Plastic bodies on the world stage: international fans’ negotiations of Korean pop idols’ bodies through mediated discourses on military service

Abstract

Perfectly constructed and positioned for a social media age, South Korea’s K-pop idols have become key figures in transnational economies of desire. However, they also stand at the epicentre of a series of conflicting power claims between fans, institutions, and nations. This thesis examines discourses on the social media site X (formerly known as Twitter) surrounding the mandatory military enlistments of two high-profile idols: MONSTA X’s Minhyuk and BTS’s V. This thesis deploys a Foucauldian discourse-analytical approach to understanding the relationship between language and hegemony, taking the body as a key in- and prescriptive surface for discourses of desire, identity and nationalism. This framework is augmented through the work of Don Ihde, whose work considers bodies along multiple registers: physical, cultural and technological. Further shaping this analysis is a focus on two key structures in the positioning of actors within discourses over idol bodies: X’s platform structure, and what Derek Johnson (2017) terms ‘fantagonism’. From there, this thesis provides a detailed analysis of how these positionings play out in the struggles for discursive hegemony that result from contradictions in the understandings of fans, nations and institutions over matters of identity, ownership and acceptable labour that arise from idols’ repositionings as soldiers. Ultimately, it is in the ruptures that that the limitations of digitised bodies make themselves known, problematising the cultural and technological trajectories that idols represent.