15

Toward a Gendered Aesthetics

of K-Pop
Timothy Laurie

Introduction
Asphalt shimmering in the heat, the camera rears to face an armored tank
striped pink and black. Urban vibrations give way to a crisp beat as five
women saunter into view. Propped up like plastic toys are an old-fashioned
telephone booth, two modified Japanese sports cars, and a congress of toxic
barrels. A siren sounds, the tank and its gun bounce into a pop-art frame,
and jostling words ignite the vocal track. “Hot, hot, hot-hot summer.”
“Hot Summer” is a #2 single by Korean pop (K-pop hereafter) group f(x).
The female quintet does not offer a novel arrangement of the song (itself
borrowed from German electro act Monrose), but they do provide new ges-
tural excitements through Rino Nakasone’s understated choreography, as
well as new props and the semiological questions posed by those props.
The tank seems to ask its spectators: What am I doing here? Do I symbolize
the forward momentum of the chorus? Or am I a vehicle for revolutions
­organized around seasonal changes?
K-pop videos are littered with superfluous objects, and these produce
difficulties for those looking for a clear politics of identification and desire
within the genre. On the one hand, f(x) is a girl group with one famously
androgynous Taiwanese-American member, Amber Josephine Liu (aka
Amber) (fig. 15.1), who seems to transgress the gender rules that segregate
the K-pop world. On the other hand, the glimmering utopian visions of
K-pop music videos complicate any easy desire for or identification with
these performers (or “idols”). “Hot Summer” does not promise fidelity to
any summer one could dance through or any tank that one could paint. The
slick near-future mise-en-scene offers instead the utopian promise of worlds
without friction or dissonance, but only by way of pleasures belonging to
the peculiar conventions of the dance music video.
This chapter argues that K-pop’s idyllic worlds cannot be measured
against the standards of social realism. Rather, K-pop produces its own dis-
tinct syntheses of sound and image to produce a utopian and communitarian
aesthetic, and its sexual politics develop in relation to these genre conven-
tions. While the selection of K-pop idols is limited by normative expectations
around age, gender, and racial physiognomy, this chapter argues that crit-
ical responses to identity-based patterns in music videos must be attentive
 Toward a Gendered Aesthetics of K-Pop  215

Figure 15.1  Screen shot from the “Hot Summer” video (2011).

to genre expectations as both constraints upon and affordances for the

­organization of new social meanings. For the most part, K-pop’s storylines,
sets, and stilettos do not pretend to express authentic social experiences, but
they do provide special creative openings for fan communities and for those
interested in the cultural valences of newly visible androgynous idols.
In placing my emphasis on gender and sexuality, the aim here is not to
locate K-pop within a political rubric that could adjudicate between pro-
gressive and conservative, or between queer and heteronormative, musical
genres. While contemporary Anglo-American scholarship on queer utopias
(e.g., Rosenberg and Villajero 2011) offers parallels to the theoretical moves
made in this chapter, the global dissemination of queer critique as the imag-
ined telos of sexual modernity risks erasing a variety of already e­xisting
local knowledges around social and sexual identities (see Shih 2002, 119).
The purpose here is neither to demonstrate that K-pop is a feminist or
queer genre nor to show that queer theories have a special monopoly on the
interpretation of K-pop not already available through existing scholarship.
I  want to argue instead that even if something queer is discovered in K-pop,
this queerness must be understood relative to the pleasures and limitations
of K-pop’s own synesthetic conventions rather than mobilized as a yardstick
by which K-pop could be measured.
The first part of this chapter provides an overview of K-pop as a trans-
national music phenomenon and surveys cultural approaches to K-pop vid-
eos. Focusing on the geographical imaginary of K-pop, the chapter then
suggests that the roaming non-places of K-pop privilege the motility of
performers over the places they haphazardly occupy. The remainder of the
chapter explores the politics of gender identity and sexuality within K-pop
videos. Following existing scholarship on K-pop performances, I discuss the
216  Timothy Laurie
ways music videos cultivate a desire for a relatively narrow spectrum of
gendered and raced bodies while making fidelity to such ideals impossible
for most viewers to achieve. Drawing on both music videos and responses
to f(x)’s Amber within fan communities, I argue that her androgyny drama-
tizes ­tensions already central to K-pop’s utopian imaginaries and fanfiction
cultures. By making schematic distinctions among players, spoilsports, and
cheats (Caillois 2001; Huizinga 1955), the final section argues that gen-
dered identity in K-pop can best be understood through consideration of
the specific moves available at any given moment in the reproduction of
genre-based codes.
In focusing on the critical challenges posed by genre specific performance
conventions, the concluding arguments of this chapter are indebted to Philip
Auslander’s commentary on glam, in which he emphasizes “the difference
between inhabiting an identity and playing a role” (Auslander 2006, 25;
emphasis in original). Glam produced a smorgasbord of quasi-cinematic
pseudonyms,1 impracticable clothing and staging, and melodramatic
spoken-­word narratives (especially in Alice Cooper). Many genres since
have played on inauthentic role-based personas: King Diamond in Danish
metal, Nicki Minaj in US hip hop, Elephant Man in Jamaican dancehall,
and Jolin Tsai in Taiwanese pop. By comparing three similarly theatrical
performances in K-pop—Lee Hyori, N.O.M, and f(x)—I argue that the key
distinction is not between authenticity and fabrication, but rather between
different kinds of relationships established between the rules of a game and
the desires of its players.

The Political Philosophy of K-Pop

Since the late 1990s, the success of K-pop artists has attracted unprecedented
global attention to East Asian music cultures. As the high point of K-pop’s
global circulation, Psy’s “Gangnam Style” (2012) remains YouTube’s most
successful video (as of 2015), with more than 2.1 billion views generating
US$8 million in its first year (see Leong 2014). Idols perform a multime-
dia branding function across South Korea’s explosive and export-oriented
media industry, dubbed the “Korean Wave” or hallyu since the late 1990s.
Recent figures suggest that Korean film, music, and television exports col-
lectively made US$4.6 billion in revenue in 2012, with hallyu assets total-
ing US$83.2 billion, and its music industry arm US$5.26 billion (see Hong
2014; Leong 2014). The success of hallyu has been attributed to national
branding driven by State subsidies, to media liberalization and globaliza-
tion, and to the global shift toward fan-driven participatory cultures, includ-
ing YouTube remix cultures (see Choi and Maliangkay 2015; Huang 2011;
I. Oh and Lee 2013; Shim 2006).
Given the synesthetic character of hallyu media economies, the musi-
cological ear can provide only partial insights into K-pop as a genre. The
K-pop cornucopia is overflowing with gifts from global hip hop, North
 Toward a Gendered Aesthetics of K-Pop  217
American smooth R&B, 1980s Hi-NRG and its cousins J-Pop dance ­culture,
1990s Cantonese pop idols (Cantopop), and mainland Chinese performers
­(Mandopop), as well as fashion elements reworked from mid-1960s Motown
and Japanese V-Kei (“visual style”). Nevertheless, while select albums and
mini-albums by K-pop groups have attracted critical acclaim for their musi-
cal daring (e.g., 2NE1’s Crush), long recording projects only follow after
promotions for the most capital-intensive object in the K-pop value chain:
the music video.2 K-pop videos are widely viewed on YouTube, Vimeo, and
M Countdown and circulate rapidly through social media technologies
like Kakao Story (South Korea), Sina Weibo (China), and Mixi (Japan).3
Furthermore, online and offline reception cultures for K-pop videos have
been analyzed in locations as diverse as Austria, France, Indonesia, ­Malaysia,
Romania, Taiwan, Thailand, and the United States.4 Some scholars have
explained the cultural appeal of K-pop’s videos by emphasizing either
national or regional cultural values. Focusing on South Korea, John Lie
argues that K-pop’s narratives appeal to “middle-class, urban and suburban
values that seek to be acceptable at once to college-aspiring youths and their
parents” (2012, 355), while Roald Maliangkay argues that K-pop’s “lack
of profanity and sex” befits “Confucian morals,” thus making it appealing
to fans in the East Asian region (2010, 6). Nevertheless, it is far from clear
whether the K-pop music video expresses a unified cultural sensibility: class-
based, national, or regional. First, the South Korean Ministry for Gender
Equality and Family censors many videos on the basis of sexual content and
drug use (see Bower 2012), complicating any simple equivocation between
K-pop supply and consumer demand. Second, the surge in regional popu-
larity for sexualized ultra-violence in South Korean blockbusters has been
contemporaneous with the rise of K-pop in East Asia.5 While sexual morality
may underpin the romantic clichés of the K-pop ballad (itself a withering
form), it does not explain the specific attraction of K-pop music videos rela-
tive to other media. Third, producers go to elaborate lengths to create K-pop
worlds independent of specific times, places, or conventional narrative forms.
In EXID’s dauntless “Up and Down,” the female quintet has no hesitation
in coupling run-of-the-mill lyrics (“Clearly show me your heart / Why don’t
u know / Up and down”) with flash cameos from an avocado, sliced drag-
onfruit, a barbie doll, severed tuna, poodle balloons, and the queen of clubs.
Rather than providing clear storylines within loaded moral frames, K-pop’s
semiotic stockpiling participates in a long history of non-narrative juxtapo-
sitions used in music videos to produce pleasure and fascination.
Continuities between K-pop videos are produced less through recur-
ring narratives than through high-concept mise-en-scene linked to the idol
group’s most reliable weapon: namely, a fierce ensemble executing upbeat
choreography. The Korean Gaon Charts remain dominated by ensemble
performers (e.g., EXO, EXID, Miss A, Infinite, 4Minute) and only lightly
sprinkled by soloists, and K-pop’s most popular songs—Super Junior’s
“Sorry Sorry,” EXO’s “Growl,” 2PM’s “Again and Again,” After School’s
218  Timothy Laurie
“First Love,” and Psy’s “Gangnam Style”—pulse with bodies carving up
the screen in topological formations. Any exhaustive account of its dance
aesthetics would require holistic engagement with the catalogues of its core
choreographers, many of whom work in South Korea, Japan, and the United
States.6 Although such work is beyond the scope of this chapter, I want to
suggest that K-pop dance performs important structural functions within
the broader synesthetics of the genre.
K-pop dance provides a way of occupying and of turning real places (if
only temporarily) into pure imaginary spaces. In keeping with a common
feature of music video performances since the birth of MTV, K-pop space
triumphs over place. Camera shots are frequently cut midway through a
gesture, only to be completed by the same idol formation in another locality.
In addition to showcasing idols’ enviable wardrobes, these cuts reveal the
absolute disposability of place. Gestures are perfectly executed relative to
other performers but with little regard for the irregularities of physical envi-
ronments. From the Wild West (Super Junior’s “Mamacita”) to the interiors
of domestic cleaning (Orange Caramel’s “Gangnam Avenue”) to a mental
health asylum (Co-Ed School’s “Bbiribbom Bberibbom”), dancers remain
fixed to flat, vacated surfaces, while site-specific storylines rarely intervene
in the energetic utopias of collective movement.
The synchronized performance conventions of K-pop music videos
smooth out social and spatial differences: K-pop promises a community
uninterrupted. Understood in the terms of political philosophy, the K-pop
dance encourages viewers “to see persons in unity with one another in a
shared whole,” to repress “the ontological difference of subjects,” and to dis-
solve social heterogeneity “into the comfort of a self-enclosed whole” (Young
1990, 229, 230). Idol worlds overlook the ruptures of social ­prohibition
or the traumas of community formation. Counterexamples could include
a subcycle of videos that foreground conflicts between insiders and outsid-
ers, but these mostly involve men fighting over a shared love interest and
inevitably employ symbiotic dance sequences to reaffirm wholeness among
group members.7
In the midst of K-pop’s communitarian utopias, at least three clear
parameters are placed around the bodies of performing idols. First, K-pop
performers appear unable to age. Most budding groups fall by the wayside,
leaving a reserve army of idols in their wake: the names A-Peace, April Kiss,
New F.O, CHAOS, and Six Bomb should strike fear into the hearts of aspir-
ing idols. Horror film White: Curse of the Melody plays on a chilling conflict
between the concept of a virtual K-pop performance—infinitely repeatable,
unendingly pleasurable, rational in its execution—and the extended pur-
gatory of many K-pop idols, who feel the envy of fading generations and
the creeping threat of adolescent hopefuls. The privileging of eternal youth
also discourages collective memory building around past performers or the
early development of the genre, so that, with the exception of trot revivalists
Super Junior-T, self-conscious citations of earlier K-pop artists are rare.
 Toward a Gendered Aesthetics of K-Pop  219
Second, K-pop enforces a subtle code of racial belonging that places
uneven burdens on performers relative to their (perceived) skin tone. K-pop
videos are directly oriented to transnational markets, and Chuyun Oh
argues that, in order to “pass” as beautiful in transnational markets, idols
are often surgically modified to have noses “much higher than the aver-
age Korean female” and to have sharp facial features bigger than “average”
Korean faces (2014, 64). Somewhat paradoxically, South Korea’s rapidly
expanding plastic surgery industry has emphasized the uniqueness of the
Korean face, where natural-looking surgeries are “defined as enhancing
Korean features” (Holliday and Elfving-Hwang 2012, 62). A recent excep-
tion proves the rule. Cube Entertainment’s CLC includes female performer
Sorn (Chonnasorn Sajakul), who was the Thai winner for the first season
of K-Pop Star Hunt (2011). In CLC’s debut “Pepe,” Sorn resembles the age,
complexion, and body shape of her four Korean peers, but her nose is rela-
tively less three-dimensional. Read as a minoritized image within a relatively
homogenized genre, Sorn’s face promises a more diverse K-pop, as Sorn her-
self suggests in interview (Hype Malaysia 2012). At the same time, for the
CLC member to be read as a symbol of cultural diversity, one must already
believe in the physiognomic homogeneity of the Korean population. K-pop
displaces diversity onto its adjacent regional markets: flatter noses become
coded as Thai and thus not-Korean. This has direct implications for the
imagined social and cultural geographies of K-pop, especially when idols’
three-dimensional noses are exported into non-Korean markets as evidence
of Korean ethnic particularity.
Third, K-pop’s idol communities are fundamentally homosocial. In a
genre that creates ample space for the absurd in “Hot Summer,” “Red,” and
“Up and Down,” one can only be disappointed by defunct mixed gender
K-pop groups like Sunny Hill, Co-Ed School, and F1RST. After a series of
costly false starts, each of these groups has been forced to disaggregate into
homosocial units. As a marketing device, the split between girl groups and
boy groups has been central to K-pop’s global circulation: K-pop cover
dance competitions throughout East and South-East Asia draw heavily
on homosocial codes, even if radically reworking them (e.g., Käng 2014).
However, male idols and female idols experience the gendering of K-pop
quite differently. K-pop netizens (“citizens of the net”) are now overly
familiar with news articles on female idols’ weight losses and gains, the
extensive network of K-pop dieting blogs,8 and the protracted comment
threads on music videos that linger on fragmented features—arms, breasts,
torsos, thighs, and legs. Groups like Girls’ Generation experience strong
pressures to maintain desired body sizes and muscle tones,9 and instances of
shaming—say, T-ara’s coarse juxtaposition between “larger” and “smaller”
women in “Little Apple”—bring into sharp relief the costs of failing to meet
gendered bodily norms (see C. Oh 2014, 61).
The social imperatives of K-pop’s utopian performances could be fl ­ ashing
in neon signs: lose weight, look beautiful, buy this. Let’s agree that K-pop music
220  Timothy Laurie
videos enforce heterosexuality, youth, slimness, ­affluence, and ­phenotypical
uniformity. Idols’ four-minute ecstatic bursts make few attempts to establish
genuine connections to everyday life, but, precisely through such utopia-
nism, K-pop’s community is openly (rather than secretly) out of reach. For
example, while the jubilant, fresh-faced sextet Boyfriend may be presented
as ideal Korean men, nobody is required to believe that Korean adolescents
normally hang out in newly constructed white palaces (“Be My Shine”) or
in playrooms where the walls change to match boys’ outfits (“Dance Dance
Dance,” “My Avatar”). Put another way, if being heterosexual looks like girl
groups 2NE1 or Girls’ Generation, then to be heterosexual is to perform a
superhuman feat reserved for elites with personal trainers.
The propulsive fantasies of K-pop produce a gulf between onscreen hero-
ics and the tangible life of any-viewer-whatsoever. In 2NE1’s “Come Back
Home,” for example, individual heartbreak is resolved when 2NE1 enter
an action-packed science-fiction world that has also become the core con-
cept for boy group Infinite. Despite the tedious heterosexual framing, the
male love interest becomes a petty vehicle for the more important project
of providing 2NE1 with cyber lasers and better shoes. These fantasies are
peculiarly productive for online fanfiction cultures, because writers can both
build on and depart from the rich semiotic worlds that high-concept videos
offer. The K-pop video is prehensive. In the dramatization of glossy objects,
persons, and spaces—the pink tank, EXID’s avocados—it anticipates a flut-
ter of stories to come. This provides opportunities for social realism as a
creative counterpoint and on websites like AsianFanFics10 K-pop fanfiction
supplies details about idols that recast them as ordinary, accessible, and
flawed (see Yang and Bao 2012). Examples include the extended dialogue
found in “How to Pet,” a flirtatious exchange between EXO-M idol Luhan
and his “cat” Jongdae (another male K-pop idol),11 and the sustained inti-
macies between men in the 58,792-word melodrama “Retrograde,” which
spans seven years in the lives of young idols during high school.12 Such
playful intertexts do not absolve K-pop from its complicity in naturalizing
certain young athletic idols as transcendental symbols of the Good Life.
They do, however, modify the scope of the kinds of political work that a
queer, feminist, or anti-racist K-pop video might do. In the final sections of
this chapter, I want to focus on readings of “androgyny” in K-pop as one
way to think through the political scope of the genre’s most archetypical
video forms.

The Androgynous Male Idol

Androgyny is a prickly term. While discussion of androgyny invites interest
in bodies that do not read easily as masculine or feminine, it also assumes
generalizable criteria for distinguishing between the normative and the
non-normative on an imagined spectrum of possible gender identities.13 Once
the fixity of gender itself is questioned, the stability of both ­androgynous
 Toward a Gendered Aesthetics of K-Pop  221
and non-androgynous identities must also be interrogated, and for this
purpose the notion of performativity has long proven useful. For Judith
Butler (1997), performative utterances do not index actions happening else-
where but themselves constitute the actions uttered. Spoken-word exam-
ples include “I promise” or “I apologize,” but the notion of performativity
has acquired currency well beyond linguistics, and performativity can be
used to explain both acts of self-definition (e.g., “I’m gay”) and (sometimes
unwanted) appellations from others (e.g., “Luhan is gay”). The corollary to
Butler’s formulation of performativity is that enunciations are collective and
citational: performatives only make sense relative to other known performa-
tives. In K-pop, conventions of group choreography—the slick movement of
a leg, thrusting hips, crouching, and sliding—cite g­ endered stylizations from
other K-pop performances, but only insofar as the mandatory containers
of boy group and girl group continue to sustain the citational economy.
Viewers are primed to see “femininity” in girl group videos as established
with reference to other girl group videos and to boy groups as belonging to
a separate masculine economy.
Androgyny—or rather, the perception of androgyny—has long been of
interest to scholars of gender and music. Here again, Philip ­Auslander’s
commentary on glam rock provides a valuable reference point. In glam,
gender-based clichés allowed heterosexuality’s organizing terms of
­
reference—men and women, dominance and submission, desiring and
­
desired—to be toyed with, overplayed, and exhausted: “Bowie threw the
sexuality of rock into question, not only by performing a sexual identity
previously excluded from rock but also by performing that identity in such
a way that it was clearly revealed as a performance for which there was no
underlying referent” (Auslander 2006, 135; emphasis in original). Neverthe-
less, the sudden visibility of male androgyny did not necessarily create visi-
ble new roles or spaces for women, even if women did attend glam concerts
and contribute significantly to its fan cultures. Auslander observes that glam
rock “was almost completely dominated by men and took the performance
of ­masculinity as its terrain” (229). Discourse on androgynous masculini-
ties must be able to interrogate which kinds of masculinity are being trans-
gressed, which versions of femininity are made available for re-signification,
and which audience members are being interpellated when new musical
personae are produced.
Most commentaries on gender and sexuality in K-pop focus on male
idols’ androgynous presentations.14 Men with “soft” or “delicate” features,
commonly referred to as a kkonminam (“flower man”), have been central
to the visual branding of K-pop and to Korean hallyu more generally. The
dissemination of new images of male bodies creates space for a vibrant aes-
thetic imaginary around male fashions, friendships, and intimacies, and the
heightened visibility of the kkonminam in superstar groups like BigBang,
BTS, Infinite, SHINee, and Super Junior also has particular resonances in a
Korean context (see S. Jung 2010). Compulsory military service has installed
222  Timothy Laurie
the “brutish tough guy image” as a social archetype, one that ­continues to
“affect how many men express their feelings and deal with issues of conflict
or stress” (Maliangkay 2010, 7). Fan communities dedicated to kkonminam
also thrive through slash fanfiction and same-sex “shipping,” in which idols
are reimagined in same-sex relationships (hence ship-ping), and through
more casual commentaries on “skinship,” where physical contact between
(mostly same-sex) idols is tracked as a subterranean sexual economy. These
novel empiricisms provide ways to synthesize signals within so-called
“straight” K-pop performances that might otherwise be considered noise.
Changing male beauty cultures and queer fanfiction writings does not, of
course, automatically generate unfettered spaces for sexual diversity within
the K-pop industry itself. There are few openly gay male K-pop performers,
and politically oriented activisms around gay and lesbian issues in South
Korea continue to be blocked by powerful Christian lobbies, themselves
linked to media outlets like newspapers and television (Chase 2012, 53).
But the issue is not that K-pop refuses to include coming-out narratives;
after all, these still depend on the assumption that idols are straight unless
proven otherwise. Rather, Lee Ji-Eun notes that in the South Korean context
“reading and writing fanfic can lead girls to think of homosexuality as just a
sort of sexual taste one can sample freely” (2007, 61), with some girls saying
that “they can understand homosexuality in fanfic but dislike it in reality”
(63). A Beyond Hallyu blogger shares Lee’s concerns: “My biggest concern
with same-sex shipping is that when a young girl decides to ship Yoonjae or
Hunhan she could be trivialising queer identities and not making any attempt
to understand what it means for two men to be in love with each other.
In fact, I’m finding it very hard to find much genuine gay male representation
in amongst the overwhelming mass of girls posting about their biases for
gay sex” (Beyond Hallyu 2013). As noted in Auslander’s commentary on
glam, the performative politics of male androgyny, including its disruption
of “brutish” masculine codes, may not produce any significant overhaul of
gender-based social relations. If girl groups continue to be segregated from
boy groups, and if heterosexuality continues to operate as the code through
which androgyny is deciphered, then the redistribution of gendered signi-
fiers around the male body cannot easily be extrapolated to support any
broader claims about a transformative sexual politics in K-pop.
Political ambivalences within the discourse on androgynous masculinity
can be strongly felt in Chuyun Oh’s important interventions around gender
in K-pop. Oh criticizes Girls’ Generation for “chaste maiden-like images”
designed “to express fragile and passive femininity” (2014, 53), noting that
these participate in “a fantasy that successfully fits the patriarchal desire
where women take subordinated positions” (61). Drawing on the psychoan-
alytic framework of the “male gaze,” she suggests that “Girls’ Generation’s
increased visibility empowers the male audience by sexualising themselves
as cheerleaders do and reinforces female objectification by ­self-internalizing
the patriarchal notion of ‘being-at-look-at-ness’” (57). However, in a later
 Toward a Gendered Aesthetics of K-Pop  223
piece that considers male K-pop idols in the context of international
­fandoms, Oh’s evaluative tone shifts:

The young-looking bodies with their sensual motions offer a

non-­
­ normative masculinity compared to the image of the mature
breadwinner type of normative white masculinity. The androgynous,
young-looking male body in K-Pop gives female audiences visual sat-
isfaction … The female fans are empowered, overjoyed and visually
satisfied by watching pretty boys who willingly dance and exhibit their
youthful bodies for the audience. (2015, 72)

Taken together, these contrasting interpretations produce a strange effect. By

converging toward a common ideal of elegance and emotional vulnerability,
male idols are cast as dramatic improvements on their forebears. At the same
time, elegant and vulnerable female idols are criticized for c­ onforming to
gendered social expectations. Furthermore, women are considered political
liabilities when their bodies are read as “sexual,” while images of “chaste”
women are believed to support “the patriarchal ideology that says a woman
should be a good wife and a wise mother” (C. Oh 2014, 59). K-pop girl
groups thus are positioned between the twin dangers of promiscuity and
chastity: in whichever direction they move, Girls’ Generation can be found
guilty of false consciousness.
Oh takes care to distinguish between Korean fandoms, international
­fandoms, and specific cases where female fans are reading men’s bodies (see
especially C. Oh 2014, 68). Nevertheless, the analyses taken together raise
serious questions about the positioning of women vis-à-vis the celebratory
discourse around the kkonminam idol. Is there an expectation that women
who appear more masculine will emancipate male or female viewers? Can
female androgyny in K-pop still be sexualized, and, if so, to what end? In
the final section of this chapter, I want to draw attention to one relatively
unique idol who provides an instructive case study for working through
these asymmetrical gender relations.

Players, Spoilsports, Cheats: The Case of Amber Liu

Amber from f(x) has become an important reference point for c­ onversations
about female androgyny in K-pop. Amber is a (presumed) cis-woman with
a short and sometimes scruffy haircut. She casually wears button-up shirts,
sports caps, and hip hop attire and is rarely seen in dresses, skirts, or heels.
Amber’s appearance received netizen attention on f(x)’s “Electric Shock,”
“Chu,” and “Hot Summer” videos but only provided short raps. S.M.
Entertainment has since increased Amber’s visibility, responding in part to
Amber’s strong social media following and the coining of such neologisms
as “Amberlicious” (that is, to be as impressive or amazing as Amber).15 Out-
side of f(x), Amber has now pursued rap collaborations on others’ tracks
224  Timothy Laurie
and has released a solo video, “Shake That Brass,” which includes cameos
from an array of other idols.
The fact of Amber’s visibility in f(x) is a notable development within Korean
popular culture. Young women who do not identify as heterosexual but who
may not adopt an unambiguously homosexual identity have remained rela-
tively invisible across K-pop, Korean film, and Korean television. Neverthe-
less, Amber can be aligned with an existing identity for women “with loose-fit
clothes and boyish fashion,” who in South Korea are sometimes called iban
(Lee 2007, 49). Lee notes that, while online forums have shaped the devel-
opment of iban communities, suspicion is sometimes directed toward those
women who embrace “fanfic iban,” or fanfiction describing homosexual
encounters between male idols. The assumption is that “some girls are not
‘real’ iban because fanfic iban is supposed to be one who just follows the
fashion depicted in fanfic as a fan of a male idol star” (51). Figurations of
iban identities are shaped by concerns that an already precarious social iden-
tity will be eroded through the confusion between queer play (doing) and
queer identification (being). Lee is critical of a popular discourse, sometimes
shared by advocates for gay, homosexual, and iban youth, that “a person’s
sexual identity can be affirmed and respected only if it is serious, not frivo-
lous, and only when it is a matter of lifetime, not just fleeting fashion” (49),
noting that, when youths do seek alternatives to heterosexual coupledom,
“ambiguous desires disappear … and sexuality is abstracted to identity, pain,
and human rights” (55). Challenging this discourse, Lee argues that there is
“no moment at which one discovers an iban identity. Rather, iban identity is
a sort of knowledge that opens up a space for interpretation of ambiguous
feelings, and lets a girl retro-experience and reorganize her life” (66; emphasis
in original). In this context, Amber’s style and persona in f(x) already promise
the kinds of questioning and interrogation of gender that Lee identifies with
more “open” spaces for interpretation around iban knowledge.
However, while Amber offers a new fashion-based semiotic code that
aligns with Lee’s own examples, it is not always decoded by fans in terms of
an iban identity. Amber’s success invites comparisons with Li Yuchun, the
tomboyish winner of China’s Super Girl in 2006, who is characterized by
Haiqing Yu and Audrey Yue as a “pan-Asian stereotype” of “cool” androgyny
(2008, 126). Despite deviating from certain norms around femininity, Amber
continues to function as one among five ideal types of femininity placed on
offer by f(x). This capacity to promote new gender ideals, while framing
them as non-normative in relation to the leader of a K-pop group (in this
case, Victoria), has raised concerns among some K-pop netizens: “I   hon-
estly believe that SM is just boxing [Amber] into a certain image, and using
it as a gimmick. She’s the ‘tomboy’ member. F(x) is ‘that group with the tom-
boy.’ That’s how we initially remember them” (Allkpop 2014). To provide a
further point of contrast, many K-pop idols who present less androgynous
identities than Amber have offered far more intriguing ­commentaries on
sexual politics. For example, Ga In explores threads of coercive i­ntimacies
 Toward a Gendered Aesthetics of K-Pop  225
and domestic violence in “Fxxk You,” while male ­patriarchal norms are
satirized throughout Miss A’s “I Don’t Need A Man” and Wonder Girls’
“Irony,” “Tell Me,” and “Nobody.” By contrast, f(x) has no controversial
threads to explore or men to satirize. S.M. Entertainment appears more than
willing to promote Amber’s coolness while remaining unadventurous in the
conceptual construction of f(x) as a whole.
Given these widely divergent readings of Amber, what critical tools are
available for negotiating these perspectives on female androgyny within
K-pop? I want to suggest that a comparison among three different kinds of
“gender queer” videos can allow us to better place Amber within the K-pop
genre as a whole. As it happens, each of these videos corresponds to ways
of playing a game.
A solo artist who broke away from successful girl group Fin.K.L, Lee
Hyori became one of South Korea’s most successful female singers and
in 2013 released a video called “Going Crazy” (fig. 15.2). Here she dons
male clothing and a moustache in order to seduce women (all contestants
from Korea’s Next Top Model 4) and in doing so pokes fun at narcissistic
and flirtatious men. “Going Crazy” is a make-believe video, and it is
clear that Hyori is pretending to be a man using tongue-in-cheek humor.
Hyori leaves intact the viewer’s expectations around gender and sexuality in
K-pop, and—like the Girls’ Generation’s brief adoption of suits and pants
for “Mr. Mr.”—Hyori knows how to manipulate gender expectations to
produce surprise, humor, and light social commentary. Like Alice Cooper’s
shock-rock theatrics, the difference is clearly maintained between inhabiting
an ­identity and playing a role (see Auslander 2006, 25). This kind of per-
former is ­simply an ordinary player.

Figure 15.2  Screen shot from the “Going Crazy” video (2013).
226  Timothy Laurie
An entirely different creature, N.O.M’s “A Guys” is an electronic dance
music (EDM) inspired K-pop romp that flickers among chapped male mus-
culature, studded leathermen in a sordid basement, and a woman who is
probably a witch. Pulsing beats mediate the delirious footage with half-­
whispered lyrics (“Girls Girls Girls Girls / I want you Sexy voice / I See
your body figure / I like your nice legs”) and a truncated chorus (“girls
ma baby  / girls ma baby / girls ma baby / girls girls-girls”). The video
was openly discussed as being “gay” K-pop (e.g., Smith 2013), but N.O.M
does not present any romantic or sexual relationships between men. Rather,
“A Guys” disaggregates and fractures the homosocial unit so essential to
the K-pop group formation. In the place of a geometric diagram of parallel
bodies, “A Guys” offers what Erin Brannigan calls “microgeographies,”
otherwise described as “a cine-choreographic order characterised by micro-­
movements or small impulsions, dancerly motility across and through a
variety of surfaces, movement consisting of related parts that form a
choreographic whole across equal and indeterminate sites” (2011, 61). To the
fraternal fantasy that founds the “togetherness” of the boy group, “A Guys”
opposes a mess of grit, shadow, and flesh.
N.O.M is a spoilsport. In resisting the elementary distinctions that mark
the “game-play” spaces, the spoilsport, Johan Huizinga suggests, “reveals
the relativity and fragility of the play-world in which he [sic] had tempo-
rarily shut himself with others” (1955 [1938], 11). For Roger Caillois, the
spoilsport is represented by the nihilist, “who denounces the rules as absurd
and conventional, who refuses to play because the game is meaningless,”
and who “robs play of its illusion” (2001 [1958], 7; emphasis in original).
The spoilsport does not break rules but rather draws attention to the arbi-
trary and unexplained character of the rules themselves. “A Guys” thrives
on N.O.M’s restlessness with the banal homosociality of the K-pop dance
video, although not to much acclaim—after a second video and potted suc-
cesses, the group disbanded altogether.
Our third player is Amber. Her persona is brought into being through
constraints peculiar to the synchronized girl group formation, but she
knows that the rules can be bent. Amber is simultaneously able to con-
form to de jure expectations of compulsory homosociality while activating
de facto practices of gender play that make the tomboy icon more “cool”
than either masculine men or feminine women. The person who appears
to play by the rules but succeeds by making moves that are prohibited
within the system as a whole is labeled (in a nonpejorative way) as a cheat.
“If the cheat violates the rules,” suggests Caillois, “he [sic] at least pretends
to respect them. He does not discuss them: he takes advantage of the other
players’ loyalty to the rules” (2001 [1958], 7). Within the coordinates of a
gender-segregated idol universe, Amber achieves what the mixed gendered
K-pop groups could not: namely, a genuinely ambivalent interplay between
masculine and feminine signifiers rather than a proliferation of oppositions
between them.
 Toward a Gendered Aesthetics of K-Pop  227
The spoilsport is not superior to the cheat, and the cheat is not superior
to the ordinary player. Each wrestles, in his or her own way, with the arbi-
trary construction of the game itself. For Huizinga, the spoilsport is not the
same as the cheat, “for the latter pretends to be playing the game and, on the
face of it, still acknowledges the magic circle” (1955 [1938], 11). The cheat
understands the constitutive power of the “performative” act. Any move
in a game contains some agency (other moves were always possible) and
repeats a pre-given structure (the game precedes the player). Amber is only
androgynous for audiences accustomed to locating masculinity and feminin-
ity on a spectrum of natural kinds, and so even the “androgynous” move is a
way of participating in the game of homosociality. From the audience’s per-
spective, though, the constraints placed upon the cheat can be wellsprings
for the imagination (“if only they were allowed, they could …”). As a figure
of speculative possibility constrained by the rules of the girl group, Amber’s
androgyny poses two questions about her own identity: “Is she playing at
being a boy?” and “Is she playing at being a K-pop idol?” Neither question
is posed by Hyori because her androgyny is clearly “make believe.” Compul-
sory homosociality within the game-space of group dance gives free rein to
speculation from the audience, and this could be one reason solo artist Lee
Hyori is mentioned in only a single story on fanfiction.net and 62 on asian-
fanfics.com, compared with 4,587 and 2,381 stories (respectively) about
f(x)’s Amber.

Conclusion
This chapter began with a mobile armoured tank that does not go anywhere.
“Hot Summer” offers only thermodynamic movement: everyone finishes
exactly where he or she started but just a little hotter. In K-pop music videos
familiar symbols and gestures are constantly bent, stretched, and twisted out
of shape, but the basic properties and divisions of its spaces are preserved.
This is the shared fate of glam rock’s theatrical performances and K-pop’s
ensemble dances. I suggested earlier that glam’s experimentations occupied
spaces within which women’s participation continued to be undervalued.
While promising a more expansive terrain of gender re-signification, K-pop
nevertheless incorporates gender segregation as a principle of spatial order.
The audience is whisked away on flights of the imagination, but performers
are constrained relative to each other, inasmuch as the success of a drama-
turgical piece corresponds (at least in part) to the obedience of its players.
Although K-pop accommodates excesses of significationf(x)’s tank, EXID’s
severed tunathese gain access to the dance space only after these desired
utopias have been expertly extracted from everyday life.
By detaching themselves from any particular places, K-pop cannot take
us from here to there. In EXO’s “Call Me Baby,” for example, the differ-
ence between Korean-language (EXO-K) and Chinese-language (EXO-M)
versions of the group is unmarked by place. We see the same underground
228  Timothy Laurie
carpark, the same car and clothing brands, the same tracking shots, and,
most importantly, we see an exact symmetry between six elegant male dancers
singing in Mandarin and six elegant male dancers singing in Korean. These
youthful and androgynous bodieslike the bodies of Amber from f(x) and
Rokhyun from 100%seem to promise novel gendered identities that could
enrich already mobile East Asian queer identity formations (see Yue 2011,
135–36). At the same time, this mobility can be read within “the popular imag-
inings of the working of finance capital and mass investment culture” that
Kim Soyoung identifies with South Korean “blockbuster culture” (2003, 12).
­It is difficult to know whether the cosmopolitan embrace of spaceless utopias
provides generous openings for new social identities or simply an opportunis-
tic way of harvesting the signifiers of cultural difference without substantive
variations in the identities or experiences addressed by the genre.
K-pop is unlikely to produce music videos devoid of the idealized
images of youth, gender, race, and sexuality that stitch together the genre
as a whole. In presenting a genre-based analysis, however, I hope to have
shown that critical readings must engage with K-pop’s own internal fictions
and that these cannot be reduced to real or unreal social representations.
By distinguishing among players, spoil-sports, and cheats, I have tried to
foreground the difficulties of challenging gender binaries and sexual norms
within a genre that prescribes compulsory homosociality as a condition of
its commercial viability. While Amber Liu does not depart significantly from
K-pop’s ideals of physical beauty, her position as a “cheat” does enable her
to capture registers of popular excitement and unease around the articula-
tion of homosocial performance, gender presentation, and sexual orienta-
tion. Like the pink tank in “Hot Summer,” Amber comes into being by way
of an answered existential query, “What am I doing here?”; sometimes even
this question is enough to make the rules of the game feel less reliable.

Notes
Many thanks to Jessica Kean, Jane Park, Sarah Richardson, and Kathryn Yan for
their insightful feedback on this chapter and for accommodating many informal
discussions of new K-pop releases and controversies.
1. These include David Jones’s “David Bowie,” Mark Feld’s “Marc Bolan,” and
Paul Gadd’s “Gary Glitter,” as well as adopted names in KISS, Alice Cooper, and
Sha Na Na.
2. T-ara’s extended drama “Cry Cry” was famously 1 billion KRW (US$ 926,360),
but even dance tracks like Kara’s “Step” and 4Minute’s “Volume Up” cost over
100 million KRW (MTV Iggy 2014).
3. Major hits by Girls’ Generation (“Gee,” “I Got A Boy,” “The Boys,” “Oh!,”
“Run Devil Run”) and Hyuna (“Bubble Pop,” “Ice Cream”) regularly exceed
100 million YouTube views. On the latter, see Shim and Noh (2012, 127). Such
figures are merely indicative and do not account for repeated viewings, alterna-
tive viewing platforms, unequal access to high-speed Internet, collective viewing
practices, or filesharing.
 Toward a Gendered Aesthetics of K-Pop  229
4. See Cha and Kim (2011), Huang (2011), Jung and Shim (2013), Käng (2014),
Khoo (2015), Marinescu and Balica (2013), C. Oh (2015), and Sung (2014).
5. See, for example, Bedevilled, I Saw the Devil, The Chaser, and Sympathy for
Mr. Vengeance.
6. See, for example, Shaun Evaristo (BigBang, 2NE1), Michael Kim (SHINee,
BoA, Super Junior, TVXQ!), Kevin Maher (Girls’ Generation, f(x), Nicki Minaj,
Britney Spears), Rino Nakasone (SHINee, Girls’ Generation, Super Junior, f(x),
TVXQ!), and Tony Testa (SHINee, TVXQ!, Britney Spears, Kylie Minogue).
7. These include Bigbang’s “Haru Haru,” DMTN’s “Safety Zone,” HuH Gak’s
“Hello,” and 2am’s “I Was Wrong.”
8. These include kpopbodies.tumblr.com, kpopthin.weebly.com, kpopweightloss-
blog.tumblr.com, kpop-slimdown.tumblr.com, and kpophealth.tumblr.com.
9. On SBS’s “Star’s Starkly,” the male “body designer” for (now ex-)Girls’ Gener-
ation member Jessica Jung is described as “artistic,” and, with reference to her
famed legs, Jung suggests that “everyone can get this” with “enough exercise.”
10. http://www.asianfanfics.com.
11. Available at http://drainbamage954.livejournal.com/55045.html.
12. Available at http://archiveofourown.org/works/1264807.
13. I have discussed this issue elsewhere, in Laurie (2014).
14. See, for example, Anderson (2013), E. Jung (2010), Maliangkay (2010), Oh
(2014), and Sinnott (2012).
15. See, for example, http://amberlicious.forumotions.net or << #amberlicious >>
on Twitter.

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