UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation is an ethnography of how intimacy is transacted in and out of the political economy and commodity culture of K-pop. I view both K-pop singers and fans as intimate laborers in the affective economy of global K-pop and explore how intimacy is commodified as a product in digital media. Popular music studies have often defined fan activities in the pop music sector as domestic and thus feminine, but K-pop female fans’ activities complicate the conventional dichotomies of domestic versus public and feminine versus masculine, as their relationships with K-pop idols (male singers in particular) are built upon female dominance acquired through digital surveillance and fetishization of idol bodies. These activities have long been deemed abnormal, hysterical, irrational, and unintelligent; however, I understand K-pop fans as consumers who seek intimate solidarity through purchased feelings of pleasure, power, and ascendancy.

K-pop fandom is not phenomenal—it is performative.