“Not Today”: Geopolitics and Activism

This short summary gives an overview of the topics covered in the essays in this section of the book, which grapple with the local, regional, and transnational contexts and power dynamics that BTS and its fandom emerge from. It describes chapters about localized political struggle that have leveraged BTS in different ways.

In “Empire Goes On: Transpacific Circuits of Care Work,” Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez links the gendered labor of entertainment and hospitality to post–Cold War tourism economies in Asia and the Pacific, locating BTS within this geography and history. Reading their consumption of a hula dance performance on holiday in Hawai’i for their travel show BON VOYAGE alongside the killings of Asian masseuses in Atlanta during the pandemic and their own roles as ambassadors of Korean culture and tourism, Gonzalez foregrounds a circuit of racialized care work to contextualize BTS’s travels. Centering the experience of Asian women in the context of imperial military interstate collaboration, Gonzalez argues for a more complex and comprehensive reckoning with the conditions that shape the gendered and sexualized asymmetries of Asian labor mobilities outside of and within Asia.