KJCKorea
Journal Central

This paper examines how the Netflix documentary Pop Star Academy: KATSEYE represents and explains the K-Pop production system. Pop Star Academy: KATSEYE constructs the formation process of the global girl group KATSEYE as a narrative of training, competition, and growth. Throughout this process, contestants learn not only dance and vocal skills but also how to regulate their emotions, maintain a professional yet deferential demeanor, and cultivate intimacy through communication with fandom. In particular, the contestants' ethnic and cultural diversity is commodified as a resource constituting the global girl group's identity, and the competition and hierarchy surrounding representation are reproduced in the documentary following the introduction of fan voting. Behind this project lies an industrial condition: a joint venture between a Korean entertainment company seeking to export the K-Pop system and an American major label seeking to acquire that system. Rather than expanding into a critique of the system, the fissures in relationships caused by competition, along with diversity ornamentalized for commercial success, are packaged as a narrative of growth in which contestants regulate their emotions, accept reality, and renew themselves. Pop Star Academy: KATSEYE represents moments of conflict and training as a process of growth toward becoming a star, thereby persuading audiences—through an emotional narrative—of a K-Pop production system that manufactures highly commodified subjects. The narrative and representation of this girl group project reveal a desire to position K-Pop as a new universal standard of professionalism within the global cultural industry: the desire for a 'K-Pop Standard.‘

This study examines how competition and elimination are organized through militarized forms in the Netflix survival reality shows Physical: 100, Siren: Survive the Island, and Culinary Class Wars. The three shows frame physical suffering as evidence of self-overcoming, women professionals’ risk-taking and achievements as evidence of their commitment to a mission, and hierarchical labor and self-exhaustion as evidence of professional pride. This study conceptualizes “militarization” as the process through which competition is organized according to military-style discipline and mission-oriented performance. It further defines “militaristic fantasy” as a cultural form through which militaristic values are experienced in narratives of emotional resonance and self-validation. By analyzing the theatrical form of survival reality shows, in which real bodies intersect with artificially constructed situations, this study demonstrates how the violence of competition and self-exhaustion are transformed into evidence of heroism and how elimination is reconstructed as a meaningful occasion for self-validation.

This study examines existential resistance and bad faith in Oh Hak-young’s postwar dramatic trilogy: The Meaning of the Chicken (1957), Life Is Like a Chorus (1958), and The Flower and the Cross (1958). Existential resistance refers to the subject’s attempt to choose and construct the meaning of their own existence, whereas bad faith denotes an attitude of evading responsibility for one’s free choices by presenting one’s actions as the inevitable outcomes of external circumstances, innate nature, or desire. In The Meaning of the Chicken, Sang-hwa attempts to create value through painting amid the loss of meaning caused by war. His refusal to sell his paintings resists the reduction of art to economic value. Yet it also constitutes bad faith insofar as he disregards his family’s economic crisis and absolutizes artistic transcendence. Likewise, his departure from home represents both an attempt to reclaim subjectivity and an evasion of responsibility for others. In Life Is Like a Chorus, Sang-hwa rejects marriage as an oppressive institution. However, while resisting objectification by the gaze of the Other, he paradoxically reduces Aran to an object of his desire, objectifying her body and denying her freedom. He further displays bad faith by justifying his sexual choice as the inevitable expression of natural male desire, thereby denying his own freedom and responsibility. His realization following Aran’s death also constitutes bad faith insofar as it rests on his appropriation of Aran as a symbol for his own existential awakening. In The Flower and the Cross, Sang-hwa’s resistance extends to legal judgment and death. He recasts his already scheduled execution by hanging as an active exercise of self-judgment, but this judgment culminates in a declaration of his own innocence rather than an acceptance of responsibility for Aran’s death. This constitutes bad faith: he effaces the facticity of his own violence while absolutizing transcendence through his declaration of innocence. Sang-hwa’s final stance thus represents not the fulfillment of existential freedom but a contradiction in which freedom and responsibility, his own choices and bad faith, and resistance and self-absolutization collide. Oh Hak-young’s trilogy thus portrays the existential determination of a postwar subject who refuses to submit to meaninglessness, objectification, and absurdity. At the same time, it demonstrates how freedom, when detached from responsibility for the Other’s freedom and life, can turn into violence and bad faith.