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This chapter provides a key themes and approaches and explains the state of the highly interdisciplinary research on Korean Pop (K-Pop), which can further the of music in Korea. It highlights the significance of music in understanding Korean culture and society. K-Pop’s transnational makeup has become the genre’s most salient feature. Shaped and reflected by multiple practices and textures, K-Pop exhibits high eclecticism by merging a plethora of techniques, styles, and genres on linguistic, aural, visual, and performative levels. The representation of female identities in K-Pop is standardized within a similarly narrow continuum of beauty ideals, of which the innocent-yet-cute “girl-next-door” and the sexually enticing imageries figure prominently at the respective ends. The playfulness and re-fashioning of gender roles in K-Pop offer great visual pleasure to audiences and have opened up a discursive space in which traditional roles of masculinity and femininity can be critically reflected, reoriented, and transformed in ways that may allow a more open discussion of sexuality.

For a long time popular music and aesthetics have been considered as mutually exclusive categories within the musicological discourse. Based on the predominance of idealistic autonomy aesthetics, the concept of the (musical) ‘work of art’, at its core, legitimised the exclusion of popular music from the realm of aesthetics. Since the concept of autonomy constituted the beauty of art as a sphere free from social functions and independent from interests of the culture industries, two antithetical strategies in researching pop music have recently emerged: on the one hand pop music has been described as art, on the other hand it has been considered as a cultural phenomenon solely explored through sociological approaches. This paper looks for an alternative way in order to overcome the dualisms of art and everyday life, aesthetics and society, without neglecting the inherent aesthetic dimension of popular music cultures or the processes of identity‐making of the involved people. For this purpose, conc...