From factory girls to K-pop idol girls : cultural politics of developmentalism, patriarchy, and neoliberalism in South Korea's popular music industry / Gooyong Kim.
Material type: TextSeries: Publisher: Lanham, Maryland : Lexington Books, c2019Description: 153 p. ; 24 cmISBN:- 9781498548823
- 23 306.4842409519 K491f
Item type | Current library | Collection | Call number | Vol info | Copy number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
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Books | Library, Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB) Window on Korea | Non-fiction | 306.4842409519 K491f (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 2019 | 01 | Available | WOK000419 |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Focusing on female idols' proliferation in the South Korean popular music (K-pop) industry since the late 1990s, Gooyong Kim critically analyzes structural conditions of possibilities in contemporary popular music from production to consumption. Kim contextualizes the success of K-pop within Korea's development trajectories, scrutinizing how a formula of developments from the country' rapid industrial modernization (1960s-1980s) was updated and re-applied in the K-pop industry when the state had to implement a series of neoliberal reformations mandated by the IMF. To that end, applying Michel Foucault's discussion on governmentality, a biopolitical dimension of neoliberalism, Kim argues how the regime of free market capitalism updates and reproduces itself by 1) forming a strategic alliance of interests with the state, and 2) using popular culture to facilitate individuals' subjectification and subjectivation processes to become neoliberal agents. As to an importance of K-pop female idols, Kim indicates a sustained utility/legacy of the nation's century-long patriarchy in a neoliberal development agenda. Young female talents have been mobilized and deployed in the neoliberal culture industry in a similar way to how un-wed, obedient female workers were exploited and disposed on the sweatshop factory floors to sustain the state's export-oriented, labor-intensive manufacturing industry policy during its rapid developmental stage decades ago.