, resiliency is promoted in the
face of growing economic inequalities and injustices in neoliberal capitalism,
and in turn, functions as a contemporary technology of self-government.
As an attribute to resilience, a proper emotional state is promoted and
legitimated during a governmental process of “producing certain desired
[subjectivation and subjectification] effects” (Rose 1999b, 52). As a produc-
tivity optimization tool, resiliency aims to capitalize on individuals’ most
 Resilience, Positive Psychology, and Subjectivity in K-Pop Female Idols 97

favorable coping mechanism, that is, positive mentality: “Happiness of indi-

viduals is a requirement for the survival and development of the state” (Fou-
cault 1988, 158). Femininity, to be more specific female subjectification, has
been concurrent under somatic intelligibility with a binding characteristic of
emotion that “mediate(s) the relationship between the psychic and the social,
and between the individual and the collective” (Ahmed 2004, 119). In this
respect, emotional/affective female subjectivities are rendered in a neoliberal
biopolitics of free choice and self-government (Campbell 2010), and popular
music videos exert governing influence to female audiences. By this emo-
tionality of female subjectivation (Dawney 2013) and an embeddedness of
emotion in power relations, women “become emotionally attached to re-
gimes of [patriarchy] that [are] disadvantageous or even hurt them” (D’Aoust
2014, 271).
To be more specific, being happy or positive has been promoted as an
ideal feminine attribute under the banner of the positive psychology move-
ment (Banet-Weiser 2014; Davies 2016). Problems caused by institutional
inequalities and injustices are reduced to a matter of individual choices and
psychological status, and can be resolved by “tapping into [individuals’
psychological] positivity” (Fredrickson 2009, 179). Individuals’ positive
mindsets are the most important factor for their success: For example, it is
young girls’ self-conditioning in positive thinking that affects their academic
performances, and in turn determines their professional and personal success
(Seligman 2012). Since it confines a concept of happiness to individuals’
psychological choices and consumption, not what they achieve, positive
psychology further legitimates neoliberal consumerism (Cabanas 2016; Sug-
arman 2015). On the other hand, any transformative efforts such as social
movements are considered a waste of individuals’ energy, and in turn con-
tribute to their “needless frustration” (Seligman 2004). Thus, individuals are
asked not to think about or question any problems in the past, but to empha-
size how to make the future more bright and positive (Seligman et al. 2016).
Or individuals are asked to regard current problems as good opportunities to
improve and “actually emerge stronger afterwards” (Seligman and Tierney
2017, n.p.).
As a psychological defense mechanism, individuals tend to resort to
psychological retreat to soothe themselves against overwhelming external
problems (Berlin 1990). However, the media’s promotion of mindfulness
training for individuals to focus on inner peace so that they can stay resilient
irrespective of their surroundings is a neoliberal ploy to distract individuals’
indignation against structural injustice. Instead of mending structural uncer-
tainties and insecurities, neoliberalism demands individuals be more self-
affirmative, reliant, effective, and responsible for all the problems (Harris
2004). In this respect, more than a cultural fad, neoliberal positive psycholo-
gy has become a mainstream social discourse: Time magazine’s special issue
98 Chapter 6

in 2016, “The Science of Happiness: New Discoveries of a More Joyful

Life,” is a case in point. A theme of mindfulness has become dominant since
the financial crisis of 2008: There were more than 3,000 scholarly publica-
tions about it between 2008 and 2016, and industry has extensively incorpo-
rated mindfulness, yielding more than $1 billion in 2015 (Cabanas and Illouz
2017; Rusk and Waters 2013).
Likewise, promotion of an “authentic you” is a part of neoliberal personal
branding that aims to increase human capital through commodity consump-
tion. The more unique and singular, the more you are attractive to your
employers or audiences, and in turn the more you will be successful in the
neoliberal service economy. In this context, psychological negativity such as
low self-esteem, vulnerable feeling, and victim mentality is what women
have to stave off (Baker 2010). However, this makeover subjectivity can only
be possible by consuming post-feminist commodities marketed for boosting
their value and self-confidence, and requires a plethora of affective, bodily,
financial, and psychological efforts in a “depoliticized, straightforward self-
governing venture of rational choice and active appropriation” (Favaro 2017,
287). In this consumerist rebranding of the self, women become capable
producers/consumers of themselves by a neoliberal notion of homo economi-
cus who sees themselves as self-reliant and efficient human capital while
eradicating notions of socioeconomic justice (Brown 2003; Foucault 2008;
Lemke 2002; Rose 1993). As a human capital by themselves, women have to
allocate proper resources (personal strengths) to a strategic field of invest-
ment and prepare any potential loss in a self-management business based on
meticulous calculation of costs and effects, performing micromanagement of
their bodies and minds in their everyday lives, such as gratitude reflections or
repeating affirmative mantras. However, this neoliberal self-help transforma-
tion effort throws women into a more insecure, conformist state that requires
them to scrutinize and correct their everyday behaviors so that they can keep
themselves abreast of what is current or dominant in society.
As a pleasing tactic to circumscribe women’s collective anger from their
frustration in neoliberalism that puts them into ever more precarious living
conditions, resilience discourse with neoliberal positive psychology aggra-
vates what Sara Ahmed (2010) laments about an abject state of the “feminist
killjoy.” A therapeutic narrative of overcoming obstacles at the core of resil-
ience discourse dissipates women’s collective anger or indignation as a trans-
formative power to change the status quo by redirecting their attention from
structural problems to their inner conditions. Thus, it confuses a personal
dimension of psychological positivity with the structural conditions of wom-
en’s success in their financial, political, professional, and social realms. By
doing so, it co-opts women’s desire to be successful into commercial inter-
ests of neoliberal industries by perpetuating neoliberal mantras like self-
scrutiny, self-development, self-realization, and human capital (Rottenberg
 Resilience, Positive Psychology, and Subjectivity in K-Pop Female Idols 99

2014; 2017). In this respect, neoliberal discourse of resilience exerts an ideo-

logical function of collective amnesia that directs the public’s attention from
what caused the problem to how to survive. To that end, the neoliberal
culture industry’s systematic proliferation of positive images of women
“plays a crucial role in [neoliberal] feminism” (Rottenberg 2014, 429). Con-
sequently, while Sara Ahmed (2010) indicates a “consciousness of unhappi-
ness” must be a guiding principle for critical consciousness to encounter
institutionalized sexism and racism in society, the resilient, neoliberal subject
is only to “permanently struggle to accommodate itself to the world” (Evan
and Reid 2013, 85). In sum, resiliency as governmentality substitutes any
need for systematic or institutional changes with depoliticized promotion of
self-help, improvement, and responsibility (Stringer 2014), and in turn priva-
tizes lingering social problems women face everyday in society, such as
income gaps, glass ceilings, and commodification of sexualized female bod-
ies, to name a few.
As for SNSD’s music videos, resilience discourse particularly works well
with traditional gender expectations and values of Confucian patriarchy in
Korea. Because conformity has been the most important female code of
conduct under centuries-long Confucianism (T. Kim 2003), Korean women
have long practiced what resilience discourse demands. Moreover, positive
psychology in SNSD’s music videos further proliferates the biopolitical
function of female resiliency by “sticking figures together (adherence), a
sticking that creates the very effect of a collective (coherence)” (Ahmed
2004, 119). On top of common ingredients of female success in patriarchal
society like being obedient, SNSD’s music videos mandate women nowa-
days have to be resilient under an ever-precarious and exploitative neoliberal
service economy. As a capitalist biopolitics that produces neoliberal female
subjects who are self-reliant, effective, and responsible for their own survi-
val, SNSD’s music videos help update traditional patriarchal gender norms
and expectations in the neoliberal culture industry.

“INTO THE NEW WORLD” (2007): PRESENTING RESILIENCY AS

IDEAL FEMININITY

As a K-pop version of Sheryl Sandberg’s (2013) bestseller book, Lean In,

which inspires women’s professional ambition, the “Into the New World”
music video provides the audience with a guide for career successes, repre-
senting a social condition of neoliberalism (uncertainty), an ontological
mode of individuals (vulnerability), a neoliberal center of gravity in individu-
als’ activities (competition), and an imperative of their mindset (resilience).
As an internal revolution in women, resilience keeps them making earnest
efforts by conditioning their mindset to be confident, something Sandberg
100 Chapter 6

(2013, 8) believes that women do not have “by not raising our hands, and by
pulling back when we should be leaning in.” In a series of quasi-personal
anecdotes of overcoming obstacles and achieving successes, the music video
aims to motivate audiences to keep trying until success, showing how mem-
bers of SNSD find their place as a graffiti artist, amateur aviator, motorist,
dancer, or coffee barista. As a life lesson for young people, the video shows
how the members slowly reclaim their agency by overcoming problems.
Preaching that self-determination and perseverance are most important for
their success, SNSD, as a group of nine high school students, sings “the
unknown future and obstacles we can’t change, but I can’t give up.” While
female victimhood is “associated with self-pity, insufficient personal drive
and a lack of personal responsibility for one’s own life,” the idols are repre-
sented as autonomous, conscious decision-makers and pursuers of their ca-
reers in the industry: In turn, there is no “space available for articulating any
sense of unfairness or oppression” in the world (Baker 2010, 190). The
message of resilience is evident throughout the video with its therapeutic
narrative of overcoming obstacles with a right attitude that will bring light to
their unknown world. Despite problems they deal with, the idols decide to
smile, stay optimistic, and be joyful. By doing so, the video tells the audience
to change their mindset to overcome their internal obstacles as the real barri-
er to their success by mental and physical resilience. In turn, the video diverts
the audience’s attention away from women’s struggles against continuing
exploitation and oppression, that is, Korea’s centuries-long patriarchal gen-
der hierarchy and institutional barriers. Thus, according to the music video,
when you change yourself, you will individually go “Into the New World,”
magically bypassing social inequalities by structures of male dominance and
power.
Positivity is the central theme of the music video, and present in its
overall color tone, melody, and the idols’ facial expressions and choreogra-
phy. This sense of optimism is manifest even when the airplane is out of
order: The teenage idols magically get it fixed and fly into “the new world.”
While the video ostensibly suggests an alternative to dominant gender roles,
its bottomless optimism rather fantasizes and fulfills audiences’ imaginary
satisfaction only. So among career choices shown in the video, waitress or
bartender is the only realistic option for girls to choose without worrying
about institutional barriers in society. The idols’ embracive gestures further
reinforce a message of being a recipient of the reality. While the music video
tries to convince that women are owners of choice and in charge of their
dreams and lives, a narrative of choice that determines everything in one’s
life is an easy way to get away with broader, institutional problems that
prevent others from making their own choices for themselves.
A traditional value of conformity is legitimated as an ideal quality of the
female subjects. Staying side by side with other suffering women is celebrat-
 Resilience, Positive Psychology, and Subjectivity in K-Pop Female Idols 101

ed as an ethical behavior for the women, who sing “now and forever, we'll do
it together in my new world.” As much as traditional female subjects were
told to endure all the hardship under the Confucian gender hierarchy, con-
temporary women are to put up with all the economic and social injustices by
resilience. However, there is no indicator of solidarity for a collective effort
to change the structural condition of their suffering or at least unfavorable
social conditions. While the members understand they face adversarial con-
ditions for which they cannot expect any help, they have to rely on their
personal commitment to resiliency: “Don’t wait for an exceptional miracle.
There’s a rough road in front of us.” Whether they come up with a positive
mindset, staying together with other females, or trying their best despite the
entire problem, their action is confined to their isolated problem-solving
capacity and they are solely responsible for the result.
In this regard, SNSD’s “Into the New World” is a visual poetics of neolib-
eral governmentality that “mould[s] the self to become self-fulfilling and
more positive, more flexible and enterprising, more responsible and more
communicative, more innovative and enterprising, and thus also more able
both to withstand the shocks and grasp the opportunities presented in the risk
society” (O’Malley 2010, 505). While neoliberal discourse on female success
revolves around a personal responsibility in which “obstacles and disadvan-
tage are likely to be responded to through arduous self-invention and self-
transformation” (Baker 2010, 193), “Into the New World” is a visual vindica-
tion of the neoliberal myth of female success through self-determination
while presenting disadvantageous circumstances as opportunities for self-
development and improvement: Anything can be overcome with the right
attitude and a right goal. Thus, as a rationality of governing the self, SNSD’s
success story in the music video is a cultural manifestation of neoliberal
privatization of everything social while it redirects women’s strategic domain
of transformative activity from the public to the personal, and in turn ato-
mizes collective forces of women’s anger (Gordon 2002).
Therefore, the “Into the New World” music video is a visual narrative of
justification of patriarchal capitalism’s gender-based exploitation in which
good female subjects are required to prove their resiliency. Any damage or
harm inflicted on women by the patriarchal system is an opportunity or
resource to be utilized in augmenting their human capital. In turn, resiliency
discourse maximizes a women’s productivity in domestic, unpaid labor, and
furthermore, updates the exploitation in the affective neoliberal economy by
making “women marketable sexually (as femme), ethically (as ‘good’), and
commercially (as productive laborers)” (James 2015, 86).
102 Chapter 6

“ALL NIGHT” (2017): WHAT PAID-OFF FEMALE RESILIENCY

WOULD LOOK LIKE

Released on August 4, 2017, to celebrate SNSD’s tenth anniversary, the “All

Night” music video vindicates the idols’ mental and physical resilience
which led them to stardom in a nostalgic manner. Produced by SM Entertain-
ment’s in-house producer Kenzie, who also produced “Into the New World,”
the video is SNSD’s self-tribute to their success, in which each member
shares recollections and appreciation for their activities in the past ten years.
Opening with a claim, “I like to party” in a high-pitched vocal sound, “All
Night” shows off the glamorous, flashy lifestyle the idols enjoy, filled with
sporadic pleasures in a vintage dance hall. Their extravagant outfits with
feathers and fringe add a feeling of achievement and pride. The visual theme
of retro accompanied by aural reminiscence of disco music and props, such
as vintage tinsel and glitter backdrops, adds another layer of the video’s
romanticization of the idols’ past ten years of hard work. Maturity and
growth are present in the idols’ appearance, demeanor, and dress, which
includes low-cut or cropped shirts and short skirts or shorts. Their facial
expressions are more serious in heavy makeup, which accentuates the idols’
pale skin. In a mini-interview format that ends by showing SNSD’s 2007
stage debut of “Into the New World,” the video is nostalgic in a visual theme
of elegance by various props, such as sequin dress with curly hair and blurry
backgrounds with warm color temperature.
The idols’ intricate emotional status between absent-mindedness, fun, and
upbeat indicates their complicated feeling when they recollect past hardships,
their success, and their unpredictable future. However, the video emphasizes
positive emotions that emit from a relaxing and lively atmosphere of partying
with friends. Disco-related props and backgrounds like colored lighting,
streamers and confetti, sparkles and sequins emphasize the playful, positive
psychology of the music video. While SNSD’s previous music videos fo-
cused on a unified theme with a synchronized choreography and uniforms,
“All Night” spotlights individual members and their nostalgic, celebratory
sentiments in close-ups. A member indulges by watching herself in the mir-
ror where she sees others come in and go out of the bathroom. Another
member is seen hiding in a hallway outside the dance floor, presumably too
shy to immediately enjoy the party. They eventually join together and dance
seductively.
Considering that “All Night” is SNSD’s allegedly last music video while
its members prepare their solo debuts without renewing contracts with the
agency, a nostalgia feeling of the idols in their twenties is rather decadent to
the extent that it is confined to what challenges and difficulties the idols have
coped with for survival without a hint of their better future. With suspicion
for their survivability in ever-increasing contingencies and competitions,
 Resilience, Positive Psychology, and Subjectivity in K-Pop Female Idols 103

each member of SNSD just celebrates what they have achieved, remember-
ing their ceaseless endeavors and efforts to stay marketable in the industry.
Unlike in the “Into the New World” video, and devoid of any utopian ideal or
imagery that opens up a possibility of transformative capacity (Jameson
2004), the “All Night” music video is a cultural and historical symptom of a
neoliberal society that does not allow individuals to envision anything other
than a survival strategy for an immanent crisis. In the hopes of being able to
survive the way SNSD did for the last ten years, the idols sing their willing-
ness to fall in love with an ex-boyfriend again, indicating the members would
go through an intense management process even under “slave-like” contracts
as far as it guarantees them success or survival: SNSD sings “keep doing this
meaningless kiss / Like a lie, we’re falling in love with each other.”
Mini interviews within the music video highlight a benefit of their being
resilient. Yoon-Ah, SNSD’s most famous idol, asserts that being resilient
was the main driving force for her to endure hardship and to achieve success
with eight other members who support each other. Tiffany maintains that
SNSD itself has been an emotional support for her since the group’s central
message is “you can do anything you want as far as you strive to get it,” and
she has relied on other members who think and strive the same way. Taeyeon
feels SNSD is like a country to her, where she originated from and will
eventually go back to. Sunny is honest about her experience in the past ten
years: She had to endure all the hard work assigned to her, but enjoyed being
in the group that is the main reason why she made it. Sooyoung mentions it
was mainly the emotional support she received from other members that kept
her enduring all the hardship, because other members had the exact same
emotions and difficulties stemming from the same situations she has been in.
In this respect, Yuri maintains that she has the same feelings about the
situation; all members will forever be a SNSD member, just as they always
have been. Hyo-Yeon remembers that the members practiced the perfor-
mance too much—to the extent that she doubts whether it is OK to exercise
that much or not. And this over-preparation and practice gets the members to
be confident for their debut performance. For Seohyun, the last ten years
were not that long a time when she thinks back, but she is sure that every
single aspect of her has changed through influencing and being influenced by
other members to the extent that they have come to look like each other. She
is glad and proud of having been a member of SNSD. Lastly, Seohyun, the
youngest member who made a debut at the age of fifteen, has grown up in
SNSD with a lot of experiences. As testified, being a member of the idol
group requires a total transformation of the self, and being resilient with a
hope of success has been the main psychological mechanism of self-endu-
rance and perseverance in the precarious neoliberal culture industry.
In their testimonies, the idols indicate that their success in the industry
was possible due to their physical and psychological resilience and mutual
104 Chapter 6

supports between the members. While they did not agree with what they had
to do as a group, the idols had to endure and try their best to stay popular in
the industry. The idols merely endured all the hardship that was assigned to
them in the hopes of being successful, and managed to deal with it only by
conforming to other suffering colleagues. In this respect, not as an indepen-
dent subject, the idols are passive performers of the industry, who do not
question their working environment but just do their best to complete what-
ever is assigned to them. Therefore, neoliberal feminism in SNSD’s music
videos blames “those who are not ‘strivers’” (McRobbie 2013, 120) for their
lack of success. In this transformative project of neoliberalism, female resil-
ience is a necessary component of self-investing human capital activities
through individuals’ physical, emotional, and mental endeavors that increase
“ their capital value in the present and enhance their future value” (Brown
2015, 22).
What is noteworthy in SNSD’s music videos is that they pleasurably
visualize various neoliberal interventions and manipulations like a moraliza-
tion of individual responsibility (Brown 2003; 2006), a normalization of self-
help as personal empowerments (Rimke 2000), and a promotion of positive
psychology in terms of governmentality (Binkley 2011). In other words,
these videos with a high production value promoting positive emotions pro-
vide audiences with a neoliberal ideal of female subjectification as a condi-
tion of reproducing and legitimating the status quo. In their “moral legitimat-
ing structure” (Vrasti 2011, n.p.), the music videos effectively fulfill govern-
mentality functions that encourage individuals to perform neoliberal ethos
voluntarily and passionately. Considering the sheer ubiquity of K-pop female
idols and their music videos in Korean society together with their power to
create “affective resonances independent of content and meaning” (Shouse
2005, n.p.), their biopolitical power gets more widespread: “The more they
circulate, the more affective they become, and the more they appear to ‘con-
tain’ affect” (Ahmed 2004, 120). In other words, the videos are an exemplar
neoliberal cultural means that delivers an ethical justification for being resil-
ient to stay intact in the “‘cold’ mechanism of competition” in the industry in
a “set of ‘warm’ moral and cultural values [of positive emotionality] that
could compensate for the otherwise mechanistic and alienating consequences
of economic rationality” (Vrasti 2011, n.p.). In this moralization of resiliency
together with individuals’ desire to be successful, neoliberal feminism in K-
pop female idols ends up contributing to reproducing and maintaining patri-
archal neoliberalism.
 Resilience, Positive Psychology, and Subjectivity in K-Pop Female Idols 105

CONCLUDING REMARKS: RESILIENCE AND SUFFUSION OF

GOVERNMENTALITY

As examined thus far, SNSD’s music videos are extravagant spectacles of

neoliberal fantasy of female agency and empowerment by resiliency dis-
course. The two music videos “Into the New World” (2007) and “All Night”
(2017) display a utopian narrative of individual success based on resiliency
and commitment. While the former is to “generate, amplify, and transmit
damage so that we can hear, see and feel the damage we (or the characters
we watch and identify with) ought to overcome,” the latter is an affective,
therapeutic spectacle of overcoming the problem, which makes audiences
feel good and relieved (James 2015, 101). In other words, “Into the New
World” projects a promise of personal success as far as one never gives up
despite all the adversarial circumstances, and in turn the music video con-
ceals all the institutional and structural impediments under neoliberalism. On
the other hand, “All Night” is a glamorized spectacle of a promised success
as far as individuals are psychologically positive and behaviorally resilient,
and in turn it obscures brutal competitions and slave-like working conditions
in the industry. In this respect, SNSD’s success by resilience intends to beget
a broader governing effect while “the spectator feeds the performer’s individ-
ual overcoming into a second-order therapeutic narrative: our approbation of
her overcoming is evidence of our own overcoming of” the current dire
survival conditions under neoliberalism (James 2015, 89).
In a broader sociopolitical ramification of the visualized governmentality,
SNSD’s music videos for public consumption normalize the problems caused
by neoliberal economic injustices and inequalities, and blame insufficiently
resilient subjects for their misfortunes. While the videos dramatize a neolib-
eral rhetoric of self-reliance, efficacy, and development, they actually justify
and relegate systemic injustices to personal responsibility. By the neoliberal
fantasy of being successful by resilience which covers up “one of neoliberal
rationality’s most vulnerable fault lines in the present” (Rottenberg 2017,
345), the industry has exploited numerous K-pop idols, trainees, and wan-
nabes who surrender personal freedoms and basic human rights. By doing so,
neoliberal feminism consumes a large number of women who are “rendered
expendable, exploitable, and disposable,” while glamorizing a few “aspira-
tional subjects who self-invest wisely and augment their capital value” (345).
As the K-pop industry’s propaganda, the music videos re-affirm a myth of
the industry’s contribution to advancing female empowerment: SNSD, as a
popular preacher of female resilience and homo economicus, fashionably
embodies and performs the industry’s rules of the game (McRobbie 2013), or
proclaims what Zillah Eisenstein (2013) calls corporate feminism.
Consequently, the videos are disciplinary measures for the audiences to
pleasurably accept and internalize a neoliberal script of success. In other
106 Chapter 6

words, as governmentality, K-pop female idols help perpetuate and legiti-

mate a traditional yet updated code of female conduct that demands them be
obedient, diligent, strong-willed, and resilient in the exploitative neoliberal
culture industry. In this respect, “what appears to be an expanded, liberated
space is actually a normative minefield, one that requires continual self-
monitoring, impression management, and a full complement of defensive and
offensive maneuvers” (Bay-Cheng 2015, 286). In this governmentality of
resilience, feminist agendas of agency and empowerment are co-opted by the
industry that capitalizes on dreams and aspirations of countless K-pop idol
wannabes and trainees. By doing so, the videos celebrate SNSD’s success
due to their choice and freedom through determination and resiliency, while
they are “more likely to foster blame and divisiveness than empowerment
and liberation” to those with less success or fortune for their ineptitude (283).
On the other hand, the more female idols (workers) are committed and resil-
ient, the more the industry sweeps profits, and in turn the more effective it is
to brush off an accusation of gender-based inequality and exploitation. Con-
sequently, the music videos of SNSD effectively condition female subjects
congruent with the ethos of neoliberal capital, and in turn, their “resilience
doesn’t fight back against patriarchy, but feeds it” (James 2015, 6).
 Chapter Seven

The 90s, the Most Stunning Days of

Our Lives
Retro K-Pop Music, Nostalgia, and Positive Psychology
in Contemporary Korea

As an effort to extend chapter six’s perusal of how K-pop advocates positive

psychology on a broader social level, this chapter examines how certain K-
pop musicians and songs are promoted to maximize a biopolitical power of
the music genre. To that end, this chapter focuses on the sociocultural impli-
cations of the recent popularity of the 1990s’ retro K-pop music, and how
popular TV programs in Korea amplify the trend. Korea’s most popular and
influential TV program since its first episode on April 23, 2005, MBC’s
Infinite Challenge, ran two special episodes devoted entirely to 90s’ popular
music, and raked an unprecedented rating of 37 percent in December 2014
and January 2015 (KyungHyang Shinmun 2015). Prior to Infinite Challenge’s
“Saturday, Saturday is Singers” (hereafter, ToToGa), there was no TV pro-
gram on the topic on major national network stations. These episodes re-
staged and revived top singers from the 90s in episode number 410 on De-
cember 27, 2014 and episode 411 on January 3, 2015. With ToToGa’s suc-
cess, there is a surge of TV programs that exclusively deal with 90s pop
music, such as MBC’s Radio Star, a popular talk-show program, which aired
a special episode on 90s pop musicians, named as “Radio Star—Wednesday,
Wednesday is Radio Star” on January 28, 2015. While there have been
marketing ploys aimed at nostalgia, ToToGa is one of the most successful
cultural “sewing machine[s] that quilts personal memory onto recorded mu-
sic, stitched together by emotion and feelings” (van Dijck 2006, 364). How-
ever, there is no scholarly investigation into how 90s pop music is strategi-
107
108 Chapter 7

cally deployed on major network TV: Existing literature examines the cultu-
ral meaning of consuming 90s popular music at private flashback dance
parties in the Netherlands (van der Hoeven 2014). In this dearth of academic
attention to network TV’s uses of retro music, I examine the extra-musical
conditions of ToToGa, and analyze why and how it became popular with
regards to its referential roles to audiences’ emotions and socioeconomic
environments under neoliberalism.
Since the second half of the twentieth century, Korea has been obsessed
with rapid industrial modernization. Specifically, the 1990s was a crucial
period that changed the overall characteristics of Korean society from its
cultural, political, economic, and social aspects. Thanks to people’s struggles
and sacrifices during almost thirty years of military authoritarianism, the first
civilian government in 1993 guaranteed a procedural democracy. Culminat-
ing with an inclusion of global economic organizations such as OECD in
1996, industrial and economic developments were realized according to peo-
ple’s desire and endeavors in previous decades. However, as much as there
were good contributions, the decade left painful memories of the 1997 Asian
Financial Crisis and its aftermath, which was epitomized by neoliberal SAPs
mandated by the IMF. In other words, while the period provided individuals
with a utopian outlook for progress, the 90s ended up putting Korea into an
unprecedented abyss of economic crisis and entailed the dissolution of fami-
ly, welfare society, and most importantly the “unrealized dreams of the past
and visions of the future” (Boym 2001, xvi). In sum, Korea’s 90s “began
with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia” (xiv).
However, even with the 1997 IMF Crisis, the country’s obsession with
economic development has not waned, while, simultaneously, there are
growing numbers of concerns, doubts, and discontents. Occasional demands
to slow down and contemplate arose after man-made disasters, such as the
collapse of the Sungsoo Bridge and Sam-Poong Department Store in 1994
and 1995, respectively, and, most recently, the capsizing of the Sewol Ferry
in 2014. Korea remains infatuated with speedy modernization, thus conceiv-
ing nostalgia as a matter of personal indulgence. It is against this sociocultu-
ral backdrop that nostalgia has suddenly become a major trend in Korean
people’s cultural lives since the 2000s. This trend began with the onset of the
SAPs’ side effects, such as a surge of precarious, temporary workers, soaring
income inequality, a demise of social safety nets, a dissolution of traditional
values and mores, and a high suicide rate.
In this context, by considering nostalgia as degenerate, delinquent, and
downright disgraceful at times (Lowenthal 1998), the current proliferation of
90s nostalgia on Korea’s major network TV stations warrants a serious schol-
arly investigation. Among cultural commodities, popular songs are particu-
larly dominated by the “re” prefix: revival, reissues, remakes, restorations,
retrospectives, and rearrangements (Reynolds 2011), formulating a close re-
 The 90s, the Most Stunning Days of Our Lives 109

lationship with feelings of nostalgia (Bennett 2009; Kong 1999; van Dijck
2006). Since the late 90s, there are a growing number of retro-themed TV
programs that deal with popular songs from the 70s and the 80s, such as
Concert 7080. 1 In this increasing attention to retro music, there has recently
been an interesting development in 90s retro programs. For example, Reply,
1997! focuses on 90s popular music and fandom culture for real K-pop idol
groups. Reply, 1994! uses music in the background so deftly that the audi-
ence believes they are watching an hour-long music video. Architectures
101, a popular film of 90s nostalgia turned national sensation by skillfully
using the decade’s popular music. Ultimately, Infinite Challenge, Korea’s
most loved and popular TV show, hosted the decade’s ten most iconic popu-
lar singers. Right after its airing, there was a soaring sale of 90’s popular
culture goods, such as fashion accessories and clothing, and popular songs
from that decade. Moreover, after ToToGa, there has been a surge of karaoke
customers, even teenagers, singing 90’s popular songs (K. Kim 2015).
Infatuation with the 70s and 80s in the 1990s came from people’s confi-
dence in their sociocultural and politico-economic achievements. This func-
tions as an indicator of the development of the Korean culture industry,
which monetizes people’s growing purchase power on through their memo-
ries. This newfound confidence gives people a moment of self-complement
on their hard work and perseverance. However, since the rosy promise and
expectations of the 90s went astray with the 1997 Financial Crisis and the
subsequent series of neoliberal degradations of people’s living standards, the
2000s’ nostalgia for the 1990s retains qualitatively different features. In other
words, 70s and 80s nostalgia in the 90s was an expression of the then-present
economic prosperity as major audiences, in their 50s and above, wanted to
remember their youth (Nam 2015). However, 90s nostalgia in the 2000s can
be viewed as a cultural manifestation of regressive desire for the decade’s
unfulfilled dreams and promises.
Politics has been the most active realm where nostalgia is evoked and, in
turn, exercises an overarching impact in Korea since the 90s. As a realm of
struggle over the meanings of the past, memory is a fundamental basis of
politics in its potential for opposition and resistance, as well as domination
(Foucault 1975). Questions on “what, when, and how [something] is remem-
bered, by who and for who” are a crucial part of hegemonic struggle in
society. A former impeached President, Park Geun-hye, like many politicians
before her, was the most obvious beneficiary of a political aesthetization of
nostalgia. With the preceding President, Lee Myung-bak, Park Geun-hye
manipulated a political nostalgia of her father’s developmental dictatorship
in order to blame their political opponents for the economic downturn since
1997, and to consolidate supporters under the expectation that she would
bring another economic boom to Korea. In this respect, she declared that she
would restage the Miracle of the Han River by Hallyu during her inaugura-
110 Chapter 7

tion speech. In this respect, nostalgia in Korea should be understood as a

political economy of recycling the past, and a proven strategy for political
manipulations.
Here, nostalgia plays into cultural politics. When produced and proliferat-
ed by a mainstream media institution like MBC, nostalgia plays an ideologi-
cal role by provoking reminiscence for a specific period that has a con-
structed and glorified sociocultural meaning and definition. For example,
ToToGa declares the 90s as the “most stunning, beautiful days of our lives,”
although there were many different, contradicting evaluations on the decade,
especially concerning the IMF crisis. While a feeling of nostalgia mainly
evokes a sensibility of loss for a certain past and contrasts with contemporary
life, ToToGa helps manipulate a personal memory of the decade as a golden
age through certain music genres and singers that implicate particular emo-
tions. In this respect, as Botstein (2000) indicates that “neither listening nor
the historical function of music is an normative analytic or descriptive cate-
gory,” one must pay critical attention to how specific genres and musicians
are selected and broadcast, since they contribute to reconstructing the “his-
torical experience of music, the patterns and objects of presumed memory,
and the essential content of cultural nostalgia” (535).
As briefly reviewed above, it is important to examine how ToToGa, as a
cultural politics of memory on the 90s, selectively navigates and repackages
contradictory memories, conferring new meanings onto the 90s and making
its memory bearable. Since remembering the past is fundamentally based on
the necessities of the present, I seek to answer why there is a boom of 90s
pop music at this moment. By considering remembering and forgetting as an
active, self-preserving processes to protect against the “unpleasantness of
continuing painful memories” of the past (Hoskins 2001, 335), it is important
to examine how the 90s is reimagined and reconstituted by ToToGa. To this
end, I analyze how ToToGa reconstructs and represents hegemonic discourse
on the decade’s sociocultural and politico-economic meanings.

RESURGENCE OF 90S POPULAR MUSIC: K-POP AND ITS

MARKETING STRATEGY

The recent surge of retro K-pop music is an inevitable result of the culture
industry’s adaptation to the audience’s longing for authentic musical talents
of the 90s. Compared with the current K-pop scene, the soundscape of the
90s was more diverse and different popular music genres coexisted. For
example, while fast-beat dance music mixed with electronic music and rap
dominates K-pop, the 90s was replete with hip-hop (Seo Taiji and Boys;
Deux), dance (Cool; Lula; Two-Two), hard rock (BooHwal; NExT), rock
ballad (Kim Jong-seo; Kim Kyung-ho), ballad (Shin Seung-hoon; Lee
 The 90s, the Most Stunning Days of Our Lives 111

Seung-hwan; Exhibition), reggae (Kim Gunn-mo), trot (Hyun Cheol; Joo

Hyun-mi; Kim Soo-hee), and so on, all of which equally appeared on major
network TV stations. Unlike K-pop’s current domination by giant talent
agencies, like SM Entertainment, 90s musicians were relatively autonomous,
challenged conventional mores, wrote their own songs, and published albums
as an independent unit for musical completeness. In this respect, the 90s
soundscape was characterized as a dialectic coexistence between musical
authenticity/ authorship and commercialism by an extensive musical contri-
bution of singer-auteurs.
However, since H.O.T.’s debut in 1996, the Korean soundscape has been
monopolized by K-pop idols. K-pop originated when Korea was in the mid-
dle of a state-led aggressive globalization process, which overemphasized
global competitiveness. In this respect, the beginning of K-pop idol groups in
1996 coincided with the music industry’s effort to make its music sound as if
it were imported from Europe or the U.S., with lots of English lyrics per-
formed by Korean musicians. Since then, K-pop has been branded as some-
thing new, trendy, and fashionable and caters to a niche market between
Korean traditional popular music, Gayo, and Western music in general.
However, K-pop has recently come to overwhelm all other existing genres of
Korean popular music. In other words, since 1996, Korea’s soundscape has
been dominated by “idol” singers who are manufactured by major entertain-
ment agencies’ strict apprentice/trainee systems. Subsequently, its diversity
greatly decreased. Musicians’ authenticity/ authorship is eradicated by their
agencies’ total control for the sake of commercial success, from song writing
and selection to sartorial coordination. In this regard, three major K-pop
management companies, SM Entertainment, JYP Entertainment, and YG En-
tertainment, have controlled Korean popular music, in terms of content,
form, production, and dissemination.
Searching for rookies, the major management companies, in partnership
with mainstream media institutions, began producing various audition pro-
grams. As seen by Huh Gak’s surprising success in Superstar K2 on October
22, 2010, these programs market themselves as discovering ordinary citi-
zens’ raw musical talent. In turn, the audience became attracted to them in
the hopes of finding fresh musical auteurs and authenticity, while enjoying
different genres, singers, and feelings from those of mainstream stereotypical
K-pop idols. In this respect, IU, a solo female idol, has become a new,
unconventional icon of K-pop, as her managing company, Loen Entertain-
ment, has taken an alternative route to the factory-like manufacturing of K-
pop idols. Characterized as an authentic idol with “impressive” vocal capa-
bilities and musical talent, IU has endeavored to collaborate with established
virtuosos whose peak times were in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, such as Kim
Chang-wan, Yoon Sang, and Seo Taiji. These collaborative efforts with mas-
112 Chapter 7

ter artists mark IU as a perfect combination between retro, artistic quality and
an idol’s commerciality.
In this respect, IU is a symbol of the K-pop industry’s new chapter, which
revisits and revises retro music of the 80s and 90s in order to commercialize
the past generation of musicians’ reputation and artistic authorship. In a
similar marketing ploy, ToToGa tried to recast K-pop female idols in the
roles of 90s musicians. For example, in an episode of ToToGa, Seo-hyun of
SNSD took the place of Eugene of S.E.S., indicating an interchangeability of
idols as a disposable component in a manufactured popular music group not
only by contemporary idols but also with intergenerational ones. In regards
to the culture industry’s continuous commercialization of 90s retro music,
ToToGa tries to sell a cultural nostalgia to the audience who are old enough
to reminiscence on the decade and, moreover, target current K-pop fans by
stitching the idols with the retro music by refreshing a consumerist appetite
for something that is both familiar and different simultaneously. And this
generation stitching between the current K-pop idols and the 90s’ singers
aimed to renew the audience’s attention to K-pop. Consequently, the 90s
retro boom stemmed from the K-pop industry’s commercial opportunism
(Drake 2003) to meet the audience’s desire for more diversity in genres and
musicians. However, this strategy is an ostensible change that does not entail
a structural transformation of the K-pop industry from its current factory
manufacturing system to a collective of individual, autonomous musicians.

POLITICS OF NOSTALGIA: REGRESSION, COMMODIFICATION,

AND REFLECTION

The feeling of nostalgia is a by-product of change in society, which sets

people apart from their previous lifestyles, customs, traditions, and thoughts.
In a modern, industrialized society, people are driven and alienated by the
high tempo of change dictated by the endless capitalist cycle of production-
circulation-consumption, and suffering from uncertainty and insecurity. As
an integral part of modernity, nostalgia is a defensive symptom of individu-
als’ longing for continuity, collective memory, and community. Referred to
as a reactionary yearning for the past or creative/cultural amnesia (Grainge
2000), nostalgia tends to romanticize the past, not because the past was good
per-se but because nostalgia uses the past as an ephemeral means of forget-
ting the burdens of the present. Seeking to attain the unattainable to satisfy
the unsatisfiable, what is lacking in the present, nostalgia is a desire to escape
from the present by a “positively toned evocation of a lived past in the
context of some negative feeling toward present” (Davis 1979, 18). In this
regard, as a socially, culturally, politically, and historically engineered mem-
ory, nostalgia is an articulation of how the past is wishfully reimagined in the
 The 90s, the Most Stunning Days of Our Lives 113

present, by being positively reconstructed and legitimized through a selective

process of idealized characters (Pickering and Keightley 2006).
The culture industry’s marketing ploy for nostalgia appears incoherent, as
TV episodes appear random; however, the systematic application of nostal-
gia, and its reach vis-à-vis major TV networks, commodifies the past through
a random recycling of processed and reconstructed memories. This, in turn,
helps maintain the status quo of the present. By focusing on “banality, func-
tioning not through [intellectual] stimulation, but by covering up the pain of
loss” (Boym 2001, 339), mediated nostalgia provides a superficial, fleeting
feeling of relief to the extent that historicity is replaced by an aesthetic
nostalgia (Jameson 1991). In other words, since memory became a best-
selling commodity in a consumer society (Le Goff 1992), the past is com-
modified by nostalgia merchants to sell an ephemeral escape from harsh
reality by reformulating the past to serve the present, and in turn sacrifices
historical meanings and implications. From a post-Fordist perspective, the
culture industry’s commercialization of popular memory of the 90s and To-
ToGa’s success in ratings and impact on consumer goods sales stem from
their “exuberant and inventive recycling of the past in new stylistic combina-
tions” (199).
Related to Le Goff’s nostalgia merchant, I examine how ToToGa navi-
gates Grainge’s (2002) differentiation between nostalgia as a structure of
feeling/experiential discourse and nostalgia as a commodified style or prac-
tices. In other words, with the growing commodification of culture, ToToGa
strategically selects a certain set of musicians and their songs to place audi-
ences in nostalgia mode, which portrays a superficial appearance of the past
and leads to a loss of its complex meaning. Without foregrounding the histor-
ical and cultural reconsideration of the 90s, ToToGa is boastful of replicating
exactly the same stage and performance of the 90s to the extent that the
audience gets to time travel to the decade. Simultaneously, ToToGa’s singers
are all fast-beat dance music performers with best-seller records, who can
easily be related to the musical features of current K-pop (H. Lee 2015). As a
mere reified cultural artifact that is sterile with its socio-political meanings,
the revivals on ToToGa erase the sociocultural references of the 90s embed-
ded in the decade’s popular sentiments, with the exception of fast dance beats
and melody. However, this ahistorical, commercial process exerts more pow-
erful influence than institutions of historical investigation like museums and
schools in its “discourses of memory by invoking commercial products and
representations” (Burgoyne 2003, 211).
On the other hand, nostalgia can still be a deliberate attempt to seek an
alternative to the present by engaging in a dialogue with the past (Pickering
and Keightley 2006). Since the lost past is associated with a longing for a
better future, the past functions as a resource and inspiration for present and
future possibilities (Boym 2001; Landsberg 2003; Oliver 2001; Pickering
114 Chapter 7

1988). Thus nostalgia is a politics of memorizing the past for the future,
which can redress a gap between individuals’ lived experiences and expecta-
tions of modernity. As a democratic potential with an alternative, critical
assessment of the past, nostalgia acts as a critical juncture and can provide a
deliberate opportunity to criticize the current social, economic, cultural, and
political environments (Baer 2001). From this point of view, nostalgia can
possibly “awaken multiple planes of consciousness” on the decade (Boym
2001, 50): Thus ToToGa can alternatively be considered as “reflective nos-
talgia . . . [for] the exploration of other potentialities and unfulfilled promises
of modern happiness” (342).
In this respect, by examining how ToToGa evokes audiences’ nostalgia to
90s pop, I investigate whether the program intends to “return to an earlier
state of idealized past,” or to “recognize aspects of the past as the basis for
renewal and satisfaction in the future” (Pickering and Keightley 2006, 921).
By investigating how the program contextualizes and codes the meaning of
the 90s pop in the current neoliberal society, I examine how ToToGa recon-
structs the symbolic meaning of 90s pop music between “past-fixated melan-
cholic reactions,” and “utopian longings” (921).

EMOTION, MEMORY, AND SUBJECTIVITY

Memory constitutes an important setting of human lives, providing social

and biological continuity, symbolic meanings, identity, and political stakes.
As a collective of desires, needs, and definitions, and a conscious form of
narrative (White 1987), cultural memory is entangled and co-constitutional
with personal and historical discourses at various degrees in their various
procedures of relating, selecting, revising, documenting, and sharing the past.
Popular music functions as a bearer of personal and social memory in which
“people make sense of their own lives and their connection to the lives of
others” (van Dijck 2004, 262). As such, studying popular music is a way of
understanding the public sentiment at a given time, since the former plays an
important role in the latter’s formation of identity, expression, imagination,
and social performance in a given social environment (Bennett 2006, 2008;
Hesmondhalgh 2005; Mulder et al. 2010). In terms of Fredric Jameson’s
(1981) political unconscious or Michel Foucault’s (1994) episteme, popular
songs, absorbed into the customary fabric of everyday life, are an indicator of
general sentiments in sociocultural and politico-economic realms as a cultu-
ral manifestation of complex relationships between “cultural production and
‘mood management,’” (Neiger, Moyers and Zandberg 2011, 972). For in-
stance, 70s folk music represented a burgeoning youth culture of (passive)
resistance, 80s ballad music was embedded in the military dictatorship’s
depoliticizing the cultural policy of “3S” (screen, sex, and sport), and 90s
 The 90s, the Most Stunning Days of Our Lives 115

hip-hop and dance music is a cultural manifestation of Korea’s growing

optimism in its participation in the global capitalist regime, epitomized by
membership attainment in global economic organizations like WTO and
OECD.
With its powerful affective and sensuous potence (DeNora 1999; Drake
2003; van Dijck 2006), music effectively evokes the memory of an idealized
past with a “promise of a retrieval of lost utopian coherence” as a means to
overcome individuals’ impotence in the present (Flinn 1992, 50). Likewise,
people with negative sentiments tend to be more nostalgic than those with
neutral or positive moods (Wildschut et al. 2006). Concerning the relation-
ship between emotion, identity, and memory in listening to recorded mu-
sic(Mather 2004; Turino 1999), popular music, especially shared listening
and collective discussion, creates a sense of belonging to a larger community
andgeneration (Connell and Gibson 2003). Actually, ToToGa in its entirety
is filled with full-fledged emotional responses to 90s music to the extent that
90s musicians and audiences share a full scale of different emotions. There
are multiple occasions of tear-filled emotional confessions that participants
and MCs experience. “We are still thirsty for the 90s nostalgia!”
I argue that ToToGa production crews’ own memory of the 90s is pro-
jected outward to today’s Korean society, and in turn, this personal-turned-
social memory of the 90s reformulates the memory of the decade in the
audience of Infinite Challenge. As much as cultural memory is a mediated
and systematized re-presentation of past experiences and realities, which is
discursive and ideological in its nature (Huyssen 1995), personal memory is
a social production, formulated and maintained by a society’s value system
(Halbwachs 1992; van Dijck 2004). What one remembers is a result of social
constructions by a selective, strategic process of what to remember and what
to forget. In this regards, as a result of the media’s cultural politics, one’s
reminiscence of the past is simultaneously “embodied [through media repre-
sentations], enabled [by interacting with others], and embedded” in the cur-
rent sociocultural and politico-economic conditions” (van Dijck 2006, 358,
emphasis original). Moreover, this selective process of memorizing stems
from a social imperative to achieve individuals’ positive psychology against
anxiety, fear, jealousy, and other negative affects (Sturken 1997). What mat-
ters most in collective memory is not its historical accuracy or truth, but its
political objective, which aims to maintain continuity and coherence in its
social, economic, and political values and standards.
In order to reimagine the present through a playful appropriation of the
past “metonymically, standing in for the entire decade” (Drake 2003, 188,
emphasis original), ToToGa provokes positive emotions associated with fast,
upbeat, and uplifting pop music through a careful selection of certain genres,
musicians, and songs of the decade. By doing so, the program recreates and
reformulates a structure of feeling and texture of the decade. ToToGa paid
116 Chapter 7

careful, meticulous attention to recreating the decade’s authentic, frisky

atmosphere by reenacting and replicating Mise-en-scène and props of the
stage and outfits in order to immerse the audience in a 1990s experience. By
immersing itself in the playful, hopeful, and energetic atmosphere of the 90s,
the audience is provided with an opportunity to reconstruct their selves
through the special episodes for a cultivation of self-accountable images and
identities that are enthusiastic, hopeful, and capable subjectivity.
Subsequently, since individuals consume particular music for specific
mnemonic, emotional, social, and cultural needs, music is considered a tech-
nology of self which exercises a “regulation, elaboration and substantiation
of themselves as social agents” (Croom 2015; DeNora 1999, 32). The seem-
ingly private practice of consuming music is conditioned by large cultural,
economic, and political contexts (Cloonan 1999). Thus, individuals’ thematic
consumption of music based on their personal and/or social needs is an
interactive process of self-creation and maintenance by reflecting, and re-
sponding to, large sociocultural and politico-economic parameters. In other
words, deploying specific music as a means of “emotional self-
management,” which is an object of self-knowledge, individuals maintain
their psychological equilibrium and individuals perform socially desired, dis-
ciplined behaviors by “creating, enhancing, sustaining and changing subjec-
tive, cognitive, bodily and self-conceptual states” (DeNora 1999, 34–35;
Saarikallio 2011). In terms of Foucauldian biopolitics, the “self-accountable
imageries” embedded in ToToGa’s song selections, which have a fast, play-
ful, danceable uplifting-feeling textuality, perpetuate the current economic
injustice and inequality emblematic of neoliberal governmentality. In other
words, rather than critically reflecting the decade, ToToGa merely relieves
the audience of the gruesome economic realities of neoliberalism since 1997,
by utilizing a nonthreatening and fun form through which the audience can
share happy memories from the 90s. In this idealization of the decade, ToTo-
Ga mainly focuses on the cultural style of surface and referentiality, rather
than reflective examination.

POPULAR MUSIC AND CONSTITUTION OF NEOLIBERAL SELF:

POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY OF RETRO MUSIC

Regarding happiness as one’s intangible, desirable attribute to be achieved,

Binkley (2009, 2011) maintains that positive psychology, which aims to
optimize, coordinate, and manage human behaviors by engineering human
affects, has become a major governing method in neoliberal society. As a
technology of neoliberal subjectification (Foucault 2008), positive psycholo-
gy has dealt with individual happiness as an object of positive science, clini-
cal intervention, and therapeutic manipulation (Gable and Haidt 2005). As
 The 90s, the Most Stunning Days of Our Lives 117

autonomous, willing neoliberal subjectivities of self-government, individuals

regulate their emotions and govern themselves in a way that neoliberalism
wants them to with “prescriptive, reflexive and instrumental dimensions of
the happiness” (Binkley 2011, 381). In this neoliberal governmentality which
replicates how the macro system of social regulations and rules produces
docile subjects in micro, individual practices of subjectification, happiness is
not a personal attribute of emotional well-being, but a matter of social policy
for economic development. The biopolitics of neoliberalism manipulates
one’s thoughts, redirecting one’s thoughts to happy subjects from negative
ones; in turn, positive psychology is a powerful, cultural means of maintain-
ing and proliferating the status quo (Ehrenreich 2009). In other words, as
neoliberal governmentality, happiness is a strategic instrument for economic
self-help, self-interest, and self-efficacy: Thus, positive psychology is a tool
of inducement to self-production of neoliberal subjectivity, homo economi-
cus.
Likewise, as an ideological representation of a “world of youth immersed
in romanticism and play . . . walled off from the rest of the society” (S. Lee
2012, 463), K-pop in general is an effective means of perpetuating neoliberal
positive thinking and aims to make the audience forget the dim sociopolitical
and economic reality. In turn, this neoliberal positive ideology is a careful
device to maintain consumerist capitalism that keeps capitalizing on people’s
urge to spend. Similarly, ToToGa is a neoliberal regulatory tool for individu-
als to navigate between how they think they “ought” to feel (neoliberal
positive thinking) and how they “do” feel (everyday real-life feeling) in the
worst employment market and economic disparity in Korean history (S. Kim
2015). Actually, as a means of embedding the audience into the positive
psychology of 90s dance music, ToToGa imposed a dress code that aims to
control not only their sartorial conduct but also psychological practices, by
seating those in 90s costumes in the front row. By reproducing the temporal
and spatial feeling of the 90s by careful deployment of props, goods, and
atmosphere on the stage, the program delocalizes and detemporizes, and in
turn, erases any reference or sense of real, specific historical time and loca-
tion. By doing so, the 90s becomes a mere consumer spectacle that com-
mands an urgency of the present moment.
In this dire socioeconomic situation where people are not willing to be
agents of positive thinking, 90s dance music is once again deployed to con-
figure the audience into neoliberal agents of positive thinking, feeling, and
identity. Considering that “positive emotions experienced during a song [are]
a much stronger predictor of music-evoked nostalgia” (Barrett et al 2010,
399), “Twist King,” an encore song, preaches and urges people to feel posi-
tive, confident, and optimistic. This song culminated ToToGa’s cultural poli-
tics in attaining, enhancing, and maintaining socioeconomically desired
states of positive feeling. As a “catalyst that shifts actors out of their reluc-
118 Chapter 7

tance to adopt what they perceive as ‘necessary’ modes of agency, and into
the modes of agency ‘demanded’ by particular circumstances” (DeNora
1999, 38), the final, encore song resonates particularly well with the audi-
ence’s psychological desperation to be successful financially and socially in
the ever-polarizing neoliberal society. In this way, the audience, who have
been suffering from neoliberal economic problems, are once again sum-
moned to be faithful subjects of neoliberal fantasies to be rich and powerful
in a way that demonstrates “how governmental rationalities transpose them-
selves onto the affective dispositions of subjects as analogous emotional
enterprises centered on the cultivation and maximization of particular emo-
tional potentials” (Binkley 2009, 387).
Therefore, as examined in chapter six, ToToGa’s main theme is to show
how the 90s musicians have been resilient to survive after their peak times,
by suggesting that everyone has to do their best to survive in today’s eco-
nomic difficulties. Kim Jeong-nam, a member of Turbo who opened and
closed the show, testified that he had put up with unbearable amounts of
work to make ends meet while performing at clubs and bars for the last ten
years. Quoting his personal reminiscing of the 90s as the best time of his life,
which he thought “would have never come again,” ToToGa signals that the
“good old days” could possibly return when individuals are resilient and
laborious, maintaining a proper psychological status to endure the dire living
conditions of the current neoliberal regime. When ToToGa covers Cool, a
dance trio, it focuses on Kim Sung-soo, whose daughter was watching his
stage performance. While a 48-year-old singer is rather too old to sing and
dance at the same time, he confesses the stage is emotionally fulfilling since
he is able to prove his performance capabilities to his daughter, evoking
paternal responsibility. Another participant ToToGa emphasizes is Shoo of
S.E.S., who is a mother of three children. During qualifying scenes, Shoo’s
busy daily life as mother was highlighted to indicate how a former top
celebrity lives just like ordinary people, thus symbolically naturalizing in-
creasingly degrading living conditions under neoliberalism. This is especial-
ly evident when Shoo’s discussion of unbearable pains while giving birth is
juxtaposed with her excitement for this special episode where her perfor-
mance is legitimized through neoliberal self-efficacy. After a round of de-
grading talks about Shoo’s unexpected motherhood troubles and trivia, she
reactivates herself as someone who used to be at the top of the industry.
When asked to dance to a song she did not recognize at first, Shoo automati-
cally perfects her choreography once the song plays. Despite a positive ex-
ample of her talent, this incident indicates the biopolitical nature of the K-
pop industry’s slave-driver-like training system. Her comment, “thanks for
encouraging mothers to pursue long-forgotten dreams,” legitimizes a neolib-
eral exploitation of housewives’ affective labour in service industries as a
major workforce that sustains the current Korean economy.
 The 90s, the Most Stunning Days of Our Lives 119

Kim Taeho, the director and producer of Infinite Challenge, indicates that
ToToGa pays homage to Kim Jeong-nam of Turbo and Shoo of S.E.S.,
focusing on their struggles to survive in reality. Leaving behind their legacies
as the nation’s top celebrities, they still have to come to terms with the
neoliberal rules of life, doing their best to stay competitive and capable.
Likewise, this is why Lee Jeong-hyun, introduced as the Lady Gaga of Ko-
rea, is praised for her well-maintained physical attractiveness, and more spe-
cifically, her young looks with a lot of aegyo. When Uhm Jeong-hwa later
joins the show, ToToGa emphasizes how she is still busy with her successful
career in the culture industry. By doing so, the show focuses on Uhm’s
explicit sexuality as her main selling point against countless younger, beauti-
ful, sexy female celebrities. Most phenomenally, when she performs her
songs with her original dancing crews from the 90s, ToToGa explicitly
broadcasts how the dancers do their best to perform onstage even though
they are not physically fit and capable anymore to the extent that their outfits
have become too small and tight for them to move freely. What is suggested
here is that ordinary people can still enjoy their success no matter how late it
comes, as long as they stay resilient. Also, Jinu-Sean, a hip-hop duo, testify
how hard they practiced in order to maintain physical stamina, representing a
neoliberal model of self-development and self-efficacy in order to stay alive
and competitive in the industry. Eventually, ToToGa persuades individuals
to put up with the current sociocultural and politico-economic difficulties,
sticking to the fading promises and hopes of success in neoliberal society. In
sum, Uhm Jeong-hwa suggests “no matter how terrible and awful it feels at
the moment, once time passes, you will realize that everything is meant to be
important and worthy.”
Participating musicians on ToToGa are required to achieve over 95 per-
cent on their karaoke score, indicating that the neoliberal mantras of self-
development, self-efficacy, and competitiveness govern the entire show.
Turbo’s “Twist King,” the encore song of ToToGa, the singers had difficulty
in passing the minimum score for qualification. Actually, Kim Jeong-nam
testified he did his very best putting the very last drop of his energy into his
performance. Likewise, three songs Turbo sang in the show were chosen
since Kim Jeong-nam’s portion is most salient amongst the group’s songs.
Therefore, it is suggestive that Turbo opened and closed the show. When
persuading Cho Sung-mo, the most commercially successful musician of the
90s, ToToGa indicates that his appearance exemplifies a legitimacy and ef-
fectiveness of doing 90s music today. However, when he got a failing score
of 83 percent for his test, Cho Sung-mo was asked to change his style of
singing to accommodate that of karaoke which radically nullified his original
singing mode, indicating that survival in neoliberal Korea requires one to
admit and naturalize the neoliberal way of life. This comment invites the
audiences to long for reactivating their fantasized 90s in reality, assuming
120 Chapter 7

that they have to work hard so that they can achieve the desired socio-
economic status in today’s neoliberal Korea.
Concerning nostalgia’s deliberative potential to seek an alternative to the
present, which is a politics of memorizing the past for the future, Infinite
Challenge’s ToToGa seems to inspire the audience to “recognize aspects of
the past as the basis for renewal and satisfaction in the future” (Pickering and
Keightley 2006, 921). However, since it does not critically examine the
decade but arbitrarily selects certain genres and musicians, ToToGa is simply
one of the most successful marketizations of nostalgia as an aesthetic and
commercial stylization of the past, which serves the neoliberal status quo.
While other nostalgic commodities such as Architecture 101, Reply 1994!
and Reply 1997! situate the 90s within the present by narrating the decade’s
influence on growth, success, and changes of characters’ current lives, ToTo-
Ga does not provide any reflective perspective on the decade, or discuss the
participating musicians’ professional and personal trajectories. Rather, the
singers were used as stage props in a 90s theme park. For example, when Soh
Chan-hwee, to date the most powerful female vocal singer, represents the
year of 1996, her debut year, her perfect performance symbolizes an apex of
Korea’s economic optimism, epitomized by membership attainment in
OECD. In turn, representing 1998, when Korea was completely replete with
defeatism and pessimism right after receiving the IMF bailout, Cho Sung-
mo, the Prince of Korean ballad, sings an emotionally charged sad ballad
without its historical context. However, right after the sad ballad song, Cho
bounces back to a fast-beat dance ballad to confirm the positive emotional
theme of ToToGa, and he is praised as an ultimate male singer at last. After
his successful management of emotional fluctuations, Cho Sung-mo is com-
plimented for holding the performance venue and conveying strong emotion-
al resonances to audiences by rejuvenating positive feelings. From this per-
spective, the last entry of the show, Kim Gunn-mo, as the “legend of Korean
pop,” succinctly summarizes ToToGa’s ahistorical treatment of 90s pop mu-
sic, which is a strange combination of sad messages and fast, optimist beats
and melody. In other words, without providing any historical contextualiza-
tion of the 90’s pop music within Korea’s contemporary political, economic,
cultural, and social transformations, ToToGa consumes the music as a reac-
tionary politics of emotion, which just relieves psychological stresses and
burdens of people who struggle to live in today’s neoliberalism.
In this respect, an ideological imperative of positive psychology, sum-
moned back from 90s popular music, lies in neoliberalism’s biopolitical
strategy of “putting actors in touch with capacities, reminding them of their
accomplished identities, which in turn fuels the ongoing projection of iden-
tity from past into future” (DeNora 1999, 48). In short, ToToGa asks the
audience to work as hard as they did in the 90s. Therefore, as a result of
commercial opportunism (Drake 2003), and as fabricated nostalgia, ToToGa
 The 90s, the Most Stunning Days of Our Lives 121

does not help the audience to deal with the future. Rather, it helps maintain
the neoliberal status quo by further proliferating rosy fantasies as neoliberal
positive thinking. While reflective, critical nostalgia can foster a transforma-
tive and creative self that improves sociocultural and politico-economic con-
ditions in the present, Infinite Challenge’s ToToGa fails to reconstitute the
decade. By ignoring the 90s’ possibilities, challenges, contributions, and fail-
ures, the show eulogizes the dreadful present which is surpassed by not only
the positive atmosphere of the 90s permeated in the songs, but also the
vanishing dreams of a better future under the debilitating neoliberal regime.
Instead, as a method of proliferating neoliberal positive thinking, ToToGa
asks the audience to be devoted, resilient workers who are eager to endure
the side effects of neoliberalism, like a surge of precarious, temporary em-
ployment, soaring income inequality, and a demise of social safety nets.
In conclusion, ToToGa’s romanticizing narrative of the 90s is an ideolog-
ical tool in imposing a moral imperative of working hard, staying resilient,
and dreaming big at a time of economic hardship. In turn, ToToGa interpel-
lates the audience to be willing socioeconomic agents in serving the current,
neoliberal capitalist regime. Listening to 90s pop music provided the audi-
ence with an opportunity to recharge themselves. While “nostalgia can be
both a social disease and a creative emotion, a poison and a cure” (Boym
2001, 354), ToToGa exploits the 90s as just a new inventory for commercial
profiteering, and furthermore, helps perpetuate neoliberal governmentality.

NOTES

1. As a harbinger, KBS’s Gayo Mudae (Popular Music Stage) has featured popular songs
from the 50s, 60s, and 70s since November 1985. Gayo Mudae resurfaces public nostalgia
sentiments toward Korea’s past turbulent conditions under which people perseveringly strug-
gled to modernize the country.
 Conclusion

In this book, I have tried to reconsider K-pop and its female idols as a
culmination of Korea’s updated developmentalist strategy in neoliberal capi-
talism. Rather than an autonomous musical evolution or adaptation to a
changing sociocultural environment, K-pop has been an industrial innovation
to capitalize on what is available to maintain and advance national economic
competitiveness. In this respect, the culture industry in post-IMF Korea has
meant to replace the country’s traditional strategic fields of development
such as the consumer commodity manufacturing industry of the 60s and 70s
and the heavy and chemical manufacturing industries of the 80s and early
90s. However, while the culture industry deals with a starkly different ratio-
nale, mode, and form of products, K-pop has retained and exploited the
traditional, authoritarian mode of manufacturing and labor relations with its
workers. In this context, as much as the nation’s miraculously fast industrial-
ization was possible by a successful mobilization of unwed female workers
by the logic of patriarchal nationalism, K-pop’s recent success, especially
since 2007, has mainly been conditioned by a neoliberal appropriation of the
traditional gender norms and expectations. To be more specific, I have exam-
ined how K-pop female idols have been an integral part of the culture indus-
try’s active role in neoliberal biopolitics, female subjectification, and subjec-
tivation in neoliberal immaterial labor and consumerism. By reconsidering
Foucault’s theses on neoliberalism not only as a political economy of free
market capitalism, but more importantly as a governmentality of individuals
by the market rationalities, I have indicated how K-pop has been effective in
reformulating the government’s industrial and social policies, promoting
commodity consumptions, (re)producing patriarchy, perpetuating neoliberal
mantras like positive psychology and resiliency, and conditioning women to
monitor, correct, and conform their emotions, thoughts, and behaviors to

123
124 Conclusion

Korea’s patriarchal neoliberalism. With this book, I hope to contribute to

opening up a new approach to understanding K-pop’s seemingly incongruous
phenomena. Likewise, I hope this book helps usher in a new scholarly ap-
proach to the topic, namely, Critical K-pop Studies. With my attempt to
encourage researchers to carry out Critical K-pop Studies, I hope they further
develop critical, structural, and organic examinations on various particular-
ities of the music genre in its practices and influences in both Korea and
beyond.
However, my initial attempt in this book is far from satisfactory in its
scholarly soundness, mainly due to its limited scope of topics, methodology,
and a unit of analysis. As I disclosed in the introduction, this book’s exclu-
sive focus on female idols sacrifices many important developments, issues,
and contributions, which were rendered by male idols. Despite its disclaimer,
this book has a very limited pool of research objects, leaving many signifi-
cant and influential K-pop female idols unexamined. While this study exam-
ines a structural condition of possibility of the music genre, or an industrial
practice of deploying young female bodies, it does still have various limita-
tions on its research methodology. Since this book mainly analyzed how K-
pop female idols are presented as an object of desire and more specifically a
mode of ideal femininity by the patriarchal neoliberal K-pop industry, it did
not examine how female audiences actually appreciate them. In other words,
because little is known about how audiences with different backgrounds
make different meaning in a variety of ways in their everyday lives, this book
took the risk of ignoring a concrete, day-to-day affection, attachment, and
value the audiences conjure up in their own terms by consuming the idols’
content.
Relying on mainly what is available in the public realm, such as published
governmental reports, news articles, press releases of the industry, discussion
threads on online sites, and YouTube videos, this book does not examine
what is really going on in the minds of actual female idols. While ostensibly
treating them as uncritical conformists to the industry and the cultural trend,
this study takes the risk of not listening to their own voices and thoughts.
This book’s emphasis on the sociocultural implications of the idols’ explicit
sexualization poses another risk of treating audiences as mere passive recip-
ients of media messages. As an “elastic discourse” (Lumby and Albury
2010), this study does not examine what audiences get out of the idols’
staged sexual expressions, but treats them as evidence. With a hint of protec-
tionism or victimization (Bragg et al. 2011; Smith 2010), this study does not
consider how female audiences actually negotiate the media content in their
everyday lives, neglecting audiences’ sexual autonomy and pleasure. This in
turn incurs an unexpected side effect of restaging a dichotomy between ac-
tive, predatory male sexuality and passive, obedient female sexualities. I do
hope future researchers fill this vast void and correct the mistakes I was not
 Conclusion 125

able to avoid in this book. For example, using obtrusive methods, especially
interviews with actual female idols and audiences, can reveal what is really
going on in their minds in terms of their subjectification and subjectivation
processes, and in turn overcome this book’s major limitation. Interviews with
personnel in the K-pop industry and the government will verify this book’s
preliminary argument on neoliberal developmentalism since the 1997 Finan-
cial Crisis. While I have raised more questions than answers on these issues,
I do hope this book’s critical attempts will encourage and vitalize critical,
systematic investigation into Korea’s culture industry in general, and K-pop
in particular, in their dynamic relationships with the nation’s neck-breaking
speed of neoliberalization.
In an ever-mediated society like Korea, the media are increasingly being
commercialized: Individuals are receiving messages that are mainly manu-
factured based on the economic interests of the stakeholders behind them.
Subsequently, in this profit-driven media environment, public opinion or
sentiment is shaped by economic interests rather than civic or social impor-
tance. Considering femininity has been defined, surveilled, and controlled by
the interests and needs of the dominant patriarchs over time in Korea, I have
tried to understand how K-pop female idols as a dominant cultural and social
genre of the nation promote a certain array of behaviors, images, ideas, and
emotions, and in turn teach audiences how to make sense of the world and
how to manage themselves to survive. As a dominant force of sense-making
in people’s everyday lives, K-pop female idols, as a microcosm of Korean
society, have become an icon of neoliberal female subjectivity manufactured
as contemporary South Korea’s concrete cultural, economic, historical, and
social specificity. In this respect, with this book’s preliminary arguments, the
audience has to be more critical and aware of the cultural politics of the
neoliberal cultural commodity in its cultural, economic, ideological, and so-
cial functionalities in maintaining a neoliberal regime.
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 Index

Academy of Korean Studies, xi Artist of the Year, 14

Adorno, TW, 32, 37 attribute, 95
aegyo, 20, 22, 54, 119; cuteness, 39; girlish Avex, 14
behaviors, 55; infantilizaiton of women,
39, 55, 69 Barthes, Roland, 37
aesthetics of neoliberal market, 53 B.C. Card, 47
affect, 37, 62; affectionated bodies, 37; Berlin, Isaiah, 97
affective commodity, 39, 68; affective Bhabha, Homi, 49
economy of K-pop, 89, 91; affective Binkley, Sam, 18, 116, 117
experience, 64, 117; affective female biopolitics. See governmentality
subjectivity, 96; affective labour, 36, BoA, 14, 54
86, 118; affective public, 64; affective BooHwal, 110
turn, 62 bourgeois: male, 91; women, 91
agency: critical human, 49, 50; false sense Brown, Bobby, 52
of, 85; female, 72; local cultural, 52, 59 Brown, Wendy, 98, 103, 104
allegory, 29
ambiguity, 39; femininity, 65, 69, 72, 89 capital, 40; cultural, 37
Ahmed, Sara, 98, 99; affect, 104; capitalism: consumerist, 50, 74, 78, 117;
consciousness of unhappiness, 98; disaster, 96; hyper free market, 62;
feminist killjoy, 98 patriarchal, 54, 101
American: audience, 56; Americanization, candy, lollipop, 90
46, 48, 68; G.I., 46; individualism, 56; chaebol, 5, 32
male gaze, 57; military camp town, 31, China, 43, 52, 66
46 Cho Sung-mo, 119, 120
amnesia: collective, 98; cultural, xxiii, 12, Choi, JungBong and Ronald Maliangkay,
112; sociocultural, 39 xviii
Annual K-pop World Festival, 8 choice: individual, 97; narrative, 100;
Appadurai, Arjun, 25, 51 psychological, 97
a priori, 29 Chun Doo-hwan, 31
Architecture 101, 77, 87, 89, 108, 120 cloth: black or black/ white, 87;
Arirang Sister, 31 coordination with make-up, 88;

145
146 Index

extravagant, 102; long-sleeve dance: collective, 35, 87; provocative, 87;

turtleneck, 90; revealing, 87; risqué, 89; sexualized, 73, 74, 89; synchronized,
tutu, 90 14, 27, 30, 38, 62, 72, 86, 87, 102
colonization, 49; double, xxx; post- de Beauvoir, Simone, 91
coloniality, 45; resistance to, 49, 50 Dean, Mitchell, 96
color: flashy, 72; monochromatic, 56; pink, Debord, Guy, 12
72; primary, 71; temperature, 88, 102 Deleuze, Gilles and Guatari, Felix, 81; on
Cool, 110, 118; Kim Sung-soo, 118 schizophrenia, 81
commercialization: of culture, 47, 59; of destination tourism, 8
popular music, 11, 32, 43, 44, 46, 110 Deux,7.9
commodification: Asian femininity, 57; developmentalism, xxxii, 2, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10,
female body, xxx, xxxii, xxxiv, 20, 25, 27, 32; dictatorship, 4, 25, 109;
37, 40, 51, 56, 58, 70, 72, 82, 85, 102; nationalist, 31; patriarchal 85
explicit portrayal, 21, 34, 37, 74; discipline, 33, 105; docility-utility, 19, 30,
sexualized female bodies, 34, 43, 54, 48
56, 62, 68, 69, 70, 73, 80
competition in K-pop, 21, 77, 78 economy of scale, 9
Concert 7080, 108 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 116
conformity, 30, 36, 83, 84, 86, 100; emotion: embeddedness in power relations,
harmony, 35; internalization of, 86, 87, 96; emotional fluctuation, 120;
89, 98; loss of individuality, 36, 48 emotional resonance, 120; emotionality
Confucianism, 34; education, 86; filial of rule, 95; emotional state, proper, 96;
piety, 84; gender norms, 78, 90, 99; emotional technology of self-
morality, 78; world view, 35 realization, 95; intricate, 102;
Connect and Development, 9 reactionary politics of emotion, 120;
Consul General of the Republic of Korea in self–management, 116
New York, 43 empowerment: imaginary, xix, 38; false
Contents Industry Promotion Law, 7 sense of female, 89; female, xxxiv, 23,
contract, slave-like, 91, 102 24, 30, 38, 40, 58, 72, 80, 87, 89, 105;
Creative Autonomy or Authenticity, 10, 50 self, 22
creativity, 49 English lyrics, 56
cultural: asymmetry, 59; authenticity, 49; entertainment economy, 12
autonomy, 59; commodification, 113; episteme, xxxiii, 17, 27, 29, 62, 63, 64, 74,
counter-flow, 59; hybridity, xx, xxxiii, 81, 114
3, 43, 44, 56, 57, 59; in-betweenness, Eun-B, 29
49; memory, xxxiv, 109, 115; police, Ewha Women’s University, 23, 94
36, 86; policy, 6, 53; proximity, 3, 49, Exhibition, 110
55 exotic otherness or mystique Asian
culture industry, 3, 6, 109; industrialization femininity, xxvii, 56, 57
of culture, 11; industrialization of Export-Import Bank of Korea, 7
popular music, 58; industrial export-oriented economy, 32, 65
transformation, 52; commodity, 12, 14,
15, 48, 53 fans: cultural consumption, xix; fandom
culture technology, 11, 44 culture, 108; online fandom, 54; K-pop,
Cumings, Bruce, 46 xviii; sam-chon fans, 20
Cyrus, Miley, 77 fantasy: male sexual, 38, 39, 56, 70, 90;
racialized Western, 57, 59
female: agency, 40, 87; aggression, 87;
autonomous, 40; bodies, 37; buttocks,
 Index 147

73; chastity and decency, 89; cleavage, Boys”, 33, 43, 45, 53, 54, 56
72, 73; collective anger, 98; girl industry, 37
complacency, 95; consumers, 23; Global Financial and Economic Crisis of
crotch, 72; double confinement of, xxx; 2008, 67, 93, 97
eyes, 71; identity, 34; internal Global System of Capitalist Cultural
revolution, 99; legs, 72; liberation from Production, xx
patriarchy, 87; pony-tail, 90; pseudo government: civilian, 108; military
subjectivity, 91; pure wholesome authoritarian, 108
subjectivity, 89; voice, 37; voluntary governmentality, xxi, xxix, xxxii, 4, 20, 23,
internalization, B04.34 B04.43 1.5 1.45 25, 32, 35, 37, 62, 63, 74, 104, 116,
2.14 2.17 5.21 5.34; respectability, 85; 121; bodily script, 35; competition, 20,
sexual, 21; somatic intelligibility, 96; 29, 47; ethics of neoliberal self, 96, 120,
sterile vanity subjectivity, 91; 121; homo economicus, xxi, 23, 63, 93,
subjective sexual satisfaction, 83; 98; human capital, 18, 21, 22, 30, 39,
subjectivity, 28, 39, 82, 96, 104; 93, 98, 103; kinetic imposition, 35, 118;
subjectless body, 34, 81, 86, 91; make-over subjectivity, 98; neoliberal
subordination, 72, 79, 82; unpaid labor, subject, 19, 21, 105; personal branding,
101 98; self-accountable image, 116; self-
Fordist assembly line, xv; regime of affirmation, 97; self-determination, 99;
accumulation, 9 self-development, 21, 22, 101, 119;
formal universality, xxxii, 27 self-efficacy, 118, 119; self-
Foucault, Michel, xxi, 4, 5, 18, 19, 21, 48, management, 98, 119; self-mastery, 93,
62, 63, 64, 65, 79, 80, 81, 96, 98, 109, 101, 119; self-reliant experts, 21; self-
116; discourse of, 37 responsibilization, 96, 99, 100, 101,
functionality, socio-cultural, 29 105; technology of the self, 95, 96, 116,
Framework Act on Cultural Industry 120; visual poetics, 101, 104, 105
Promotion, 7 Grainge, Paul, 112
Free Trade Agreement between Korea and G20 Seoul Summit, xxxiii, 16, 67, 74; G20
the U.S., xxxiii, 11, 14, 16, 44, 66, 74 Generation, 67; G20 Star Supporters,
Fuhr, Michael, xx, 46 16; Talking to the G20 Leaders, 16

gender: equality, xv, xxviii, 33, 36; Hall, Stuart, 40, 47, 53, 58
inequality, 70 happiness, 96, 97; instrumental, 116; social
gender relations, xv; hegemonic, xxx, 2, policy, 116; strategic instrument, 116
79; hierarchy, 38, 80, 81, 87, 100; Harvey, David, 5, 93
patriarchal, 30, 32, 36, 40, 54, 72, 90 hegemony, 50; agency, 4; American, xxvii,
genealogy, 65; of K-pop, xxxiii, 63 34, 44, 46, 47, 50, 52, 54, 56, 57, 58,
genre, cultural, 29, 44 59; cultural, xv, xxxiii, 45; dominant,
Giddens, Anthony, xx 37; femininity, 28, 38, 90;
Girls’ Day, 7 globalization, 53; ideological double
Girls Generation (SNSD), xi, xxvii, 13, 14, play, 48; neoliberal, 30; patriarchal
43, 54, 63, 68, 74, 94, 99; “All Night”, female empowerment, 89, 105; political
94, 102, 105; “Gee”, 14, 39, 45, 54, 55, economic, 51; structure of, 49;
68, 69, 72; “Genie: Tell me Your vernacular cultural articulation, 50;
Wish”, 68, 72; “Into the New World”, voluntary internalization/subsumption,
23, 72, 94, 99, 102, 105; “I Got A Boy”, 48, 50, 105
53; National Idol, xxvii, 14, 69, 94; historical specificity, xxxii, 27, 78
postage stamps, 16; SNSD plastic H.O.T., 111
surgery, 22; Seo-hyun, 112; “The Huh Gak, 17, 111
148 Index

Hyorin of Sistar, 7 Kim Gunn-mo, 110, 120

Hyun Cheol, 110 Kim Jong-seo, 110
Kim Kyung-ho, 110
identity crisis, 47 Kim Sisters, 31
ideological state apparatus, xxvi, 4, 16, 63, Kim Soohee, 110
78, 121 Kim Young-sam, 2, 6
image: visual, 54; Western imaginary of Klein, Naomi, 96
Asian women, 54, 56, 57, 59 Korea Creative Content Agency
imagination, sociological, 91 (KOCCA), 7, 14, 16
imperialism, 47; cultural, 48, 51; Korea Foundation for International Culture
dominated group’s internalization, 47 Exchange (KOFICE), 7, 8
innocence: childhood, 39; imagery, 89; Korea Post, 16
visual, 68, 71, 78 Korea Tourism Organization (KTO), 16
International Monetary Funds (IMF), 5, 44; Korea Trade Insurance Corporation, 8
1997 Asian Financial Crisis, 34, 40, 48, Korea Trade Promotion Agency, 8
55, 59, 65, 66, 67, 70, 71, 74, 77, 81, Korean Culture and Information Service
108, 109; Structural Adjustment (KOCIS), 14
Programs (SAPs), 36, 47, 108 Korean popular music (K-pop), 1; audition
program, 17, 111; K-pop combo plastic
Interpellation. See ideological state appara- surgery, 22
tus Korean Popular Culture and Arts Awards,
Infinite Challenge, 15, 107, 108; Kim, Tae- 16
ho, 119; “Saturday, Saturday is Korean War, 46, 82
Singers” (ToToGa), xxxiv, 107, 110, Korean Wave, xvi, 1; index, 7
112, 113, 115, 117 Koreanness: pseudo, 53; de-Koreanization,
institution: barrier, 100; inequality and 54
injustice, 97, 98, 100 KOSDAQ Stock Market, 52
instrumental rationality, xv, 80 Kracauer, Siegfried, 79, 80; mass
I.O.I.: Sejeong Kim, 84 ornament, 80, 86, 91
I.U., 111 Kraidy, Marwan, 49, 52, 59

James, Robin, 93, 95, 101, 105 Ladies’ Code, 40

Jameson, Fredric 25, 29, 37, 80, 113; Late Show with David Letterman, xxvi, 16,
political unconscious, 52, 114; political 54, 57
fantasy, 80; utopia, 102 Lee Jeong-hyun, 119
Japan, 38, 39, 43; colonial occupation, 34; Lee Myung-bak, 7, 16, 109
economic depression, 55; idol- Lee Seung-hwan, 110
manufacturing system, 54; popular Lee Sooman, 11, 52
culture, 49 Lie, John, xvi, xvii, xxii, 5, 9, 10, 12, 13,
Jin, Dal Yong, xvii, 3, 7, 10, 14, 45, 47, 59 17, 32, 33, 45, 46, 48, 50, 59, 69
Jinu-Sean, 119 Lieb, Kristin, 54, 56
Joo Hyun-mi, 110 life cycle model for female popular
JYP Entertainment, 9, 11 singers, 54, 57, 68
Live with Kelly, xxvi, 16, 54
kawaii, 39, 55 locality: cultural production, 47, 50;
Kellner, Douglas, 45, 80 fetishism of, xx, 45, 48, 51;
Kenzie, 102 localization, 47; multi-directional
Kim Chang-wan, 111 culture production, 51; sensitivity, 44
Kim Dae-jung, 2, 6 Lula, 110
 Index 149

market: autonomy, 6; concentration, 9; 104, 115, 116, 117, 120; economic

expansion, 53; global marketing development, 11; enterprising self, 20;
strategy, 54; localizing strategy, 53; commercialism, 59, 63; competition,
strategy, 53; uncertainty, 56 67, 70; consumerism, 12, 21, 22, 23, 24,
male: gaze, 39; hypocrisy, 88; sexual 47, 82, 97; gender technology, 85;
demand/fantasy, 79, 82, 89; supremacy, inequality, 71, 96; insecurities, 23, 65,
39 93, 108; organizational rationality of
mass games, military, 38 society, 95; patriarchal, 40, 58;
master narrative, 80 rationality, 79; self-help transformation,
McRobbie, Angela, 33, 37, 103, 105 98; social policy, 17, 24; social
memory, 114, 115 reconstruction, 93; survival, 102, 119;
Milli Vanilli, 52 marketing the unmarketable, 88, 90;
mindfulness @ 6.10 market-oriented social transformation,
Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism 18, 27, 96; regime of truth and life, 18;
(MCST), 7, 8 rhetoric, 105; deregulation and
Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade privatization, 18, 59, 101
(MOFAT), 8 NExT, 110
Miracle on the Han River, 2, 5, 25, 32, 109 nostalgia, 38, 102, 107; childhood, 39;
misogyny, 34 commercial opportunism, 120;
Miss A, 87; First Love, 89; “Good Girl, commercialization of memory, 113,
Bad Girl”, 87, 90; “Hush”, 87, 89, 90; 120; commodified style, 113, 116, 120;
Suzy, xxxiv, 77, 84, 90 critical assessment of the past, 113,
modernity: alienation, 112; capitalist, 34, 120; cultural politics, 110, 115, 117;
81; globalized, xx; industrialization, 36, decadent, 102, 108, 109; deliberative
108; speedy, 108; westernization, 34 potential, 120; engineered memory,
monopoly, aural, 61 112; fabricated, 120; feeling of loss,
mothers, Korean, 91 110; merchant of the past, 112, 113,
Motown girl groups, xv, xxix, 9, 27, 30, 120, 121; personal indulgence, 108;
31, 32, 35, 46, 69 political aesthetization, 109, 113;
MTV, 74, 94 psychological defense mechanism, 112;
Mulvey, Laura, 54 reactionary yearning, 112; retro music,
Murray, Bill, 57 xxxiv, 102, 107, 108; retro TV
music: authenticity/authorship, 110, 111; program, 108; romanticization, 102,
ballad, 80s, 114; diversity, 111; extra- 112, 121; selective package of the past,
musical conditions, 107; folk music, 110, 112; structure of feeling/
70s, 114; hip-hop, 90s, 114; historical experience, 113, 115; theme park, 120
experience, 110; hook, 14, 17, 30;
referential role, 107; vocabulary, 30 Obama administration, 16
objectification: Asian women, 57, 58;
narcissism, 83, 102; compensatory female sexuality, 56; female body part,
narcissistic self-inflation, 83; low self- 56, 73; self-sexualization/
esteem, 83 objectification, 70; survival of the
nation-building, industrial capitalist, xxix sexiest, 70
nationalism: patriarchal 1.2 1.5 2.11: pop, OECD, 44, 108, 120
1; post-colonial, 34 optimism, 100
neoliberalism, xxi, 5, 6, 17, 18, 47, 59, 99; Oricon Chart, 14
service industry, xxix, 10, 12, 13, 25,
29, 44, 48, 66, 85, 99; positive Park Chung-hee, 2, 6, 25, 31, 34
psychology, xxxiv, 71, 96, 97, 99, 102, Park Geun-hye, 2, 7, 25, 32, 109
150 Index

Park, Gil-sung, 9 temptation, 54, 57, 81; tonality, 61

patriarchy, 27, 35; affective economy, 82, resilience, 93, 103, 118, 119; discourse of,
101; control and manipulation, 87; xxxiv, 93; moralization of, 104;
desires, xv, 87; family, 35; long perseverance, 99; self-endurance, 17,
habituation, 91; neoliberalism, 27, 34; 93, 103, 120; therapeutic narrative, 98,
other-oriented emotional economy, 82; 99, 103; visual message of, 93, 95, 102
relations, xxiv, 84; unified patriarchal resistance, imagined, 50
subject, 81 re-territorialization, 28
Pearl Sisters, 31 Riley, Teddy, 56
pedagogy: affective, 37, 86 RiSe, 29
corporeal, 35; everyday, 18; pleasurable, Roh Moo-hyun, 2
62 Rose, Nikolas, 96, 98
phantasms of Orientalness, 56 Rottenberg, Catherine, 95, 98, 105;
physicality, 27, 30, 31; attractive, 52, 68, neoliberal feminism, 103, 105
119; reified, 87; stamina, 119
plastic surgery, 22 Sam-Poong Department Store, 108
political economy, 3, 4, 45; local culture Sandberg, Sheryl, 99
production, 50, 80; local media Sassen, Saskia, 8, 52
industry, 59; of memory, 109; K-pop satisfaction: imaginary, 94, 100; symbolic,
production, 51 23
Popular Music Production Support Project, self-identification, 30
2013, 7 self-Orientalism, 59
pornography, 21, 74; dance, 83; everyday, Seligman, Martin, 97
38; market exchange of intimacies, 83 sense of belonging, 115
portfolio management, 56 Seo Taiji and Boys, 52, 110, 111
post-feminism: commodities, 98; Seoul Music Awards, 14
consumerist rebranding of the self, 98; Sewol Ferry Capsize Incident, 108
corporate feminism, 105 S.E.S., 13, 14, 63, 65, 68, 74; Eugene, 112;
power: micro-physics of, 37, 38, 62, 63; “I Am Your Girl”, 68, 71; “Love”, 68;
purchasing, 54, 109; sexual, 56; soft, 43 Shoo, 118, 119; “Show Me Your
Presidential Council on Nation Branding, 8 Love”, 68
productivity optimization, 96 sexuality: construction, 80; double
proletarian, 91 standard, 72; explicit, 65, 73, 90, 119;
propaganda, 67, 69; of K-pop, 105 female, 34, 37, 39, 56; hyper-sexualized
Psy, 43 Asian women, 57; innuendo, 73
psychology: psychological negativity, 98;
psychological retreat, 97 Shim, Doobo, xx, 3, 47, 52, 59
Shin Seung-hoon, 110
Radio Star of MBC, 107 Shiri, 47
Radway, Janice, 50 singer-auteurs, 110, 111
Reagan Administration, 93 SM Entertainment, 9, 11, 13, 14, 25, 54,
reality TV, 15, 20 57, 58, 68, 102, 110
Reply,1994! , 108, 120 SM Town Concerts, 52, 57
Reply,1997! , 108, 120 social: control, 81; inclusion, 17; mobility,
representation, 38, 80; china doll, 56, 79; 17; movement, 97
dragon lady, 54, 56; K-pop female Soh Chan-hwee, 120
idols, xxviii, xxxiv, 61, 68, 80; soundscape, 110, 111
provocative, 56, 85; submissive gender Spears, Britney, 77
roles, 39, 79; sex doll, 73; sexual
 Index 151

spectacle: affective therapeutic, 105; Turbo, 118; Kim Jeong-nam, 118, 119;
consumer, 117; erotic, 36, 86; media, “Twist King”, 117, 119
63; neoliberal fantasy, 105, 117, 119, Two-Two, 110
120; society of, 12 typology of cultural system, 27
sphere, domestic, 12
Spice Girls, 27 Uhm Jeong-hwa, 119
split-personality, or schizophrenic uniform, 38, 72, 86, 102; military, 38, 72;
character, xxx, xxxiv, 77, 80, 81, 87; sexualized, 36, 72, 86
schizoid double pull, 82; schizophrenic uniformity, 30; visual, 30, 86
female sexuality, 81, 82
state-private partnership, or state-corporate van Dijck, José, 107, 108, 114, 115
nexus, 8, 16 visuality: affect-charged, 93; close-up, 71,
Stellar, 63, 70, 74; “Marionette”, 70, 73 74; contradiction, 90; corporeal, 52, 54,
Sturken, Marita, 115 56, 82; of conformity and harmony, 86;
subjectification/subjectivation, 4, 18, 63, elegance, 102; of K-pop, 37, 62, 64, 68;
77, 84, 96, 115, 116; double bind, 21, narrative, 79; sexualized, 37, 89;
81, 82; double gaze, 83 themes, 61
subordinations, colonial or military, 31
Sungsoo Bridge, 108 Wall Street Journal 57
Superstar K2, 17, 111 White, Hayden, 114
Williams, Raymond, xv, xxxii, 2, 27, 28,
taxonomy of K-pop, xxxiii, 63, 65 33, 37; on cultural formation, xv, 28; on
Telecommunication Act of 1996, 21, 67, structure of feeling/experience, 29, 37,
74 38, 40; practical consciousness, 37
Terrorist Attack, 2001, 93
text: analysis, 45, 57; polysemy, 80 Winfrey, Oprah, 95
The Shirelles, 30 Wonder Girls, 13; “Tell Me”, 69
Tiller Girls, xv, 80
Time Magazine, 97 Yerin of Girl Friend, 84
transnational: capitalism, 48, 50, 58; YG Entertainment, 9, 11
cultural commodity flow, 59; media, YouTube, 3, 54
47; speculative capital, 47, 65 Yoon Sang, 111
 About the Author

Gooyong Kim (PhD in Cultural/Media Studies, UCLA) is an assistant pro-

fessor of communication arts at Cheyney University of Pennsylvania. His
research includes Critical Studies, Media Aesthetics/Criticism, Media Litera-
cy, Political Economy of the Media, Cultural Politics of Neoliberalism, and
Social Movements.

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