If any of this sounds like your kind of thing, I hope you will check out the book—or ask your library to order it. Library orders really do help edited collections find their way into classrooms and future research. And please share the thread with anyone who might be interested! #CriticalKPop

Chapter 12 (Megha Solanki): BIBI’s Oh Geum-ji is bloody, ambitious, monstrous, sexual, and very hard to contain. Solanki reads Lowlife Princess: Noir through the femme fatale to ask what happens when female empowerment gets too unruly for K-pop’s cleaner scripts. #BIBI #CriticalKPop

Chapter 11 (@theogray.bsky.social): Moon Byul’s 6equence tells a queer love story across songs, videos, and more. Gray shows how the story becomes legible only when those pieces are read together, making queerness visible while leaving room for protection and ambiguity. #MOONBYUL #CriticalKPop

Chapter 10 (me!): A concert sign declared that “KARD challenges all bisexuals.” In this chapter, I take that seriously. I look at how KARD builds queer desire through bodies, choreography, innuendo, and touch, creating stories that stay sticky, messy, and hard to straighten out. #KARD #CriticalKPop

Chapter 9 (@lillyluwrites.bsky.social): TXT’s storyworld keeps circling back to five people, closed loops, repeated images, and intimacy. Lu finds queer possibility in that enclosure, while also asking when a closed story starts to look too much like closed working conditions. #TXT #CriticalKPop

Chapter 8 (Sara Taghvaeishahroodi and Fatemeh Salehivaziri): Hwasa and Jessi have built careers around pushing back on how women in K-pop are supposed to look, move, and speak. This chapter asks what that self-expression opens up and what it can still cost. #HWASA #JESSI #CriticalKPop

Chapter 7 (Patricia Cove): K-pop idol, indie rocker, YouTuber, farmer? Kim Hyun Joong’s No Solid Answers and “Cage” run into all the other stories told about his career. Cove asks what happens when those narratives refuse to settle into a neat celebrity “comeback.” #CriticalKPop

Chapter 6 (Zeb Khalid): BTS’s HYYH universe has never belonged to one text—or, really, to one storyteller. Khalid looks at how official narratives, fan theories, fic, blogs, and collective detective work all help keep the story alive, messy, and continually unfinished. #BTS #HYYH #CriticalKPop

Chapter 5 (@sharonbeckerphd.bsky.social): ENHYPEN’s vampires are doing more than looking cool. Across videos, choreography, albums, and webtoons, Becker reads their undead world as a way of thinking through adolescence, idol life, identity, and the uneasiness of becoming. #ENHYPEN #CriticalKPop

Chapter 4 (@nayoungbishoff.bsky.social): Sunmi’s “Gashina” begins with han, a Korean language of sorrow shaped by gender and memory, but it does not leave her there. Bishoff shows how the song turns abandonment into something else: self-definition, agency, and transformation. #SUNMI #CriticalKPop

Chapter 3 (@emarlow.bsky.social): Taemin keeps returning to the cruciform “T-pose.” Marlow follows that gesture across videos and performances to show how sacred imagery can shift as it circulates, gathering new meanings around vulnerability, desire, and transgression. #TAEMIN #CriticalKPop

Chapter 2 (Joseph T. Salazar): BTS’s “Dynamite” feels bright, familiar, and deliberately easy to enter. Salazar looks at what that familiarity costs, tracing how Korean identity and masculinity are softened, repackaged, and made comfortably legible for a global pop market. #BTS #CriticalKPop

Chapter 1 (Osarugue Otebele): Is K-pop in its Afrobeats era? Looking at TXT and LE SSERAFIM, Otebele asks what it means when African sounds travel easily through K-pop while the bodies, histories, and places attached to them do not. #TXT #LESSERAFIM #CriticalKPop

The first volume asked how K-pop stories move across songs, videos, performances, platforms, and fandoms. This one asks what happens politically as they move: what gets carried with them, what gets left behind, who performs the labor, and when/where refusal becomes possible. #CriticalKPop

My second edited K-pop collection, The Cultural Politics of Transmedia Storytelling in K-Pop, officially came out yesterday from @bloomsburyacademic.bsky.social. I am a day late to my own publication announcement, but very happy to finally have this one in the world. A thread! #CriticalKPop