EXPLORING THE NEXUS OF K-POP DANCE CHALLENGES: CHILDREN’S K-POP DREAM, INTERNET STARDOM, AND CUTE LABOR IN THE EVOLVING CULTURE INDUSTRY

Abstract

For its global popularity and market expansion, K-pop idol culture has been integrated into child peer culture on social media, particularly in the Asia Pacific region. This is particularly noticeable in the form of K-pop dance challenges on short-form platforms/functions like Instagram Reels, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts, where people replicate choreographic moves from latest K-pop songs and post short-form videos with hashtags. Children casually join the trending challenges for fun and post videos by themselves, their parents, and even third-party companies, including child influencer agencies and K-pop training companies. This paper interrogates how this phenomenon has evolved into children’s new peer culture within the context of the influencer and K-pop culture industries. I discuss how children are positioned and presented in the evolving landscape of culture industries in the Asia Pacific region. I argue that this genre serves as a new version of ‘child pageant programs’ where childhood is performed and presented as a mixture of cuteness, innocence, immature maturity, and prodigious skills for the adult gaze. Pertinent issues surrounding children’s agency and wellbeing are also discussed, such as children’s everyday digital labor and the subsequent normalization of commodified childhood innocence in the industries. Crucially, the virality-centered algorithms of social media platforms underpinned in K-pop dance challenges further normalizes children’s seamless labor of cute, with the myth of instant internet virality, stardom, and K-pop dream. This study is based on a 4-year ethnographic observation of children’s K-pop dance challenges in the Asia Pacific region.