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Deviation and Integration of the Female Body in Idol Fandom Fiction - Lee Yu-ri’s Dungdung and Lee Hee-ju’s My Idol’s Baby

  • Journal of Popular Narrative
  • 2026, 32(2), pp.289~315
  • DOI : 10.18856/jpn.2026.32.2.008
  • Publisher : The Association of Popular Narrative
  • Research Area : Interdisciplinary Studies > Interdisciplinary Research
  • Received : May 9, 2026
  • Accepted : June 18, 2026
  • Published : June 30, 2026

Park ShinHye 1,  Kim Tae Soo 1

1단국대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This study analyzes how the bodies of female characters in idol fandom fiction relate to space, examining the way fantasy within fandom is narrativized through the body's deviation from, and incorporation into, the idol–fan relationship. It takes as its objects two short stories, Lee Yu-ri’s Dungdung and Lee Hee-ju’s My Idol's Baby. Both center on the relationship between a male idol and a female fan, yet they stand in contrast: whereas Eun-tak in Dungdung passes through an external fantasy space, U-mi in My Idol’s Baby makes her own body an internal space that mediates fantasy. Eun-tak departs from the conventionality of the idol–fan relationship and forms a bond grounded in paternal affection; through an extraterrestrial space, her body comes to converge upon herself. U-mi, by contrast, appropriates and reworks a patriarchal grammar through a capitalist transaction, but once the fraud is exposed her attempt fractures, and she is reduced to a bodily materiality that no language can translate. Depending on where fantasy is located, Dungdung presents deviation from the idol–fan relationship and convergence upon the self, while My Idol’s Baby presents an attempt to deviate from the “normal” that ends in forced incorporation. Despite this difference, the two works share a common condition: because escape from the norms of reality is impossible within reality itself, the female character can only pass through fantasy. Moving beyond prior readings that have treated idol fandom fiction as a reflection of socio-cultural phenomena or as a realization of the fantastic, this study rediscovers it as a narrative of self-construction grounded in the female subject’s bodily and spatial experience. It further reads the texts’ response to gendered political structures through the relation between body and space. In doing so, it shows that, as fandom fiction takes shape as a genre of popular narrative, these two works carry a meaningful gender politics.

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