Between universes: Fan positionalities in the transnational circulation of K-pop (original) (raw)
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Transnational fandom in the making: K-pop fans in Vancouver
International Communication Gazettee
This study examines how young people become, and feel about being, K-pop fans in a Western context, which is geographically and culturally distant from K-pop's place of origin. Drawing on qualitative interviews with K-pop fans in Vancouver, Canada, the study explores (1) how young fans encounter K-pop and negotiate its cultural distance, (2) how K-pop and its fandom are stereotyped by non-fans, (3) how the stereotypes are negotiated by the fans, and (4) how the fans engage in a particular sense of belonging through K-pop. NOTE: the pre-proof version is available on the author's website kyongyoon.com
Global Imagination of K-Pop: Pop Music Fans’ Lived Experiences of Cultural Hybridity
Drawing on qualitative interviews with Canadian-based K-pop (contemporary South Korean “idol pop” music) fans, this study discusses how transnational fans experience and interpret K-pop as a form of cultural hybridity that facilitates global imagination. In particular, the study explores how fans consume and translate transnational pop music while engaging with different modes of global imagination in their everyday lives. In so doing, the study contributes to a better understanding of the text and context of K-pop from the lens of audiences’ negotiation with globalization.
Negotiating fan identities in K-pop music culture
In this paper I bring together interaction, media, deviance, self, and identity to make sense of how young Singaporeans consume Korean popular (hereafter, K-pop) music and culture. My overarching goal is to highlight that being a music fan is not a straightforward or even easy experience. Rather, the self as music fan is continually developing within a complex variety of social processes, from the circulation of global, mass media representations to inter-and intra-personal interactions. I present data collected from a study on K-pop music consumption in Singapore, a small island-nation in Southeast Asia with an insatiable thirst for foreign culture. The data show how a group of Singaporean K-pop fans were regularly bombarded with largely negative messages about what it means to be K-pop music fans, and how these meanings affected their own negotiations as fans. K-pop fandom provided a sense of shared identity and status within popular youth culture, yet their experiences were often soured by negative media portrayals of deviant fans, whose behaviors risked stigmatizing the K-pop social identity. This paper thus deals with some of the problems for self that being a music fans entails.
Evolving yet contentious transcultural fanscapes: Peruvian fans' accounts of K-pop and its fandoms
Media, Culture & Society, 2024
Global fans’ engagement with K-pop (South Korean pop music) demonstrates how audiences’ daily lives and identities are interwoven with transcultural media. This study explores how global K-pop fan cultures have evolved along with the genre’s expansion overseas, with particular reference to Peruvian fans in the Global South context. Drawing on Peruvian fans’ accounts of the global K-pop fanscapes – the universes experienced and mediated through fan practices, the study addresses the complexities, negotiations, and conflicts in audience engagement with transcultural media. By examining how K-pop fans in a distant locale imaginarily identify with K-pop idols and interact with other global fans and non-fans, the study reveals that local fans may realize their identity in the global fanscapes while being aware of power relations that operate between different audiences.
The Korean Wave has given Korean popular culture and its products multinational audiences and consumer fanbases. It is no longer uncommon to see fans of all genders, nationalities, and racial and ethnic backgrounds participating in the K-pop fandom, especially online. However, even now, Black American participation in the K-pop fandom is often policed by non-Black fans and Black fandom outsiders alike. This paper examines the racial anxieties that surround Black American engagement in the K-pop fandom and suggests that, through their participation, Black fans are actively contesting the racial, national, and linguistic boundaries that surround K-pop culture and, in the process, are renegotiating Black Americans' historical relationship to the very notions of culture, identity, and belonging.
Cultural Translation of K-Pop Among Asian Canadian Fans
Drawing on qualitative interview data, this study examines the cultural translation of K-pop in Canada. By focusing on Canadian youth of Asian descent, who are relatively marginalized in the dominant Canadian mediascape yet considered a main segment of K-pop fandom in Canada, the study closely examines how racial and affective affinities of K-pop are translated and negotiated by young fans. In the study, young Asian Canadian fans challenged the racial stereotyping of K-pop as the other of dominant Western pop culture by positively redefining racial meanings attached to K-pop. Meanwhile, they affectively identified with K-pop idols via the extensive use of social media, and thus internalize a particular mode of subjectivity through which individuals willingly seek the model of a self-developing, entrepreneurial self.
Research Handbook on Feminist Political Thought, 2024
Co-authored by Min Joo Lee, Lily Chu, Inhye Irene Han, and Ji Sun Jeon * This document is a copy-editing version of the chapter. For a final printed copy of the chapter, please email me at mlee4@oxy.edu Hallyu fandom is made up of fans of different races, gender, and sexual identities, but a certain subsection of fans has gained particular notoriety for their overzealousness. These fans acquired the nickname “Koreaboo.” Many Koreaboos share social media posts about their affection for Koreans and Korean culture to form transnational connections with other like-minded individuals (Lee 2020b). In this chapter, we examine the social media posts related to Koreaboos. We examine both the posts uploaded by Koreaboos and the ones posted about Koreaboos by those who do not share their zeal for Korea. We utilize feminist theories on eroticism and feminist media theories to conduct critical analyses of these social media posts. We argue that, on the one hand, Koreaboos attempt to deconstruct problematic dating culture and gender norms in their respective countries by taking control of their erotic desires and practices. However, on the other hand, we contend that they reconstruct the problematic binary between the East and the West through their essentialist erotic desires for Korean culture and people.
K-pop fandom as 'sub-visible culture': Digital work and enjoyment in the precarious present
Studies in South Asian Film and Media, 2023
In this article, I attempt to understand the global K-pop fandom among young women, from the perspective of non-metropolitan locations like the state of Kerala in southern India. I examine the 'sub-visible' nature of K-pop fandom and situate it in relation to existing discourses surrounding visibility in youth subcultures and fan cultures, both in India and the West. I argue that the key to understanding this fandom is in the cultural process of feminization that it produces-a feminization of male K-pop idols through the 'free labour' (to use a concept by Tiziana Terranova) that K-pop fans engage in on digital spaces-labour that has the structure of work and the function of enjoyment and enthusiasm. Drawing on existing discourses on the 'feminine', I analyse the peculiar mode of feminization in K-pop fandom as a response to the precarity and vulnerability experienced by young people in the contemporary world.
K-pop Reception and Participatory Fan Culture in Austria
Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, 2014
K-pop's popularity and its participatory fan culture have expanded beyond Asia and become significant in Europe in the past few years. After South Korean pop singer Psy's "Gangnam Style" music video topped the Austrian chart in October 2012, the number and size of K-pop events in Austria sharply increased, with fans organizing various participatory events, including K-pop auditions, dance festivals, club meetings, quiz competitions, dance workshops, and smaller fan-culture gatherings. In the private sector, longtime fans have transitioned from participants to providers, and in the public sector, from observers to sponsors. Through in-depth interviews with event organizers, sponsors, and fans, this article offers an ethnographic study of the reception of K-pop in Europe that takes into consideration local interactions between fans and Korean sponsors, perspectives on the genre, patterns of social integration, and histories. As a case study, this research stresses the local situatedness of K-pop fan culture by arguing that local private and public sponsors and fans make the reception of K-pop different in each locality. By exploring local scenes of K-pop reception and fan culture, the article demonstrates the rapidly growing consumption of K-pop among Europeans and stresses multidirectional understandings of globalization.
Media, Culture & Society, 2018
This article has examined how the Hallyu phenomenon is integrated into a transnational global cultural landscape, focusing on Chilean reception of K-pop. It analyzed how Hallyu fans engage with a social media-saturated environment in Chile, mapping out transnational pop cultural flows within the digital media environment through which the participatory culture of media users is spread. What is interesting is that Chilean society, in general, shows negative attitudes toward K-pop fans. More importantly, while many Chileans consider K-pop fans weird and strange, often disparaging their family members and friends for liking such music, the marginalization of K-pop fans in Chile promotes a greater sense of bonding among them through the affinity spaces of social media. Under this circumstance, most of our interviewees explained that digital media plays a vital role in the dissemination of K-pop in Chile and Latin America. Unlike Hallyu fans in other regions, K-pop fans in Chile have developed cultural intimacy specific to digital site-media, primarily in the realm of social media, and K-pop generates the creation of affinity spaces via different social media platforms.