15 Toward a Gendered Aesthetics of K-Pop Timothy LaurieIntroductionAsphalt shimmering in the heat, the camera rears to face an armored tankstriped pink and black. Urban vibrations give way to a crisp beat as ivewomen saunter into view. Propped up like plastic toys are an old-fashionedtelephone booth, two modiied Japanese sports cars, and a congress of toxicbarrels. 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 (itselfborrowed from German electro act Monrose), but they do provide new ges-tural excitements through Rino Nakasone’s understated choreography, aswell 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 symbolizethe forward momentum of the chorus? Or am I a vehicle for revolutionsorganized around seasonal changes? K-pop videos are littered with superluous objects, and these producedificulties for those looking for a clear politics of identiication and desirewithin the genre. On the one hand, f(x) is a girl group with one famouslyandrogynous Taiwanese-American member, Amber Josephine Liu (akaAmber) (ig. 15.1), who seems to transgress the gender rules that segregatethe K-pop world. On the other hand, the glimmering utopian visions ofK-pop music videos complicate any easy desire for or identiication withthese performers (or “idols”). “Hot Summer” does not promise idelity toany summer one could dance through or any tank that one could paint. Theslick near-future mise-en-scene offers instead the utopian promise of worldswithout friction or dissonance, but only by way of pleasures belonging tothe peculiar conventions of the dance music video. This chapter argues that K-pop’s idyllic worlds cannot be measuredagainst the standards of social realism. Rather, K-pop produces its own dis-tinct syntheses of sound and image to produce a utopian and communitarianaesthetic, and its sexual politics develop in relation to these genre conven-tions. While the selection of K-pop idols is limited by normative expectationsaround 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 215Figure 15.1 Screen shot from the “Hot Summer” video (2011).to genre expectations as both constraints upon and affordances for theorganization of new social meanings. For the most part, K-pop’s storylines,sets, and stilettos do not pretend to express authentic social experiences, butthey do provide special creative openings for fan communities and for thoseinterested in the cultural valences of newly visible androgynous idols. In placing my emphasis on gender and sexuality, the aim here is not tolocate K-pop within a political rubric that could adjudicate between pro-gressive and conservative, or between queer and heteronormative, musicalgenres. While contemporary Anglo-American scholarship on queer utopias(e.g., Rosenberg and Villajero 2011) offers parallels to the theoretical movesmade in this chapter, the global dissemination of queer critique as the imag-ined telos of sexual modernity risks erasing a variety of already existinglocal knowledges around social and sexual identities (see Shih 2002, 119).The purpose here is neither to demonstrate that K-pop is a feminist orqueer genre nor to show that queer theories have a special monopoly on theinterpretation 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 limitationsof K-pop’s own synesthetic conventions rather than mobilized as a yardstickby which K-pop could be measured. The irst 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 thensuggests that the roaming non-places of K-pop privilege the motility ofperformers over the places they haphazardly occupy. The remainder of thechapter explores the politics of gender identity and sexuality within K-popvideos. Following existing scholarship on K-pop performances, I discuss the 216 Timothy Laurieways music videos cultivate a desire for a relatively narrow spectrum ofgendered and raced bodies while making idelity to such ideals impossiblefor most viewers to achieve. Drawing on both music videos and responsesto f(x)’s Amber within fan communities, I argue that her androgyny drama-tizes tensions already central to K-pop’s utopian imaginaries and fanictioncultures. By making schematic distinctions among players, spoilsports, andcheats (Caillois 2001; Huizinga 1955), the inal section argues that gen-dered identity in K-pop can best be understood through consideration ofthe speciic moves available at any given moment in the reproduction ofgenre-based codes. In focusing on the critical challenges posed by genre speciic performanceconventions, the concluding arguments of this chapter are indebted to PhilipAuslander’s commentary on glam, in which he emphasizes “the differencebetween inhabiting an identity and playing a role” (Auslander 2006, 25;emphasis in original). Glam produced a smorgasbord of quasi-cinematicpseudonyms,1 impracticable clothing and staging, and melodramaticspoken-word narratives (especially in Alice Cooper). Many genres sincehave played on inauthentic role-based personas: King Diamond in Danishmetal, Nicki Minaj in US hip hop, Elephant Man in Jamaican dancehall,and Jolin Tsai in Taiwanese pop. By comparing three similarly theatricalperformances in K-pop—Lee Hyori, N.O.M, and f(x)—I argue that the keydistinction is not between authenticity and fabrication, but rather betweendifferent kinds of relationships established between the rules of a game andthe desires of its players.The Political Philosophy of K-PopSince the late 1990s, the success of K-pop artists has attracted unprecedentedglobal attention to East Asian music cultures. As the high point of K-pop’sglobal circulation, Psy’s “Gangnam Style” (2012) remains YouTube’s mostsuccessful video (as of 2015), with more than 2.1 billion views generatingUS$8 million in its irst year (see Leong 2014). Idols perform a multime-dia branding function across South Korea’s explosive and export-orientedmedia industry, dubbed the “Korean Wave” or hallyu since the late 1990s.Recent igures suggest that Korean ilm, 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 Hong2014; Leong 2014). The success of hallyu has been attributed to nationalbranding 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. TheK-pop cornucopia is overlowing with gifts from global hip hop, North Toward a Gendered Aesthetics of K-Pop 217American 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 Motownand Japanese V-Kei (“visual style”). Nevertheless, while select albums andmini-albums by K-pop groups have attracted critical acclaim for their musi-cal daring (e.g., 2NE1’s Crush), long recording projects only follow afterpromotions 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, andM Countdown and circulate rapidly through social media technologieslike Kakao Story (South Korea), Sina Weibo (China), and Mixi (Japan).3Furthermore, online and ofline reception cultures for K-pop videos havebeen analyzed in locations as diverse as Austria, France, Indonesia, Malaysia,Romania, Taiwan, Thailand, and the United States.4 Some scholars haveexplained the cultural appeal of K-pop’s videos by emphasizing eithernational or regional cultural values. Focusing on South Korea, John Lieargues that K-pop’s narratives appeal to “middle-class, urban and suburbanvalues that seek to be acceptable at once to college-aspiring youths and theirparents” (2012, 355), while Roald Maliangkay argues that K-pop’s “lackof profanity and sex” beits “Confucian morals,” thus making it appealingto fans in the East Asian region (2010, 6). Nevertheless, it is far from clearwhether the K-pop music video expresses a uniied cultural sensibility: class-based, national, or regional. First, the South Korean Ministry for GenderEquality and Family censors many videos on the basis of sexual content anddrug use (see Bower 2012), complicating any simple equivocation betweenK-pop supply and consumer demand. Second, the surge in regional popu-larity for sexualized ultra-violence in South Korean blockbusters has beencontemporaneous with the rise of K-pop in East Asia.5 While sexual moralitymay underpin the romantic clichés of the K-pop ballad (itself a witheringform), it does not explain the speciic attraction of K-pop music videos rela-tive to other media. Third, producers go to elaborate lengths to create K-popworlds independent of speciic times, places, or conventional narrative forms.In EXID’s dauntless “Up and Down,” the female quintet has no hesitationin coupling run-of-the-mill lyrics (“Clearly show me your heart / Why don’tu know / Up and down”) with lash 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’ssemiotic 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 idolgroup’s most reliable weapon: namely, a ierce ensemble executing upbeatchoreography. The Korean Gaon Charts remain dominated by ensembleperformers (e.g., EXO, EXID, Miss A, Ininite, 4Minute) and only lightlysprinkled 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 upthe screen in topological formations. Any exhaustive account of its danceaesthetics would require holistic engagement with the catalogues of its corechoreographers, many of whom work in South Korea, Japan, and the UnitedStates.6 Although such work is beyond the scope of this chapter, I want tosuggest that K-pop dance performs important structural functions withinthe broader synesthetics of the genre. K-pop dance provides a way of occupying and of turning real places (ifonly temporarily) into pure imaginary spaces. In keeping with a commonfeature of music video performances since the birth of MTV, K-pop spacetriumphs over place. Camera shots are frequently cut midway through agesture, only to be completed by the same idol formation in another locality.In addition to showcasing idols’ enviable wardrobes, these cuts reveal theabsolute disposability of place. Gestures are perfectly executed relative toother performers but with little regard for the irregularities of physical envi-ronments. From the Wild West (Super Junior’s “Mamacita”) to the interiorsof domestic cleaning (Orange Caramel’s “Gangnam Avenue”) to a mentalhealth asylum (Co-Ed School’s “Bbiribbom Bberibbom”), dancers remainixed to lat, vacated surfaces, while site-speciic storylines rarely intervenein the energetic utopias of collective movement. The synchronized performance conventions of K-pop music videossmooth out social and spatial differences: K-pop promises a communityuninterrupted. Understood in the terms of political philosophy, the K-popdance encourages viewers “to see persons in unity with one another in ashared whole,” to repress “the ontological difference of subjects,” and to dis-solve social heterogeneity “into the comfort of a self-enclosed whole” (Young1990, 229, 230). Idol worlds overlook the ruptures of social prohibitionor the traumas of community formation. Counterexamples could includea subcycle of videos that foreground conlicts between insiders and outsid-ers, but these mostly involve men ighting over a shared love interest andinevitably employ symbiotic dance sequences to reafirm wholeness amonggroup members.7 In the midst of K-pop’s communitarian utopias, at least three clearparameters are placed around the bodies of performing idols. First, K-popperformers 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 ilm White: Curse of the Melody plays on a chilling conlictbetween the concept of a virtual K-pop performance—ininitely repeatable,unendingly pleasurable, rational in its execution—and the extended pur-gatory of many K-pop idols, who feel the envy of fading generations andthe creeping threat of adolescent hopefuls. The privileging of eternal youthalso discourages collective memory building around past performers or theearly development of the genre, so that, with the exception of trot revivalistsSuper 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 placesuneven burdens on performers relative to their (perceived) skin tone. K-popvideos are directly oriented to transnational markets, and Chuyun Ohargues that, in order to “pass” as beautiful in transnational markets, idolsare often surgically modiied 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 rapidlyexpanding plastic surgery industry has emphasized the uniqueness of theKorean face, where natural-looking surgeries are “deined as enhancingKorean features” (Holliday and Elfving-Hwang 2012, 62). A recent excep-tion proves the rule. Cube Entertainment’s CLC includes female performerSorn (Chonnasorn Sajakul), who was the Thai winner for the irst seasonof 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 relativelyhomogenized 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 theCLC member to be read as a symbol of cultural diversity, one must alreadybelieve in the physiognomic homogeneity of the Korean population. K-popdisplaces diversity onto its adjacent regional markets: latter noses becomecoded as Thai and thus not-Korean. This has direct implications for theimagined social and cultural geographies of K-pop, especially when idols’three-dimensional noses are exported into non-Korean markets as evidenceof Korean ethnic particularity. Third, K-pop’s idol communities are fundamentally homosocial. In agenre that creates ample space for the absurd in “Hot Summer,” “Red,” and“Up and Down,” one can only be disappointed by defunct mixed genderK-pop groups like Sunny Hill, Co-Ed School, and F1RST. After a series ofcostly false starts, each of these groups has been forced to disaggregate intohomosocial units. As a marketing device, the split between girl groups andboy groups has been central to K-pop’s global circulation: K-pop coverdance competitions throughout East and South-East Asia draw heavilyon homosocial codes, even if radically reworking them (e.g., Käng 2014).However, male idols and female idols experience the gendering of K-popquite differently. K-pop netizens (“citizens of the net”) are now overlyfamiliar with news articles on female idols’ weight losses and gains, theextensive network of K-pop dieting blogs,8 and the protracted commentthreads on music videos that linger on fragmented features—arms, breasts,torsos, thighs, and legs. Groups like Girls’ Generation experience strongpressures to maintain desired body sizes and muscle tones,9 and instances ofshaming—say, T-ara’s coarse juxtaposition between “larger” and “smaller”women in “Little Apple”—bring into sharp relief the costs of failing to meetgendered bodily norms (see C. Oh 2014, 61). The social imperatives of K-pop’s utopian performances could be lashingin neon signs: lose weight, look beautiful, buy this. Let’s agree that K-pop music 220 Timothy Laurievideos enforce heterosexuality, youth, slimness, afluence, and phenotypicaluniformity. Idols’ four-minute ecstatic bursts make few attempts to establishgenuine connections to everyday life, but, precisely through such utopia-nism, K-pop’s community is openly (rather than secretly) out of reach. Forexample, while the jubilant, fresh-faced sextet Boyfriend may be presentedas ideal Korean men, nobody is required to believe that Korean adolescentsnormally hang out in newly constructed white palaces (“Be My Shine”) orin playrooms where the walls change to match boys’ outits (“Dance DanceDance,” “My Avatar”). Put another way, if being heterosexual looks like girlgroups 2NE1 or Girls’ Generation, then to be heterosexual is to perform asuperhuman 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 BackHome,” for example, individual heartbreak is resolved when 2NE1 enteran action-packed science-iction world that has also become the core con-cept for boy group Ininite. Despite the tedious heterosexual framing, themale love interest becomes a petty vehicle for the more important projectof providing 2NE1 with cyber lasers and better shoes. These fantasies arepeculiarly productive for online faniction cultures, because writers can bothbuild on and depart from the rich semiotic worlds that high-concept videosoffer. The K-pop video is prehensive. In the dramatization of glossy objects,persons, and spaces—the pink tank, EXID’s avocados—it anticipates a lut-ter of stories to come. This provides opportunities for social realism as acreative counterpoint and on websites like AsianFanFics10 K-pop fanictionsupplies details about idols that recast them as ordinary, accessible, andlawed (see Yang and Bao 2012). Examples include the extended dialoguefound in “How to Pet,” a lirtatious exchange between EXO-M idol Luhanand his “cat” Jongdae (another male K-pop idol),11 and the sustained inti-macies between men in the 58,792-word melodrama “Retrograde,” whichspans seven years in the lives of young idols during high school.12 Suchplayful intertexts do not absolve K-pop from its complicity in naturalizingcertain young athletic idols as transcendental symbols of the Good Life.They do, however, modify the scope of the kinds of political work that aqueer, feminist, or anti-racist K-pop video might do. In the inal sections ofthis chapter, I want to focus on readings of “androgyny” in K-pop as oneway to think through the political scope of the genre’s most archetypicalvideo forms.The Androgynous Male IdolAndrogyny is a prickly term. While discussion of androgyny invites interestin bodies that do not read easily as masculine or feminine, it also assumesgeneralizable criteria for distinguishing between the normative and thenon-normative on an imagined spectrum of possible gender identities.13 Oncethe ixity of gender itself is questioned, the stability of both androgynous Toward a Gendered Aesthetics of K-Pop 221and non-androgynous identities must also be interrogated, and for thispurpose the notion of performativity has long proven useful. For JudithButler (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 performativityhas acquired currency well beyond linguistics, and performativity can beused to explain both acts of self-deinition (e.g., “I’m gay”) and (sometimesunwanted) appellations from others (e.g., “Luhan is gay”). The corollary toButler’s formulation of performativity is that enunciations are collective andcitational: performatives only make sense relative to other known performa-tives. In K-pop, conventions of group choreography—the slick movement ofa leg, thrusting hips, crouching, and sliding—cite gendered stylizations fromother K-pop performances, but only insofar as the mandatory containersof boy group and girl group continue to sustain the citational economy.Viewers are primed to see “femininity” in girl group videos as establishedwith reference to other girl group videos and to boy groups as belonging toa separate masculine economy. Androgyny—or rather, the perception of androgyny—has long been ofinterest to scholars of gender and music. Here again, Philip Auslander’scommentary on glam rock provides a valuable reference point. In glam,gender-based clichés allowed heterosexuality’s organizing terms ofreference—men and women, dominance and submission, desiring anddesired—to be toyed with, overplayed, and exhausted: “Bowie threw thesexuality of rock into question, not only by performing a sexual identitypreviously excluded from rock but also by performing that identity in sucha way that it was clearly revealed as a performance for which there was nounderlying 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 concertsand contribute signiicantly to its fan cultures. Auslander observes that glamrock “was almost completely dominated by men and took the performanceof 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-signiication,and which audience members are being interpellated when new musicalpersonae are produced. Most commentaries on gender and sexuality in K-pop focus on maleidols’ androgynous presentations.14 Men with “soft” or “delicate” features,commonly referred to as a kkonminam (“lower man”), have been centralto the visual branding of K-pop and to Korean hallyu more generally. Thedissemination of new images of male bodies creates space for a vibrant aes-thetic imaginary around male fashions, friendships, and intimacies, and theheightened visibility of the kkonminam in superstar groups like BigBang,BTS, Ininite, SHINee, and Super Junior also has particular resonances in aKorean context (see S. Jung 2010). Compulsory military service has installed 222 Timothy Lauriethe “brutish tough guy image” as a social archetype, one that continues to“affect how many men express their feelings and deal with issues of conlictor stress” (Maliangkay 2010, 7). Fan communities dedicated to kkonminamalso thrive through slash faniction and same-sex “shipping,” in which idolsare reimagined in same-sex relationships (hence ship-ping), and throughmore casual commentaries on “skinship,” where physical contact between(mostly same-sex) idols is tracked as a subterranean sexual economy. Thesenovel 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, ofcourse, automatically generate unfettered spaces for sexual diversity withinthe K-pop industry itself. There are few openly gay male K-pop performers,and politically oriented activisms around gay and lesbian issues in SouthKorea continue to be blocked by powerful Christian lobbies, themselveslinked 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 unlessproven 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 asort of sexual taste one can sample freely” (2007, 61), with some girls sayingthat “they can understand homosexuality in fanic but dislike it in reality”(63). A Beyond Hallyu blogger shares Lee’s concerns: “My biggest concernwith same-sex shipping is that when a young girl decides to ship Yoonjae orHunhan she could be trivialising queer identities and not making any attemptto 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 representationin amongst the overwhelming mass of girls posting about their biases forgay sex” (Beyond Hallyu 2013). As noted in Auslander’s commentary onglam, the performative politics of male androgyny, including its disruptionof “brutish” masculine codes, may not produce any signiicant overhaul ofgender-based social relations. If girl groups continue to be segregated fromboy groups, and if heterosexuality continues to operate as the code throughwhich androgyny is deciphered, then the redistribution of gendered signi-iers around the male body cannot easily be extrapolated to support anybroader claims about a transformative sexual politics in K-pop. Political ambivalences within the discourse on androgynous masculinitycan be strongly felt in Chuyun Oh’s important interventions around genderin K-pop. Oh criticizes Girls’ Generation for “chaste maiden-like images”designed “to express fragile and passive femininity” (2014, 53), noting thatthese participate in “a fantasy that successfully its the patriarchal desirewhere women take subordinated positions” (61). Drawing on the psychoan-alytic framework of the “male gaze,” she suggests that “Girls’ Generation’sincreased visibility empowers the male audience by sexualising themselvesas cheerleaders do and reinforces female objectiication by self-internalizingthe patriarchal notion of ‘being-at-look-at-ness’” (57). However, in a later Toward a Gendered Aesthetics of K-Pop 223piece that considers male K-pop idols in the context of internationalfandoms, 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 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. Byconverging toward a common ideal of elegance and emotional vulnerability,male idols are cast as dramatic improvements on their forebears. At the sametime, elegant and vulnerable female idols are criticized for conforming togendered social expectations. Furthermore, women are considered politicalliabilities when their bodies are read as “sexual,” while images of “chaste”women are believed to support “the patriarchal ideology that says a womanshould be a good wife and a wise mother” (C. Oh 2014, 59). K-pop girlgroups thus are positioned between the twin dangers of promiscuity andchastity: in whichever direction they move, Girls’ Generation can be foundguilty of false consciousness. Oh takes care to distinguish between Korean fandoms, internationalfandoms, and speciic cases where female fans are reading men’s bodies (seeespecially C. Oh 2014, 68). Nevertheless, the analyses taken together raiseserious questions about the positioning of women vis-à-vis the celebratorydiscourse around the kkonminam idol. Is there an expectation that womenwho appear more masculine will emancipate male or female viewers? Canfemale androgyny in K-pop still be sexualized, and, if so, to what end? Inthe inal section of this chapter, I want to draw attention to one relativelyunique idol who provides an instructive case study for working throughthese asymmetrical gender relations.Players, Spoilsports, Cheats: The Case of Amber LiuAmber from f(x) has become an important reference point for conversationsabout female androgyny in K-pop. Amber is a (presumed) cis-woman witha 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 toAmber’s strong social media following and the coining of such neologismsas “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 Laurieand has released a solo video, “Shake That Brass,” which includes cameosfrom an array of other idols. The fact of Amber’s visibility in f(x) is a notable development within Koreanpopular culture. Young women who do not identify as heterosexual but whomay not adopt an unambiguously homosexual identity have remained rela-tively invisible across K-pop, Korean ilm, and Korean television. Neverthe-less, Amber can be aligned with an existing identity for women “with loose-itclothes 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 thosewomen who embrace “fanic iban,” or faniction describing homosexualencounters between male idols. The assumption is that “some girls are not‘real’ iban because fanic iban is supposed to be one who just follows thefashion depicted in fanic as a fan of a male idol star” (51). Figurations ofiban identities are shaped by concerns that an already precarious social iden-tity will be eroded through the confusion between queer play (doing) andqueer identiication (being). Lee is critical of a popular discourse, sometimesshared by advocates for gay, homosexual, and iban youth, that “a person’ssexual identity can be afirmed and respected only if it is serious, not frivo-lous, 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 isa sort of knowledge that opens up a space for interpretation of ambiguousfeelings, and lets a girl retro-experience and reorganize her life” (66; emphasisin original). In this context, Amber’s style and persona in f(x) already promisethe kinds of questioning and interrogation of gender that Lee identiies withmore “open” spaces for interpretation around iban knowledge. However, while Amber offers a new fashion-based semiotic code thataligns with Lee’s own examples, it is not always decoded by fans in terms ofan iban identity. Amber’s success invites comparisons with Li Yuchun, thetomboyish winner of China’s Super Girl in 2006, who is characterized byHaiqing Yu and Audrey Yue as a “pan-Asian stereotype” of “cool” androgyny(2008, 126). Despite deviating from certain norms around femininity, Ambercontinues to function as one among ive ideal types of femininity placed onoffer by f(x). This capacity to promote new gender ideals, while framingthem as non-normative in relation to the leader of a K-pop group (in thiscase, Victoria), has raised concerns among some K-pop netizens: “I hon-estly believe that SM is just boxing [Amber] into a certain image, and usingit 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 afurther point of contrast, many K-pop idols who present less androgynousidentities than Amber have offered far more intriguing commentaries onsexual politics. For example, Ga In explores threads of coercive intimacies Toward a Gendered Aesthetics of K-Pop 225and domestic violence in “Fxxk You,” while male patriarchal norms aresatirized throughout Miss A’s “I Don’t Need A Man” and Wonder Girls’“Irony,” “Tell Me,” and “Nobody.” By contrast, f(x) has no controversialthreads to explore or men to satirize. S.M. Entertainment appears more thanwilling to promote Amber’s coolness while remaining unadventurous in theconceptual construction of f(x) as a whole. Given these widely divergent readings of Amber, what critical tools areavailable for negotiating these perspectives on female androgyny withinK-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-popgenre as a whole. As it happens, each of these videos corresponds to waysof playing a game. A solo artist who broke away from successful girl group Fin.K.L, LeeHyori became one of South Korea’s most successful female singers andin 2013 released a video called “Going Crazy” (ig. 15.2). Here she donsmale clothing and a moustache in order to seduce women (all contestantsfrom Korea’s Next Top Model 4) and in doing so pokes fun at narcissisticand lirtatious men. “Going Crazy” is a make-believe video, and it isclear that Hyori is pretending to be a man using tongue-in-cheek humor.Hyori leaves intact the viewer’s expectations around gender and sexuality inK-pop, and—like the Girls’ Generation’s brief adoption of suits and pantsfor “Mr. Mr.”—Hyori knows how to manipulate gender expectations toproduce surprise, humor, and light social commentary. Like Alice Cooper’sshock-rock theatrics, the difference is clearly maintained between inhabitingan 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 dancemusic (EDM) inspired K-pop romp that lickers among chapped male mus-culature, studded leathermen in a sordid basement, and a woman who isprobably a witch. Pulsing beats mediate the delirious footage with half-whispered lyrics (“Girls Girls Girls Girls / I want you Sexy voice / I Seeyour body igure / I like your nice legs”) and a truncated chorus (“girlsma baby / girls ma baby / girls ma baby / girls girls-girls”). The videowas openly discussed as being “gay” K-pop (e.g., Smith 2013), but N.O.Mdoes not present any romantic or sexual relationships between men. Rather,“A Guys” disaggregates and fractures the homosocial unit so essential tothe K-pop group formation. In the place of a geometric diagram of parallelbodies, “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 avariety of surfaces, movement consisting of related parts that form achoreographic whole across equal and indeterminate sites” (2011, 61). To thefraternal 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 markthe “game-play” spaces, the spoilsport, Johan Huizinga suggests, “revealsthe relativity and fragility of the play-world in which he [sic] had tempo-rarily shut himself with others” (1955 [1938], 11). For Roger Caillois, thespoilsport is represented by the nihilist, “who denounces the rules as absurdand 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” thriveson N.O.M’s restlessness with the banal homosociality of the K-pop dancevideo, 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 throughconstraints peculiar to the synchronized girl group formation, but sheknows that the rules can be bent. Amber is simultaneously able to con-form to de jure expectations of compulsory homosociality while activatingde facto practices of gender play that make the tomboy icon more “cool”than either masculine men or feminine women. The person who appearsto play by the rules but succeeds by making moves that are prohibitedwithin 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 pretendsto respect them. He does not discuss them: he takes advantage of the otherplayers’ loyalty to the rules” (2001 [1958], 7). Within the coordinates of agender-segregated idol universe, Amber achieves what the mixed genderedK-pop groups could not: namely, a genuinely ambivalent interplay betweenmasculine and feminine signiiers rather than a proliferation of oppositionsbetween them. Toward a Gendered Aesthetics of K-Pop 227 The spoilsport is not superior to the cheat, and the cheat is not superiorto 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 thesame as the cheat, “for the latter pretends to be playing the game and, on theface of it, still acknowledges the magic circle” (1955 [1938], 11). The cheatunderstands the constitutive power of the “performative” act. Any movein a game contains some agency (other moves were always possible) andrepeats a pre-given structure (the game precedes the player). Amber is onlyandrogynous for audiences accustomed to locating masculinity and feminin-ity on a spectrum of natural kinds, and so even the “androgynous” move is away of participating in the game of homosociality. From the audience’s per-spective, though, the constraints placed upon the cheat can be wellspringsfor the imagination (“if only they were allowed, they could …”). As a igureof speculative possibility constrained by the rules of the girl group, Amber’sandrogyny poses two questions about her own identity: “Is she playing atbeing a boy?” and “Is she playing at being a K-pop idol?” Neither questionis posed by Hyori because her androgyny is clearly “make believe.” Compul-sory homosociality within the game-space of group dance gives free rein tospeculation from the audience, and this could be one reason solo artist LeeHyori is mentioned in only a single story on faniction.net and 62 on asian-fanics.com, compared with 4,587 and 2,381 stories (respectively) aboutf(x)’s Amber.ConclusionThis chapter began with a mobile armoured tank that does not go anywhere.“Hot Summer” offers only thermodynamic movement: everyone inishesexactly where he or she started but just a little hotter. In K-pop music videosfamiliar symbols and gestures are constantly bent, stretched, and twisted outof 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’sensemble dances. I suggested earlier that glam’s experimentations occupiedspaces within which women’s participation continued to be undervalued.While promising a more expansive terrain of gender re-signiication, K-popnevertheless incorporates gender segregation as a principle of spatial order.The audience is whisked away on lights of the imagination, but performersare 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 signiicationf(x)’s tank, EXID’ssevered tunathese gain access to the dance space only after these desiredutopias have been expertly extracted from everyday life. By detaching themselves from any particular places, K-pop cannot takeus 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 Lauriecarpark, the same car and clothing brands, the same tracking shots, and,most importantly, we see an exact symmetry between six elegant male dancerssinging in Mandarin and six elegant male dancers singing in Korean. Theseyouthful and androgynous bodieslike the bodies of Amber from f(x) andRokhyun from 100%seem to promise novel gendered identities that couldenrich 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 inance capital and mass investment culture” thatKim Soyoung identiies with South Korean “blockbuster culture” (2003, 12).It is dificult to know whether the cosmopolitan embrace of spaceless utopiasprovides generous openings for new social identities or simply an opportunis-tic way of harvesting the signiiers of cultural difference without substantivevariations in the identities or experiences addressed by the genre. K-pop is unlikely to produce music videos devoid of the idealizedimages of youth, gender, race, and sexuality that stitch together the genreas a whole. In presenting a genre-based analysis, however, I hope to haveshown that critical readings must engage with K-pop’s own internal ictionsand that these cannot be reduced to real or unreal social representations.By distinguishing among players, spoil-sports, and cheats, I have tried toforeground the dificulties of challenging gender binaries and sexual normswithin a genre that prescribes compulsory homosociality as a condition ofits commercial viability. While Amber Liu does not depart signiicantly fromK-pop’s ideals of physical beauty, her position as a “cheat” does enable herto 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 wayof an answered existential query, “What am I doing here?”; sometimes eventhis question is enough to make the rules of the game feel less reliable.NotesMany thanks to Jessica Kean, Jane Park, Sarah Richardson, and Kathryn Yan fortheir insightful feedback on this chapter and for accommodating many informaldiscussions 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, alterna- tive 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. 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