Areum Jeong | K-Pop Fandom: Performing Deokhu from the 1990s to Today

Korea Colloquium

Areum Jeong
Assistant Professor, Korean Studies, School of International Letters and Cultures, Arizona State University

Areum Jeong is an interdisciplinary scholar and educator of Korean and Korean diasporic cinema, literature, popular culture, theatre and performance. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Korean Studies at Arizona State University. She is the author of Beyond the Sewol: Activist Theatre and Performance in South Korea and Diaspora (University of Hawaii Press, September 2025) and K-Pop Fandom: Performing Deokhu from the 1990s to Today (University of Michigan Press, February 2026).

Chaired by Chan Yong Bu, Assistant Professor, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University

Abstract:
Fan practices have been central to K-pop’s production as an artistic and cultural phenomenon and behemoth global industry. And yet, even as fans have by now been widely recognized as important to the spectacular phenomenon that is K-pop, we are far from a systematic understanding of fan practices as labor practices—that is, as work that produces value and without which K-pop as we know it would not exist. Based on my book, K-Pop Fandom: Performing Deokhu from the 1990s to Today, this talk examines how fan practices constitute a central productive force, shaping not only K-pop’s explosive global popularity but also K-pop’s cultural and social impacts, cultural politics, and horizons of possibility. In particular, I argue that K-pop fans, in performing deokhu—a Korean term connoting an “avid fan”—perform a kind of materialization of affective labor. This materialization of affective labor takes place across diverse fandom arenas and processes, from generalized, collective, and communal fan activities to decentralized, personalized labor that represents individual fans’ personalities and performances of care. To conduct this study, I combine insights from ethnography, cultural studies, fan studies, media studies, and performance studies. Significantly, I also draw on my own experiences as a participant-observer and co-performer witness.

Generously supported by the Sunshik Min Endowment Fund for the Advancement of Korean Literature at the Korea Institute, Harvard University