K-Pop Idols

Abstract

K-pop agencies, or “entertainment companies,” are often described as “idol factories” or “boot camps” in which teenagers are selected to become K-pop idols, trained to acquire a set of skills and manners, evaluated regularly, and forced to conform regarding their looks, behavior, and relationships. The companies must acquire management skills for unexpected situations, such as idols’ dating scandals. In this chapter, the K-pop industry is seen not as a standardized culture built upon a Fordist business model of mass production but as a critical site where diverse social relations are created, negotiated, and contested. The industry sees the idol body as a profitable media text that is manageable, predictable, and available to any general audience. Nonetheless, the idol retains some degree of human agency. In an industry in which an idol body with agency become a volatile product through mediated presentations and representations, how do the companies produce idols at the most complete level? How do the idols cope with their multiple roles and the expectations placed upon them as producers, laborers, and commodities of intimacy? This chapter investigates the methods by which entertainment companies produce idols as incomplete commodities and intimate laborers through surveillance and regulation.