Abstract :
In September 2009, the leader of the South Korean boy band 2PM, Park Jaebeom (a Korean American from Seattle), ceremoniously left Korea after the discovery of a controversial posting on his Myspace account from before he debuted as a singer. Fans were outraged about the extent to which Jaebum was disciplined for his past comments and wasted no time in displaying this outrage in the form of protests, sit-ins and performances. These fans were resisting Jaebeom s dismissal, and by effect the over-reaching power his company, JYP Entertainment, seemed to be extracting. In this paper, I deconstruct the notion of resistance as a diagnostic of power, as Abu- Lughod (1990: 42) terms it, where resistance is not a romanticised notion of overthrowing dictatorial regimes or causing wide-spread change, but rather in opposition to hegemonic moments as its own moment in time. I argue that these moments of resistance illustrate not only that consumers are stakeholders in what is produced and how it is produced, but also that these forms of resistance are instances of affective relationships built on intimacy. In other words, these protests serve a dual purpose of recovering the fans lost idol (in this case 2PM s Jay Park) and building intimate networks of friendships predicated not only on shared consumption but also shared resistance. This paper will therefore make some preliminary notes on Korean popular music, delineate theories of resistance as momentary and cathartic, and then introduce the case of 2PM and their fans to illustrate that communities of fans are bound together through their affective resistance.
Keywords :
popular culture , resistance in South Korea , affect , fan culture
