K-Pop Dance: Fandoming Yourself on Social Media by Chuyun Oh (review)

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Reviewed by:

• K-Pop Dance: Fandoming Yourself on Social Media by Chuyun Oh
• Emily Wilcox

K-POP DANCE: FANDOMING YOURSELF ON SOCIAL MEDIA. By Chuyun Oh. New York: Routledge, 2023. x + 184 pp. Softcover, $42.36.

Anyone teaching in Asian studies, performance studies, or media studies today knows that K-pop is a hugely popular subject among college students, and research on the topic is in high demand. Chuyun Oh’s book perfectly meets this need, especially for research on K-pop dance, a relatively understudied component of the broader K-pop genre. Oh’s book examines K-pop dance from multiple perspectives—as social media dance, as modern dance choreography, as intercultural performance and identify formation, as social engagement, and as fandom. Written in a highly accessible manner while being firmly grounded in an impressive array of critical performance and cultural theory discourses, K-pop Dance offers a stimulating and highly original contribution to the study of South Korean popular dance in global contexts.

The book is organized into two parts that map onto the two major contributions of the project. In “Part I: K-pop Dance,” Oh examines K-pop dance as a choreographic genre, with an emphasis on performance aesthetics, training, and the history and circulation of K-pop dance by professional artists in commercial contexts. In “Part II: K-pop Dance Fandom,” Oh turns to K-pop dance as a practice of international fandom among amateurs including refugees, young adults, and college students, with a focus on themes of identity passing, cross-cultural experiences, and aspirations of social mobility. The first half of the book centers mainly on artists based in Asia, primarily in [End Page 456] South Korea but also with one case study of an artist in Vietnam. The second half of the book looks primarily at fans either from or based in the United States. The backgrounds of the dancers discussed in this latter section are quite diverse, including Asian Americans, a Latinx American, and a South Korean international student studying in San Diego, California, a white American student studying abroad in Japan, and a group of refugee teens from Thailand at a community center in Utica, New York. Despite the seemingly disparate contexts and topics explored, the book is united by two related themes: an effort to treat K-pop dance seriously as an artistic and cultural practice with its own aesthetic aims and a specific media and industrial context, and a respect for the labor of fans and the complexity of their diverse intersectional identities, desires, and experiences as they engage with K-pop from a variety of positionalities and privileges.

Methodologically, Oh combines multi-sited ethnography (including on-site participant observation, interviews, and social media ethnography), choreographic analysis (mainly of performance videos from television, TikTok, and YouTube), and, to a lesser extent, auto-ethnography and performance ethnography. The deepest ethnographic engagements appear in Chapter 6 and the Epilogue, which examine Oh’s work with refugee teens at the Midtown Utica Community Center in upstate New York. As Oh explains, this is where her work with K-pop cover dancers¹ first began in 2016, when she “was teaching a performance ethnography class and looking for a local community center for a student field trip” (p. 143). Oh’s work with the center and its teens spanned many years and demonstrates her commitment to dance as a mode of social engagement and transdiasporic community. Compared to the other two ethnographic chapters (Chapters 4 and 5), these two about her work with the center convey the most nuance and self-reflexivity. This is likely a result of the long-term nature of Oh’s involvement with the center. This contrasts with the distanced and at times somewhat more superficial accounts of the university cover dance teams in San Diego, where her role was as an observer and visitor rather than a direct long-term participant.

Throughout the book, Oh makes a passionate and convincing case for the complexity of K-pop dance and its importance as an academic subject of study. Oh’s elaboration of the main aesthetic features of K-pop dance through the concept of what she calls “gestural point...