An autoethnography of the K-pop fandom and its evolution
K-Pop Fandom: Performing Deokhu from the 1990s to Today is a study of K-pop that centers fans and their labor. Rather than framing fans primarily as consumers of K-pop, the book insists that K-pop fan practices and activities constitute a central productive force, shaping not only K-pop’s explosive global popularity, but also K-pop’s cultural impacts, politics, and horizons of possibility. Over the past three decades, the K-pop fandom and its activities have expanded, intensified, and diversified along myriad dimensions, assuming novel social, technological, and economic forms, some of which are unique to K-pop, and some of which reflect broader cultural and industrial logics of globalized mass entertainment culture. Areum Jeong argues that K-pop fans, in performing deokhu—a Korean term connoting an “avid fan”—perform a materialization of affective labor that also seeks to produce good relationships between asymmetrically positioned actors in the K-pop ecosystem.
Through an autoethnography of becoming a K-pop deokhu, Jeong connects their experiences to generations of K-pop fans, showing simultaneously how fandom practices have shifted over time and the intricacies of fan labor participation. This personal connection paved the way for participant-observation and co-performer witnessing methodologies in the study, which crucially allowed for collaborating with fans whose communal pursuits have been stigmatized by dominant discourses that denigrate their activities as solely addictive, uncritical, and wasteful. Jeong’s genre-spanning corpus of fan activities and analyzing its contexts and contents represents an important contribution to the making of a fan archive that is also an archive of affective labor.
K-Pop Fandom has been published in February 2026 via the University of Michigan Press (https://press.umich.edu/Books/K/K-Pop-Fandom3).
From The Journal of Popular Culture (https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.70098):
“The book offers a timely and empirically rich contribution to English-language scholarship on K-pop and stands as one of the clearest book-length studies to place fan labor at the center of its analytical framework.”
“Jeong has produced a lucid, engaging study that makes K-pop fan practices legible as labor without reducing them to exploitation. She describes fansign culture as a K-pop subculture that “blatantly encourages excessive consumer spending” (69), and she shows how fans build communities, support one another, and hold powerful industry actors accountable through the same structures that extract their labor. This balance, which acknowledges the neoliberal capitalist dynamics of K-pop and respects fans’ agency, is one of the book’s signal achievements.”
“K-pop Fandom will be valuable to scholars and students in fan studies, media studies, Korean studies, and digital and affective labor. Its clear prose and vivid case studies make it suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses on global popular culture. By centering the perspective of fans themselves, against stereotypical accounts that emphasize tropes of brainwashing and exploitation (28), Jeong offers a model for how scholarship can take seriously the creative, communal, and critical dimensions of popular culture participation. For popular culture scholars, the book provides a clear vocabulary, showing how fandom becomes labor, memory, community, intimacy, and critique.”