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. She 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, she 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. Her 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. Dr. Jeong has received competitive research grants from the Academy of Korean Studies and the American Society for Theatre Research for this project. K-Pop Fandom will be published in February 2026 via the University of Michigan Press (https://press.umich.edu/Books/K/K-Pop-Fandom3).