2016 Toward a Gendered Aesthetics of K-Pop

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 ive women saunter into view. Propped up like plastic toys are an old-fashioned telephone booth, two modiied 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 gestural 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 superluous objects, and these produce dificulties for those looking for a clear politics of identiication 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) (ig. 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 identiication with these performers (or “idols”). “Hot Summer” does not promise idelity 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 distinct syntheses of sound and image to produce a utopian and communitarian aesthetic, and its sexual politics develop in relation to these genre conventions. While the selection of K-pop idols is limited by normative expectations around age, gender, and racial physiognomy, this chapter argues that critical 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 progressive 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 imagined 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 irst part of this chapter provides an overview of K-pop as a transnational music phenomenon and surveys cultural approaches to K-pop videos. 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 idelity 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 dramatizes tensions already central to K-pop’s utopian imaginaries and faniction cultures. By making schematic distinctions among players, spoilsports, and cheats (Caillois 2001; Huizinga 1955), the inal section argues that gendered identity in K-pop can best be understood through consideration of the speciic moves available at any given moment in the reproduction of genre-based codes. In focusing on the critical challenges posed by genre speciic 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 irst year (see Leong 2014). Idols perform a multimedia branding function across South Korea’s explosive and export-oriented media industry, dubbed the “Korean Wave” or hallyu since the late 1990s. Recent igures suggest that Korean ilm, music, and television exports collectively made US$4.6 billion in revenue in 2012, with hallyu assets totaling 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 globalization, and to the global shift toward fan-driven participatory cultures, including 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 musicological ear can provide only partial insights into K-pop as a genre. The K-pop cornucopia is overlowing 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 musical 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 ofline 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” beits “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 uniied cultural sensibility: classbased, 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 popularity 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 speciic attraction of K-pop music videos relative to other media. Third, producers go to elaborate lengths to create K-pop worlds independent of speciic 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 lash cameos from an avocado, sliced dragonfruit, 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 juxtapositions used in music videos to produce pleasure and fascination. Continuities between K-pop videos are produced less through recurring narratives than through high-concept mise-en-scene linked to the idol group’s most reliable weapon: namely, a ierce ensemble executing upbeat choreography. The Korean Gaon Charts remain dominated by ensemble performers (e.g., EXO, EXID, Miss A, Ininite, 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 environments. 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 ixed to lat, vacated surfaces, while site-speciic 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 dissolve 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 conlicts between insiders and outsiders, but these mostly involve men ighting over a shared love interest and inevitably employ symbiotic dance sequences to reafirm 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 aspiring idols. Horror ilm White: Curse of the Melody plays on a chilling conlict between the concept of a virtual K-pop performance—ininitely repeatable, unendingly pleasurable, rational in its execution—and the extended purgatory 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 modiied to have noses “much higher than the average 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 “deined as enhancing Korean features” (Holliday and Elfving-Hwang 2012, 62). A recent exception proves the rule. Cube Entertainment’s CLC includes female performer Sorn (Chonnasorn Sajakul), who was the Thai winner for the irst 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 relatively less three-dimensional. Read as a minoritized image within a relatively homogenized genre, Sorn’s face promises a more diverse K-pop, as Sorn herself 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: latter 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 lashing in neon signs: lose weight, look beautiful, buy this. Let’s agree that K-pop music 220 Timothy Laurie videos enforce heterosexuality, youth, slimness, afluence, and phenotypical uniformity. Idols’ four-minute ecstatic bursts make few attempts to establish genuine connections to everyday life, but, precisely through such utopianism, 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’ outits (“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 heroics 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-iction world that has also become the core concept for boy group Ininite. 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 faniction 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 lutter of stories to come. This provides opportunities for social realism as a creative counterpoint and on websites like AsianFanFics10 K-pop faniction supplies details about idols that recast them as ordinary, accessible, and lawed (see Yang and Bao 2012). Examples include the extended dialogue found in “How to Pet,” a lirtatious exchange between EXO-M idol Luhan and his “cat” Jongdae (another male K-pop idol),11 and the sustained intimacies 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 inal 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 ixity 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 elsewhere but themselves constitute the actions uttered. Spoken-word examples 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-deinition (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 performatives. In K-pop, conventions of group choreography—the slick movement of a leg, thrusting hips, crouching, and sliding—cite gendered 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). Nevertheless, the sudden visibility of male androgyny did not necessarily create visible new roles or spaces for women, even if women did attend glam concerts and contribute signiicantly 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 masculinities must be able to interrogate which kinds of masculinity are being transgressed, which versions of femininity are made available for re-signiication, 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 (“lower 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 aesthetic imaginary around male fashions, friendships, and intimacies, and the heightened visibility of the kkonminam in superstar groups like BigBang, BTS, Ininite, 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 conlict or stress” (Maliangkay 2010, 7). Fan communities dedicated to kkonminam also thrive through slash faniction 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 faniction 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 fanic 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 fanic 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 inding it very hard to ind 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 signiicant 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 signiiers 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 its the patriarchal desire where women take subordinated positions” (61). Drawing on the psychoanalytic 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 objectiication 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 satisfaction … The female fans are empowered, overjoyed and visually satisied 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 conforming 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 speciic 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 inal 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 conversations 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 Outside 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 relatively invisible across K-pop, Korean ilm, and Korean television. Nevertheless, Amber can be aligned with an existing identity for women “with loose-it clothes and boyish fashion,” who in South Korea are sometimes called iban (Lee 2007, 49). Lee notes that, while online forums have shaped the development of iban communities, suspicion is sometimes directed toward those women who embrace “fanic iban,” or faniction describing homosexual encounters between male idols. The assumption is that “some girls are not ‘real’ iban because fanic iban is supposed to be one who just follows the fashion depicted in fanic as a fan of a male idol star” (51). Figurations of iban identities are shaped by concerns that an already precarious social identity will be eroded through the confusion between queer play (doing) and queer identiication (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 afirmed and respected only if it is serious, not frivolous, and only when it is a matter of lifetime, not just leeting 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 identiies 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 ive 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 honestly 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 tomboy.’ 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” (ig. 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 lirtatious 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 performer 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 lickers among chapped male musculature, studded leathermen in a sordid basement, and a woman who is probably a witch. Pulsing beats mediate the delirious footage with halfwhispered lyrics (“Girls Girls Girls Girls / I want you Sexy voice / I See your body igure / 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 micromovements 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 lesh. 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 temporarily 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 arbitrary 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 successes, 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 conform 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 signiiers 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 arbitrary 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 femininity 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 perspective, though, the constraints placed upon the cheat can be wellsprings for the imagination (“if only they were allowed, they could …”). As a igure 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.” Compulsory 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 faniction.net and 62 on asianfanics.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 inishes 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-signiication, K-pop nevertheless incorporates gender segregation as a principle of spatial order. The audience is whisked away on lights of the imagination, but performers are constrained relative to each other, inasmuch as the success of a dramaturgical piece corresponds (at least in part) to the obedience of its players. Although K-pop accommodates excesses of signiicationf(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 difference 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 imaginings of the working of inance capital and mass investment culture” that Kim Soyoung identiies with South Korean “blockbuster culture” (2003, 12). It is dificult to know whether the cosmopolitan embrace of spaceless utopias provides generous openings for new social identities or simply an opportunistic way of harvesting the signiiers 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 ictions 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 dificulties 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 signiicantly 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 articulation of homosocial performance, gender presentation, and sexual orientation. 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 igures are merely indicative and do not account for repeated viewings, alternative viewing platforms, unequal access to high-speed Internet, collective viewing practices, or ilesharing. 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, kpopweightlossblog.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’ Generation 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. https://www.asianfanics.com. 11. Available at https://drainbamage954.livejournal.com/55045.html. 12. Available at https://archiveofourown.org/works/1264807. 13. 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