Early Bodily Discipline

I used to sit on the counter while my mother made breakfast, watching her move through the same quiet routine every morning. She cracked eggs with a small flick of her wrist, wiped the table in slow circles, and shifted between silence and conversation with a rhythm I somehow fell into. I learned when to swing my legs and when to stay still, when a question would be welcomed and when it would feel out of place. None of this was ever explained. My body just mirrored the atmosphere，the clatter of dishes, the steady breathing, the sense that everything should move smoothly without interruption. Back then, it simply felt like comfort. Only later did I realize how early the body starts practicing things it doesn’t yet have words for.

Foucault reminds us that discipline settles into the body through repetition rather than force, long before we have the language to name it (Foucault 1977). Bordo adds that habits feel “natural” not because they originate within us, but because they are practiced until they seem inevitable (Bordo 1993). I didn’t know any of this then. I only knew that the “good” body was the one that blended in, the one that didn’t interrupt the rhythm, the one that stayed neatly within the frame drawn for it. And perhaps that is why Bollmer’s idea of the body as media materiality stays with me. Even as children, we were already being tuned for legibility, for smooth circulation, for being seen in the “right” way (Bollmer 2016). Long before I encountered pop culture or performance, I had already absorbed something: that the body becomes visible only after it has learned how not to disturb the picture.

Algorithmic K-Pop Visibility

The visual language of K-pop girl groups has become one of the most globally recognizable media phenomena of the past decade. Even for people who pay little attention to K-pop, its images still appear constantly in the background of online life.  They show up not because users seek them out, but because the algorithms that structure digital platforms treat these visuals as universally recognizable and easy to distribute. Over time, this steady, almost passive exposure creates a sense of familiarity, as if the look and rhythm of K-pop girlhood were something we already understood, even when we know very little about the cultural or industrial context that produced it. They appear in TikTok edits, airport fashion compilations, Spotify banners, Vogue covers, and YouTube recommendations. In this way, K-pop girlhood has become a global aesthetic shorthand for “Asian femininity,” detached from its origins and recontextualized through international media flows.

Industrial Origins of Idol Femininity

Scholars point out that the figure of the female idol did not emerge organically: it is rooted in South Korea’s rapid industrialization during the 1960s–1980s, when Confucian patriarchal management structures and the exploitation of young female labor shaped how women’s bodies were disciplined, displayed, and commodified in public culture (Gooyong 2017). The choreography of cuteness and submission that defined early K-pop was far more than a stylistic choice; it crystallized the broader sociopolitical conditions that cast women simultaneously as disciplined laborers and as consumable cultural commodities.

The Marketed Shift to “Crush” Empowerment

More recently, the industry has embraced the so-called “crush girl” aesthetic,confident, charismatic, emotionally restrained, aligned with global discourses of empowerment (Sun, Paje’, & Lee 2023). Blackpink has become the emblem of this shift, their public personas marketed as the definitive repudiation of earlier girlhood tropes. The dominant narrative circulating online suggests that Korean femininity has undergone a genuine transformation: that the cute-to-powerful arc signifies increased autonomy, feminist progress, or ideological change. However, as media theorists remind us, visibility is not synonymous with liberation. When empowerment becomes an easily exportable aesthetic, packaged for global consumption, it becomes difficult to distinguish structural change from a strategic recalibration of marketable femininity. What forms of feminine subjectivity are being legitimized through these hyper-mediated performances, and which possibilities are being constrained, erased, or rendered unimaginable?

Discipline as Affective Technique

When we look at the bodies of contemporary girl-group idols, it is tempting to treat what we see as a kind of distilled personality, confidence, coolness, a stylistic refusal of vulnerability. But the media theories we’ve worked with suggest something more complicated: what feels like a “self” on screen is often the afterimage of systems that have already moved through the body long before it appears in front of a camera.Foucault gives us the vocabulary for this calibration. Discipline, he writes, works not by coercion but by embedding micro-habits: the turn of the chin, the straightened spine, the practiced smile (Foucault 1977). What seems voluntary is often the sediment of countless corrections. Bordo extends this insight by observing that once such corrections settle into muscle memory, we mistake them for personal inclination (Bordo 1993). A particular walk, a particular emotional poise, a particular restraint begins to feel “natural,” not because it arises from the self but because it has been rehearsed until it replaces whatever existed before.

The Body as Media Materiality

This is precisely where Bollmer becomes crucial. For Bollmer, the body is not merely disciplined by media, it becomes a medium, a material surface optimized for circulation and readability within a given cultural system (Bollmer 2016). The gestures we associate with the “crush girl” aesthetic, cool confidence, perfectly metered charisma, emotional containment, are not spontaneous expressions. They are industrial techniques that render the body legible within a global visual economy. The body is trained to be smooth, efficient, and expressive in highly specific ways because these qualities travel well across platforms. A certain tilt of the head or unbothered gaze becomes a replicable template, not an authentic disclosure of subjectivity.

The Limits of Distant Vision

Sometimes I think about how vision itself is organized in East Asian media cultures. In glossy MVs and perfectly lit close-ups, the idol’s face does not simply appear; it is delivered to us already curated, polished, legible, engineered for instant recognition. But real women’s lives never arrive in that state. They require nearness, texture, and time, forms of attention that cannot be automated or algorithmically scaled. You have to move closer before anything becomes truly visible. Media theory teaches us that distance is one of capital’s most effective visual strategies: it offers the appearance of empowerment while softening, even silencing, the voices that underwrite the image. The farther the image travels, the quieter the body becomes. So the question is not only whether East Asia is distant from “real” empowerment, but what our eyes have been trained to perceive from afar, and what becomes audible only when that distance is refused.

Works Cited

Bollmer, Grant. Inhuman Networks: Social Media and the Archaeology of Connection. Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.

Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. University of California Press, 1993.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, 1977.

Gooyong, Kim. “Cute but Deadly: The Commodification of Female Labor in Early K-pop.” Journal of Korean Popular Culture, vol. 5, no. 2, 2017, pp. 15–32.

Sun, Wanning, D. Paje’, and Haein Lee. “Rebranding Femininity: The ‘Crush Girl’ Aesthetic in Contemporary K-pop.” Media & Culture Review, vol. 12, no. 1, 2023, pp. 44–62.