MENT: Why Now, Why Ever?
Image by Amber Lee. Adapted from screenshots of Answer Me 1997, 2012; Be Melodramatic, 2019; and Lovely Runner, 2024.
YIN YUAN
W
hat would it look like if critical work on Korean popular culture was actually grounded in love for its objects? That is the question that lies at the inception of MENT; I ask it as both a scholar and a fan.
Traditional scholarship treats K-pop and K-drama as export commodities designed to shore up South Korea’s soft power, so the tendency has been to discuss those cultural texts in the broadest of strokes, and only on the way to examining the ostensibly more important issues of cultural proximity, regional affiliation, international diplomacy, and global capitalism. Despite their distinctive mode(s) of storytelling, K-dramas are rarely accorded the kind of attention that has been given to film, and when attention is given, it’s typically a pretty damning assessment of their formulaic nature (K-dramas are always melodramatic; K-dramas are all about love stories, etc.) Methodologically, many of these studies also adopt—to borrow the words of Elizabeth A. St. Pierre and Alecia Y. Jackson—a “positivist, quasi-statistical analytic practice” that treats textual features and audience responses as “brute data waiting to be coded.”
As a K-drama fan, this was frustrating to see. The heart of these shows that I love and the hearts of those who passionately love them were both lost. Within the thicket of data awaiting so-called scientific analysis, the human recedes from view.
ANDREA ACOSTA
I absolutely saw this tendency in K-pop studies too.
My way of coming to this field of study was as a fan myself—before I went to graduate school in English in Los Angeles, I was already a serious fan of both SHINee and BTS. But when I was reading for my qualifying exams, I noticed that the tendency to view K-media objects primarily as export commodities showed up in Korean-language scholarship as well. There was a study done by Sohn Seung-Hye, for instance, that analyzed 250 Korean-language academic articles on hallyu and found that Korean academic work by 2009 had “rapidly transformed to explore the possible contributions hallyu can make to boost the nation’s economy.” This economic export frame was therefore something that predated, and probably informed, a lot of the English-language work on South Korean popular media.
Since I was in a humanities program at the time, I remember being really frustrated by the way this approach flattened the affective, cultural, communal dimensions of the media—the topics I was personally interested in and thinking about. I remember I was preparing for my graduate exams just as BTS was in the process of ascending to the US pop culture mainstream. So, on the one hand, I was reading academic articles on hallyu. On the other, I was attending all of these filming events for BTS in Los Angeles: I was going to The Late Late Show with James Corden, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the American Music Awards, the Billboard Music Awards—basically anything I could get tickets to.
The sheer energy within ARMY (BTS’s official fandom) during this time was intense, and it was fascinating to witness the nuances of how ARMY was organizing, especially as they negotiated with US music and radio industry figures and facilitated accurate media coverage of the group. There was also a great amount of in-fandom discourse around topics of access, race, US hegemony, and grassroots movement strategy. But neither this critical discourse nor the fan organizing was fully reflected in the hallyu scholarship I was reading.
It was this dissonance that propelled me, first, to write the kind of scholarship that I wanted to see in the world and, second, to want to advocate for more fan-driven publications.
Yes, some of the most insightful perspectives on K-drama and K-pop that I’ve seen come from fans themselves. Henry Jenkins has observed that “within the realm of popular culture, fans are the true experts,” since they “display a close attention to the particularity of [the content] that puts academic critics to shame.”
So, for instance, Amber Lee, whose essay on Taemin as a shamanic figure appears in this issue, was posting on their Tumblr account these amazingly erudite think pieces on both the K-pop industry and individual musical acts—pieces grounded not only in Lee’s intimate knowledge of historical contexts and specific discographies, but, just as importantly, in their passion for the objects of discussion. Over on the K-drama side of things, fan-made digital remixes (or video edits, as they are more colloquially known) were performing subtle but astute genre analyses that deftly identified narrative patterns and visual poetics across a wide range of shows, while making affective arguments through the form of their audiovisual utterance (here is one on the “slice of life” K-drama that I find particularly powerful).
So, for me, academics who write about Korean pop culture need to be in conversation with the fans who move in that sphere. And I don’t mean that in an ethnographical “let us study your norms and practices” kind of way, but as interlocutors engaging in a common project, though necessarily (helpfully!) with differing styles and for differing ends.
Last year, I edited an essay cluster on the Korean Wave for Post45 Contemporaries, and the call for papers invited potential contributors to think about how and why Korean pop culture was resonating worldwide at this particular moment. I received many thought-provoking proposals that attentively—lovingly—engaged with the nuances of their objects of analyses, applying methodologies that moved between critical analysis and fan practice. For many of these writers, Korean studies or media studies wasn’t their home discipline, and they had come to what they were writing about through personal interests. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that these were proposals for a public venue like Post45 Contemporaries, which asks for intellectually rigorous writing that is not weighed down by disciplinary jargon or too much theoretical throat-clearing.
Absolutely. I think experimental or dynamic work on K-media is more possible from the position of somebody who starts out with a real knowledge of—and love and attachment to—the media itself, because that is the level at which you're engaging with the media as more than a commodity product, right? It’s no coincidence that more interesting work is coming from fans. And here, I mean different kinds of fans: not just fans who are academics but also fans who have never received formal academic training on media analysis. Fannishness is how you access the humanness, the emotional power, and the messiness, I think, of these media objects.
That’s one of the reasons why we’ve featured the interview with the Bangtan Remixed editors in this issue: they're all academics, but they're also huge fans of the media they write about. They’ve taken care to feature diverse fan perspectives in their critical BTS reader, and they think of the collection as a resource by and for the ARMY community. The difference in the ethos of that kind of work is palpable. Actually, when I was on a panel with a few of the editors in Seattle last year, I remember the energy of that panel in that room being so high, even as we delved into difficult topics and serious conversation. There were stickers; there was music; there were inside fandom jokes; there were memes in the presentation slideshows. But most importantly, there was a genuinely engaged audience of fellow fans who could supplement and nuance our ideas with knowledge of their own. The whole event felt like a real merge of fannishness with critique.
CONSUMPTION, ACTIVISM, AND FAN MOBILIZATION
BTS occupies an interesting place in this issue. None of the pieces explicitly engage with BTS’s discography or performances, but the group itself provides a crucial critical framework for our key thematic concerns. In addition to our conversation with the Bangtan Remixed editors, we also feature an interview with ARMY for Palestine. Perhaps BTS’s spectral presence in these pages speaks to their distinctive impact. The group has become such a cultural phenomenon that the gestures of the members and their fanbase are inevitably bound up with contemporary political issues.
We’ve seen this with how ARMY for Palestine has mobilized the BTS fandom around the Palestinian cause as Israel continues its genocide in Gaza. The boycott against HYBE, which houses BTS’s record label, for the purposes of pressuring the entertainment company to divest from Zionism has sparked controversy and led to backlash within the fandom. As Mimi Thi Nguyen observed in our interview with the Bangtan Remixed editors, “so much of ARMY identity is tied to mass streaming and buying—and organizing that mass streaming and buying—to the extent that a boycott ends up challenging people’s sense of self.”
This controversy draws attention to the fact that, for many, “fan activism” may be a contradiction in terms. Media scholars Melissa M. Brough and Sangita Shresthova ask: if we understand activism as a “resistant practice, resisting or pushing back against a hegemony in order to provoke change,” then “how is it that fans can both participate in a commercial pop culture space, and at the same time resist or attempt to change the status quo within or through the same hegemonic space?”
I think this tension between consumerism and activism in fan identity has, in some ways, always been felt within the BTS fandom and K-pop fandoms at large. The K-pop industry has a long history of labor malpractice that has triggered calls for boycotts from fan communities in the past. The tension is not new.
But I will say that there used to be a sense in the BTS fandom that consumption wasn’t only capitalist work but also potentially political work. In BTS’s early days of US recognition, I remember buying and streaming albums was framed as a collective expression of a largely minority-led fanbase trying to vouch in material ways for BTS’s recognition as a foreign artist in a xenophobic Western market. The idea of buying or streaming enough so that BTS would reach the top of the US Billboard charts was understood as subversive because the US music scene, especially the Top 40 radio industry, was not otherwise responsive to the presence of South Korean artists.
But now that BTS has achieved significant mainstream success—and HYBE has become the first music entertainment company designated a major business group in South Korea—the need for market recognition has arguably shifted. Why, many fans are asking, is consumption still the primary marker of support?
We’re seeing a renewed conflict between fan identity that privileges competitive consumption as the fundamental expression of support and fan identity that privileges human engagement with the group’s art and politics—an engagement that moves beyond streaming and purchasing.
To put it succinctly, the language of fan support is being called into question. This tension represents, I think, a reckoning moment for K-pop fans: how do we shape the identity and work of the community as a whole? What does a fan actually do? Can we articulate fan identities beyond consumerist models?
Yes, and in fact, fandom’s participatory culture can provide the training ground for grassroots activism and civic participation, as many fan studies scholars have pointed out. Jenkins notes that fandom itself “originates, at least in part, as a response to the relative powerlessness of the consumer in relation to powerful institutions of cultural production and circulation.”
If we are to take seriously Richard Dyer’s idea that popular culture appeals precisely because it speaks to our utopic desires for an alternative reality, for something better than a world ruled by war, greed, violence, injustice, and exploitation, then mobilization on behalf of the very ideals expressed in the content that drew in fans in the first place perhaps constitutes fan engagement at its best.
I agree! Unfortunately, there are also accusations that fans who mobilize in this way—who, say, refuse to stream or choose to boycott—are not true fans. But I think this accusation has always been a bad-faith representation of what these fans are trying to do. Accusations that critical fans are “anti-fans” echo precisely the history of accusations against Black fans who have raised concerns about racism within the fandom or racism by K-pop group members themselves. The accusation is always that you are being too critical, too angry—therefore you’re not a real fan.
Rukmini Pande wrote an article to this point on the idea of the “anti.” In it, Pande discusses how the label of “anti” often gets weaponized to discredit critique from fellow fans. But this use of the term is technically incorrect, or at least inconsistent. Traditionally, the “anti-fan” is somebody who expresses hatred or dislike toward a group or media object, but the fans who mobilize in the fandom to call out a perceived issue don’t self-identify as people who hate or dislike the group—quite the opposite. They self-identify as fans who love the group and will thus spend the time and labor it takes to mobilize in the first place.
Actually, I'm curious about the K-drama side of this because most of my personal experience has been in K-pop fan spaces. Do you see any similarities among fans in K-drama circles? Is fan identity constructed in similar ways? Or do they differ?
Compared to K-pop, I think collective mobilization doesn’t happen as much in K-drama fan spaces. There is, after all, no real equivalent for the kind of organization that K-pop fan activities such as mass streaming require. The K-drama fandom might be what media socialist Daniel Dayan would call a “taste public,” a visible collective “generally focused on works, texts, or programmes.” (In contrast, music fans tend to form “identity publics,” where response to the texts in question feeds more directly into identity formation.)
A significant part of K-drama fan engagement occurs through participation in discourse (recaps, reviews, in-depth analyses, and reflections) around the K-drama text, as evidenced by popular review sites such as Dramabeans, Dramas over Flowers, and The Fangirl Verdict.
Dramabeans explicitly orients itself around discussion: “discussing what [K-dramas] are, what we feel about them, why we love them, what we don’t love about them—anything and everything.” Passionate feeling and critical distance are emphasized in equal measure. The first-person plural underscores the crucial dimension of sociality. Episode recaps and analyses develop through ongoing conversations with the site’s members (known as “beanies”) and are subject to the community’s discursive norms. The very popularity of the recap as a genre bespeaks the desire for community: we read and comment on these posts to experience a sense of “watching with” that takes us out of our private living rooms and into a virtual commons.
SOCIALITY vs. STAYING IN
In the past, you’ve talked about how your mode of fan engagement aligns with the broader K-drama community in some ways but departs from them in other ways. How would you describe the ways that you personally engage with this media?
I’ve mostly been a lurker, though I think there must be many other K-drama fans like me as well. I don’t actively post in online communities or attend watch parties; I belong to no chat groups; I neither write fan fiction nor make fan art. In many ways, I do not fit the classic definition of a fan, but to say a word on behalf of lurker fans, I’d like to think that we are more than just “audience members” who enjoy the media but “claim no larger social identity on the basis of this consumption.” I seek out discourse on the shows I watch, calibrate my own interpretations with what others are saying, and most certainly experience myself as a part of a fan community.
It boils down, I think, to how we conceive of the relationship between sociality and fandom. In fan studies, fannishness takes on a political charge by virtue of its sociality. “[Fan] communal discussions and deliberations… are, in abstract terms, the customs that have been laid out as essential for democratic politics,” Liesbet Van Zoonen writes. Dayan drives home the implications of this point when he insists upon an absolute distinction between the singular “television spectator” and the collective “taste public.” According to Dayan, the spectator only has two options: accept the ideological frame imposed by the content they are consuming, or “reject the frame and become a non-spectator.” The public, however, can “construct an alternative frame of reception, a counter-frame,” for they “display a collective autonomy not afforded to individual spectators.”
But I think the line between solitude and sociality, between individual capitulation and collective resistance, is too sharply drawn here. Popular media provides topical material for everyday thought and talk, as Youna Kim has shown. When individual spectators engage with particular media texts, they are reflecting upon what they consume, testing it against their own histories and ways through which they inhabit the world, and bringing it to bear upon everyday relationships and conversations. And they do so with the acute sense of being part of broader interpretive communities that can themselves overlap in surprising ways.
So it’s hard to insist on the absolute distinction between the political possibilities of a declared “public” and the more mundane and micro ways in which each individual relates—is brought into relation with—others around them.
I really like the idea of the lurker fan as an identity that’s more engaged than is typically acknowledged—I say that as somebody who was very much a lurker fan myself in other fandom spaces.
I feel like lurking gives you this fluency in a particular sphere that can then be potentially deployed in other directions. I think that fluency is a kind of engagement that isn’t often valorized, but I appreciate the way it can motivate other kinds of critique and engagement, including for media beyond or outside of the fandom itself. Being a lurker can prime you for other kinds of publics.
I love how you’ve described it as a “fluency.” It also conjures up for me the idea of “fluidity,” as a lurker fan moves through and across different spaces. An avowed member of any public that knows itself as such is subject to its discursive norms; the sheer demands of sociability can limit how one thinks and what one expresses. On a broader social level, we have also seen how the entrenchment of separate publics can lead to polarization.
One of the central questions that we are exploring, not just in the contents of this issue but also more structurally through the act of creating a public that we call “MENT,” is the different ways multiple “we’s” can be with each other. Even asociality can be a form of relationality, as Summer Kim Lee has powerfully argued. For minoritarian subjects who must “bear and navigate the burden of relatability from which a compulsory sociability emerges,” asociality can provide a powerful critique to “the exhausting liberal mandate impressed upon [these subjects] to make oneself relatable, sociable, and approachable.” In pulling back from “relatability,” a more radical “relationality” becomes possible.
To put the question another way: what new lifeworlds are getting their seeds sown when we choose to stay in and listen to music or watch tv?
Yes! And I want to expand on your point about the limitations of staying within the confines of a particular group.
Returning to the idea of BTS's presence / absence in this issue, one of our primary desires is for the magazine to expand outward and cultivate work on artists and groups beyond BTS. Starting with but also moving beyond the critical frames that BTS has enabled creates room for a multiplicity of perspectives through which we can pursue relationality without, I think, reductivity.
We insist on the importance of difference (between K-media forms, between one K-pop group and another, between different fans within the same community) even as our desire is for speaking to, writing with, and creating alongside each other. How do the myriad forms of K-media move through our interrelated cultural spheres? How do “we,” a (dis)collective of diversely-sited subjects, engage with these K-media modes in different ways? What dynamics beyond mainstream success can orient our response to such cultural objects?
What about groups or media objects that are not popular by industry metrics? What work do they do? How can we imagine horizons of the “popular” beyond market domination as index? Our first issue sketches out some preliminary answers, but it remains limited, as all issues necessarily are. So, we invite others to join the conversation :)
IN THIS ISSUE
Our issue opens with two interviews. In a conversation with three of the editors of Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader, we pursue some of the fundamental questions that motivated MENT’s inception: what is the status of K-culture discourse today? How do we negotiate our identities as both fans and critics of this media? And what are the stakes of having this conversation at all?
Our second interview is with ARMY for Palestine (A4P), the fan collective organizing within the BTS community in support of Palestine. As their activism directs the latent politics of fandom toward liberatory ends, the collective offers us concrete answers to the theoretical questions posed above. The A4P admins make succinct but powerful arguments for the dissolution of old binaries of fan and critic, activist and consumer, viewer and participant. Far from distinct categories, their overlap is not only present but increasingly urgent.
The “arguments” section features four critical essays that explore the potential of K-drama, K-pop, and Korean American literature for creating relationality across difference. Steve Choe argues that the distinctiveness of K-drama manifests through its visual and sound design “not in the moments where dialogue and narrative action dominate, but in the moments that seem to suspend the forward movement of the plot.” These moments, which Choe calls “affective interludes,” mediate character emotion for K-drama viewers near and far, creating a kind of global community defined at once by intimacy and distance.
Yegene Lee compares My Name is Kim Sam-soon (2005) and Another Oh Hae-young (2016) to examine K-drama’s evolving depiction of the modern Korean woman who simultaneously accepts and subverts ideals of femininity. Reading these shows as predecessors of the “friendship dramas” that have emerged in the wake of Korea’s #MeToo movement, Lee considers the role pop culture plays in facilitating female empowerment and solidarity amidst the current surge of antifeminist sentiment in South Korea.
Turning to K-pop, Amber Lee reads SHINee’s Taemin as a shamanic figure who transcends gender confines “in the same way that a shaman channeling spirits accomplishes death-defying feats.” Underscoring K-pop’s political dimensions as not just mass culture industry but also folk art, Lee pushes back against Western pinkwashing narratives and examines the possibilities that Taemin’s gender performance holds for queer people everywhere.
Maddie Kim considers diasporic engagement with Korean pop culture by examining the implications that the Korean Wave holds for Korean American literature, which becomes endowed with an aura of global pop. Through close analyses of recent Korean American literature and personal interviews with the authors of these works, Kim considers how Korean American writers negotiate the slippery relationship between diasporic and national identity.
In recognition of K-media’s perpetually shifting modes, we also feature hybrid pieces whose “attachments” to their objects play out through experimental forms. In an essay that blends the critical with the personal, Julie Moon reflects on how the place-based desires that dramas (and drama sets) sell occasion the author’s discovery of a different relationship to her native land. While the Suncheon Open Film Set presents an instance of ahistorical reproduction, Moon’s tour of the film set with her grandmother ultimately engenders the deeper insight that memory and history themselves constitute “productions of some kind.”
Asanti Gemeda uses the video essay for her analysis of Lovelyz’s music video, “WoW!,” to explore the group’s meta-commentary on idol commodification. With clips from the video, Gemeda traces the visual transformation of the K-pop idol into a paper-doll product while meditating on a song that ultimately undermines and complicates the fantasy of fan-idol love.
vvtobbi’s video art takes up Gemeda’s negotiation between love and fantasy and extends it into a protracted meditation on the aesthetic production of—and obsession with—the idol image. A video artist who blurs the boundaries between fan practice and contemporary art, vvtobbi stages the editor’s love for the idol against their simultaneous manipulation of the idol’s image.
Pivoting from the fan edit video, we turn to the social media platforms and communities that sustain the circulation of such videos and other fan content. In a creatively written piece, M. Xinyu Liu crafts an uncanny imitation of K-pop fan discourse on Reddit. Their playful rendition of the rhythm of fandom writing both highlights the cyclical nature of K-pop fan discourse and indexes its stylistic similarity to online conversation in spaces beyond K-pop.
Just as Liu’s piece explores how K-pop discourse propagates through its online contexts, MENT pursues the flows of K-media across our contemporary cultural spheres and attends to the relational modes that they make possible. An English loanword turned Korean slang turned global K-fandom reference, “ment” (멘트) encodes communication mediated by circulation and translation. It is the semi-spontaneous ad-lib, the deep feeling that occasions more feeling. Our magazine title embraces these affective circuits and the communities they call into existence. Ə
