ABSTRACT
This chapter reconsiders BTS’s commercial success by analyzing a visuality of alternative masculinity. It provides an alternative heuristic to the current discourse on the group’s success that focuses on a committed fandom and its positive messages. Dealing with the political economy of cultural production, it addresses how BTS changed themes in music, messages and visuality around its US debut to market Western (female) audiences’ increasing desires for alternative gender and social relations. Rather than the current hyperbolic assessment on BTS’s “emancipatory masculinity” that is alleged to empower fans, this chapter reveals how the group re-appropriates hegemonic cultural, economic, ideological and gender relations through its seemingly alternative visualities. This chapter argues that BTS is likely to reinforce the perceived inevitability of the status quo, or hegemonic solutions to the current social problems for its non-threatening, individualistic and consumerist messages of self-love, self-betterment, resilience, narcissism and other neoliberal fantasies.
