Drinking the KATSEYE Kool Aid

Minority Representation in the Postfeminist Era

Abstract

In 2025, the clothing brand GAP released its Better in Denim commercial, a video posted to YouTube featuring global girl group KATSEYE, a pop group formed by Korean entertainment conglomerate HYBE in collaboration with American record label Geffen Records. The group consists of members from various global backgrounds, including women of Indian Tamil descent, Filipino descent, Cuban and Venezuelan descent, South Korean descent, Singaporean and Chinese descent, and Swiss Ghanaian descent, respectively. Much of the discourse found in the audience reception to KATSEYE praises their ethnic diversity and commends their perceived attractiveness.

Because there is little literature regarding racial diversity within K-pop groups, the purpose of this essay is to reveal why audiences might uncritically praise KATSEYE for appearing to subvert rigid hegemonic standards of the Eastern and Western entertainment industries. In this essay, I argue that, despite the veneer of progress for representation for people of color, KATSEYE maintains the oppressive features of performative femininity, and their upholding of these rigid ideals softens the audience's defences to make them easily acceptable. KATSEYE’s ethos, built on plastic representation of minorities and empowerment through self-sexualization, silences the audience's true concern for how these industries practice commodity fetishism on women of color. Through a discourse analysis of YouTube comments underneath the Better in Denim commercial, this essay aims to unravel the modern narratives of ethnic representation and performative femininity through post-racial theory and post-feminist theory.