'A sudden wave of embarrassment washes over me': Confessions and negotiations of guilty pleasure among fans of “bad” K-pop songs

Sammanfattning

This thesis explores how audiences experience and manage their guilty pleasures when listening to “bad” K-pop songs. By employing Goffman’s (1986) concept of stigma and Scambler’s distinction between stigma and deviance as the main analytical lenses, and drawing on other frameworks associated with taste, the study investigates how listeners understand, respond to, and justify their guilty pleasure songs, and how certain sociocultural contexts shape these practices. While “badness” consumption is a common feature of mundane cultural experience across various contexts and audiences, the understanding of how guilty pleasure operates in everyday life remains limited. This study focuses on SumDeutMyung (MMTG 2018-2020), a YouTube video series produced by the MMTG channel, approaching it as a space where private listening practices become openly visible and collectively negotiated. Through a qualitative textual analysis of comments under the original videos on YouTube, the study examines how users themselves define guilty pleasure, the emotional responses that arise from their engagement with guilty pleasure songs, and the justificatory strategies they use to defend their tastes in an online participatory space. These data reveal how tastes are socially shaped, and how individuals position and identify themselves in relation to societal norms about what is acceptable. The findings demonstrate that guilty pleasure is defined as a mode of consumption surrounding a private enjoyment of “bad” cultural objects, characterised as an affective tension between pleasure and discomfort. The YouTube comment section adds complexity to this consumption by exposing socially unacceptable tastes to public view. Listeners experience persistent ambivalent emotions when engaging with guilty pleasure songs, including nostalgia, guilt, and shame. To manage the affective tension and justify their tastes, listeners adopt strategies, such as ironic consumption, vindication, collectivisation, and reinterpretation. Ultimately, this thesis argues that South Korea’s specific sociocultural context, which strongly emphasises conformity and hierarchy, stigmatises fan identity and “bad” tastes. This indicates a fundamental distinction from existing understanding of “badness” consumption, which mainly views audience engagement with “bad” cultural objects as an open celebration of deviance and rebellion against mainstream culture.