ARMY is Family: The Affective Labor of K-Pop Fans

The growth of K-pop globally influenced the emergence of many different subcultures and communities dedicated to K-pop in various social media. My ethnographic work looks at a new sensation that is multiplying and is relevant to current youth culture. As a K-pop fan myself, I look at what made something like K-pop so famous in the West despite the members of the boy group not fitting into the Western gender norms of masculinity. K-pop growth is due to soft power and the investment the Korean government puts towards promoting it. K-pop appeal is more than its music as it provides a bundle of entertainment for their audience. K-pop idols bring attention to gender and sexuality as it showcases hybrid performance, which brakes gender norm, and creates a space for the LGBTQ community through the act of liminal masculinity. K-pop artists showcase a gender-fluid presentation which allows the audience to feel liberated and allows them to express their own gender identity. K-pop popularity and its growth are the results of how K-pop provides a safe space for a lot of fans. As well as making the fan feel empowered, and so they are willing to invest a lot of affective labor into learning and supporting K-pop. K-pop fans have converted their fanning into creating their own form of production, which gives them something to claim as their own and to feel empowered. The boy band BTS is my prime example throughout my thesis because they are the most popular K-pop boy band globally and are the most active. What I focus on most in this thesis is the fan culture and their fan labor. I looked at how effective the labor that these fandoms put into supporting their favorite artist is. This often gets overlooked, so I make it a point to emphasize such. My thesis highlights the experiences of fans and their reasons for being part of the K-pop fandom.