Oh, C. (2022). K-Pop Dance: Fandoming Yourself on Social Media. Routledge.

Abstract

Chuyun Oh’s K-Pop Dance: Fandoming Yourself on Social Media, is the fifirst book by a scholar solely dedicated to understanding the signifificance of the K-Pop cover dance phenomenon. Oh asserts that fans eventually fandom themselves and their bodies by copying and idolizing K-Pop dance. She introduces the framework of ‘social media dance’ to understand how dance is performed and consumed on social media, emphasizing that unlike professional dancers performing in front of an audience in a theater, on social media, the public can be both dancers and audience members (Oh, p. 3). The book details the transformation of dance in K-Pop from the 1980s to the early 2020s and is the result of substantial ethnographic research including interviews and “participation-observation” with forty amateur and professional K-Pop dancers based in Seoul, California, and New York (Oh, pp. 6-7). Despite the presence of a few incorrect facts, spelling mistakes, and incorrect grammar in the book, Oh has undeniably created an essential resource regarding the scholarship of K-Pop dance for students and scholars of Communication Studies, Media Studies, Performance Studies, Dance, and Korean studies.