13
Popular Culture

Abstract

Scholarship on the creation and circulation of forms of popular culture has always been concerned with questions of audiences and reception. Initial theorizations of audiences as overly credulous, easily swayed masses have long been significantly complicated to account for more active participation. One of the key drivers of this move of framing audiences from passive to active has been the emergence of the discipline of fandom studies. Today, the field is truly multidisciplinary, encompassing popular culture and media studies, literary studies, communication studies and psychology, marketing and tourism studies, amongst others. Additionally, while fan communities have always been transnational and transcultural, the explosion of cross-cultural phenomena like the Korean Hallyu Wave (the worldwide popularity of Korean media texts and celebrities) has brought renewed attention to the interconnected nature of the contemporary global mediascape. Even as it has expanded, one of the main challenges to the discipline has been criticism that it has overemphasized aspects of fan identity, such as gender identity and sexual orientation, while neglecting the role of race. This critique challenges the structure of the field, whereby certain critical genealogies, methodologies, and even fandoms themselves, are granted a canonical and universal status while others are seen as tertiary. This review of published works in popular culture studies focuses on studies of fandom that aim to break these silos, selecting three publications that address different aspects of today’s globalized fandom mediascape to underline the necessity for fandom scholars to expand their understanding of how these spaces are interconnected. Thematically, the review considers how these publications address and extend three core interests of fandom studies: 1. Digital Platforms and Politics; 2. Identity and Community; and 3. Transcultural Flows.

Introduction: Participatory Fandom

Growing out of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, which investigated questions of power and agency within popular cultural formations, particularly Stuart Hall’s framework of encoding/decoding (1973), fandom studies came into its own in anglophone academia in the 1990s with publications such as Camille Bacon-Smith’s Enterprising Women (1992), Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers (1992), and Lisa Lewis’s The Adoring Audience (1992). This first wave of fandom studies was fundamentally invested in complicating and adding nuance to the dominant cultural idea of fans as obsessed and dangerous individuals with a tenuous grip on reality, and established the field as it is broadly understood today. In opposition to prevailing stereotypes, this scholarship framed fans as engaged, productive audiences that were often resistant to mainstream interpretations of the popular cultural texts that appealed to them. Amongst the forms of resistance that were the most interesting to scholars were the ways in which fans expanded the canon of popular cultural texts by producing their imaginative expansions of them through work such as fanfiction, fanart, and fanvids. As opposed to naive and gullible, fans were seen as expert audiences, as illustrated by their skill in unearthing hints and undercurrents in their favourite texts. Notably, fandom scholars chose fans of popular cultural texts or ‘media fandom’ (as opposed to ‘sports fandom’) as the primary focus of their research and theorization about participatory audiences.

Since the early 1990s, what have been broadly termed as the second and third waves of fan studies scholarship have complicated and revised these ideas significantly, along with expanding their focus to encompass different types of fans and fandoms. However, the field continues to have a significant interest in questions of fan identity, community, politics, and evolving aspects of fanwork. Media fandom in particular has been seen as a space for fanwork by fans from marginalized gender identities and sexual orientations which push against mainstream heteronormative media narratives (Stein, Millennial Fandom [2015]; De Kosnik, Rogue Archives [2016]; Lothian, ‘Archival anarchies’ [2013]). It has also been seen as an arena of civic action, with fans coming together to advocate for various issues, ranging from those directly related to media texts, such as the revival of specific television shows or spin-offs for favourite characters, to broader social and political movements including issues of minority representation in media and even electoral organizing (Brough and Shresthova, ‘Fandom Meets Activism’ [2012]; Kligler-Vilenchik, ‘Decreasing World Suck’ [2016]).

There has also undoubtedly been a larger mainstreaming of fandom communities over the last two decades. Engaged audiences have always been valued by media industries, but the transition from fandom communities being seen as subcultural and niche to their more dominant role in globalized mediascapes today is a significant change. This role has been accelerated by the rise of digital platforms and convergence culture in media production, distribution, and reception, which has led to more attention being given to vocal fan communities on social media networks. Fandom scholars such as Henry Jenkins have seen this impulse in a largely positive light, pointing to the possibility of more democratic and participative audiences (Convergence Culture [2008]). However, in practice, ‘empowered’ fans and audiences are frequently hostile to media texts that do not align with their own preferences. This is seen in the frequent objections to the casting of actors of colour for roles deemed to be originally or canonically white, such as in the controversy around the latest Tolkien adaptation, The Rings of Power (2022). While media fandom has traditionally been differentiated from these more majoritarian sections of fandom and seen as more receptive to queer storylines and diverse casts, more recent scholarship has also questioned this assumption.

Today, the study of fandom is truly multidisciplinary as scholars from widely variant backgrounds, from popular culture and media studies, literary studies, communication studies, and psychology to marketing and tourism studies, are interested in investigating how these communities function. Additionally, while fan communities have always been transnational and transcultural, the explosion of cross-cultural phenomena like the Korean Hallyu Wave has brought renewed attention to the interconnected nature of the contemporary global mediascape. This includes issues such as the operations of multinational media conglomerates, networks of production and distribution, and the related functioning of diverse fan communities across different digital platforms, social media networks, and related physical locations.

Even as it has expanded, one of the main challenges to the discipline has been criticism that it has overemphasized aspects of fan identity, such as gender identity and sexual orientation, while neglecting the role of race. As pointed out most notably by Rebecca Wanzo, ‘one of the reasons race may be neglected is because it troubles some of the claims—and desires—at the heart of fan studies scholars and their scholarship.’ That is to say, the inclusion of race as an identity category disturbs some of the field’s foundational ideas around subversion and resistance by engaged viewers of popular cultural texts. This critique identifies and challenges the structure of the field whereby certain critical genealogies, methodologies, and even fandoms themselves, are granted a canonical and universal status while others are seen as tertiary. Inevitably, scholarship focused on anglophone fandoms dominated by white fans of texts produced by USA/UK media industries is seen as universally relevant, while work on fan communities differentiated by (non-white) racial identity, language use, and geographical location is siloed off in conferences, edited collections, and university syllabi.

Wanzo’s critique of the field has been built on by other scholars (Pande, Squee From The Margins [2017]; Woo, Getting A Life [2018]; Stanfill, ‘The Unbearable Whiteness of Fandom and Fan Studies’ [2018]), but the patterns of siloing remain quite apparent in the survey of fan studies publications of 2023. For instance, entire volumes were published about the continuing influence of Western fandoms on cult television shows such as The X-Files, franchises like Star Trek and Doctor Who, and musical figures like The Beatles and Pink Floyd. Additionally, monographs that focused on broader media industry trends with a heavy emphasis on fandom dynamics, such as Eve Ng’s Mainstreaming  Gays: Critical Convergences of Queer Media, Fan Cultures, and Commercial Television, did not need to clarify in their titles that their focus was on the development of industries around queer media only in the USA. However, collections that focused on non-Western media industries, such as Queer Transfigurations: Boys Love Media in Asia, edited by James Welker, continue to be titled to specify their geographical and cultural location. This review of the year’s work in the discipline of fan studies aims to break these silos, selecting three publications—Briony Hannell’s Feminist Fandom: Media Fandom, Digital Feminisms, and Tumblr, Maya Phillips’s Nerd: Adventures in Fandom from this Universe to the Multiverse and Suk-Young Kim’s The Cambridge Companion to K-Pop—that address different aspects of today’s globalized fandom mediascape to underline the necessity for fandom scholars to expand their understanding of how these spaces are interconnected.

1. Digital Platforms and Politics

Through their period of recorded activity from the 1990s onwards, online anglophone fandom communities have moved from platforms like Usenet groups and mailing lists (ONElist, eGroups, Yahoo Groups), to journaling sites (LiveJournal, Dreamwidth) and stand-alone archive websites of individual or groups of fandoms to host fanwork, to what are now the current preferred platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) and Tumblr, along with broad-based archive sites for hosting fanwork (ArchiveOfOurOwn.com or AO3, Wattpad). Fandom interactions on all these platforms have differed according to contemporary norms and practices, and newer participants and developments in technology have often brought further change. However, the platforms themselves have also mediated these interactions, allowing for greater or lesser autonomy, connectivity, and exposure to different ideas.

The first platforms used for fan interactions, such as Usenet and mailing lists, enforced certain assumptions about membership and expectations around participant interactions due to the control exercised by individual moderators. Rebecca Lucy Busker points out that there often was ‘an implied and even overt hostility to critical discussion’ (‘On Symposia’ [2008]). This hostility to critical discussion and insularity of focus also manifested in cases where participants wished to discuss potentially ‘non-positive’ aspects of a popular cultural text, such as racism. The switch to journaling sites like Livejournal from mailing lists allowed fans to curate their experiences to a greater extent by choosing other journals to connect to, as well as creating their own space to host fanworks, meta discussions, or more personal posts. Busker also notes that these sites made fandom more porous, allowing for individual fans to be more aware of events in other fandoms even though they might not participate in them. This mix of the personal and the political led to more strongly felt opinions about issues in both popular cultural texts and fandom communities being expressed and circulated.

The subsequent shift from journaling sites to even more dialogic platforms like X and Tumblr has accelerated the effect on the development and articulation of fandom participant identity and politics. These platforms offer greater visibility, both in terms of individual fans being willing to claim a specific identity within a fannish space and in terms of finding others who share or understand their experiences. The porousness of fandoms has also increased due to the larger numbers of participants as well as the opportunity for them to be exposed to fan content for media texts apart from their primary interest. The larger visibility and mainstreaming of fan cultures has also increased participation in what used to be subcultural communities. Largely, such media fandom spaces have been perceived to be dominated by individuals from marginalized gender identities and sexual orientations, and supporters of various progressive political ideologies. Tumblr, especially, has been seen as a particularly fertile space for discussions around social justice issues. Whilst the site has seen a decline in fandom activity from its heyday, it continues to be extremely relevant to any discussion of contemporary fandom.

It is in this context that Briony Hannell’s Feminist Fandom: Media Fandom, Digital Feminisms, and Tumblr locates itself. As noted above, Hannell’s publication comes at a time when the use of the microblogging and social media site has declined, but it has been a defining space for many aspects of how media fandom dynamics have developed, and further, how fandom is perceived by the broader society. Hannell states that her research questions concern the role of fandom in the development of young people’s political identities, and specifically how ‘feminist fan communities bring together both fannish and feminist discourses, practices, and positionalities’ (p. 2). Hannell’s choice of Tumblr as her primary research focus was guided by the fact that it has developed a reputation as a platform that is largely populated by marginalized groups. It is also an important site where many different fan communities converge. Also, unlike many other social networking sites, Tumblr affords users a high level of control over their self-presentation, visibility, and disclosure of identity. This, she argues, makes the site particularly conducive to ‘counterpublic’ modes of address (p. 16).

Hannell states that she deliberately uses the plural ‘feminisms’ in the title of the book, as she understands contemporary feminism as slippery and multiplicitous. Even when she uses the singular form, she recognizes feminism as inherently plural. In this conceptualization, the key features of fourth-wave feminism include an ‘increasing take-up of digital media technologies for feminist activism and debate, and a rise in public and media engagement with and interest in feminism(s), particularly within popular media cultures’ (p. 8). Further, ‘the “newness” of the fourth wave is signified by the hypervisibility of feminism with popular media cultures, and the recent explosion in the number of websites, blogs, and online networked communities that facilitate feminist community building, practice, and activism’ (p. 8). So, if contemporary feminisms are marked by their focus on popular media, culture, personal action and voice, and digital media and communication technologies, the connections to media fandom spaces are quite self-evident.

Hannell uses a mix of ethnographic methods, including a narrative survey with over 300 fans, to capture Tumblr users’ experiences, covering mainly the early 2010s. This places the study before the site’s acquisition by Yahoo in 2013 and the adult content ban that was enforced in 2018. Both of these events are perceived to have degraded the quality of the site, though again, declarations of its death have been somewhat exaggerated as it continues to see significant traffic. However, Hannell’s study is well placed to capture the experience of users during the site’s peak. This is also the period where it broke into mainstream consciousness and was closely associated with progressive politics. This was not always a positive association, and saw the rise of the term ‘social justice warrior’, which was often used in a derogatory manner. Hannell’s tracing of these associations is important as it establishes how the connections between media fandom, participants of marginalized identities, and a specific kind of politics have been reinforced by fandom scholars as well as cultural commentators writing for a general audience.

Hannell observes that ‘feminist fandom is discursively (re)produced as an imagined community of “like-minded” feminist fans by my participants, as well as the importance of shared feeling, of shared affective states, to a sense of belonging within this imagined community’. And further that ‘participants’ positioning of Tumblr as a “safe space” to engage with feminist fandom without fear of judgement counters recent claims within fan studies about the mainstreaming and increasing acceptance of fandom and fan cultures’ (p. 65). This is an important point, as it shows that while fandom cultures in general have been integrated into the mainstream, they continue to be subject to the operations of misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, racism, etc. To complicate the idea of Tumblr (and media fandom) as a safe space further, it must be acknowledged that fans who point out racist patterns, especially anti-blackness, in fandom are distinctly unsafe in these communities, often as a result of direct action by fans who would continue to overtly identify as feminist (Stitch, ‘What It’s Like Being Fandom Critical While Black’ [2017]).

This observation aligns with Hannell’s work, which also notes that the perception of progressive politics in media fandom is somewhat oversimplified as it continues to be a largely anglophone space, dominated by whiteness. This is also borne out in the demographics of the survey participants of the study, with 70 per cent identifying as white. While it may be expected that feminist fans would also be interested in antiracist politics and action, studies have found that while individual participants might declare themselves to be supporters of racial diversity in popular cultural texts, this does not always translate into fandom enthusiasm. This is evidenced by observing which media texts gain traction in media fandom communities as measured via generation of fanwork, and, further, how these communities handle antiracist critique of themselves (Pande and Coker, ‘Not So Star-Spangled’ [2018]).

Hannell also acknowledges the reluctance of (assumed white) feminist fans to engage in dialogues about race, observing that fans who speak about these issues are often labelled as anti-fans of fandom itself. The issue of fans being othered and targeted in such a way for pointing out the operations of systemic racism in fandom spaces has definitely accelerated in recent times, and requires further sustained analysis. As Hannell notes, ‘feminist fans positioned feminist fandom as a pedagogical space wherein, through routine and everyday fannish practices, fans learn about a wide range of issues concerning media representation and diversity, social justice and inequality, digital technologies, and the media industry’ (p. 117). The ways in which this pedagogical space works to elide its own foundational whiteness to deflect and undermine criticism is clearly an increasing area of concern of which fandom scholars must remain cognizant.

2. Identity and Community

Apart from being focuses of academic enquiry, fans have also been popular subjects for cultural journalism. This has sometimes led to them being written about in sensationalized terms, employing the same stereotypes as those that were disputed by the first wave of fandom scholarship. Along with the rise of fandom studies as traced above, another crucial avenue of the mainstreaming of fandom spaces has been writing by cultural critics who are fans themselves. These pieces, often written in the first person, generally offer a more nuanced look at how these spaces operate, along with documenting their challenges. This commentary, published by a variety of journalistic outlets such as Vox, The New Yorker, and Teen Vogue, is a critical record of fandom dynamics that are often not captured fully by academic publications. Journalists and commentators are able to engage with events within fandom with a greater sense of immediacy, without the delays associated with the lengthy publication process of the majority of academic presses, and therefore offer invaluable insights. An important additional aspect to be considered here is that the participatory nature of digital fandom extends to how fans engage with both academic scholarship and journalistic commentary, which is read voraciously. Fans are extremely aware of themselves as communities of interest to writers, journalists, and researchers, and so take a keen interest in how they are depicted within both academic scholarship and mainstream journalism.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a common thread between academic and non-academic writing on fandom is a focus on the role it plays in identity formation and building community bonds, especially for young people. Another commonality is that journalistic spaces, particularly in anglophone spheres, continue to have an issue with employing critics and journalists of colour. Maya Phillips’s Nerd: Adventures in Fandom from This Universe to the Multiverse, a collection of essays initially published in the New York Times and other outlets, is a welcome disruption of that norm. In Nerd, Phillips reflects on her experiences of being a Black fan through the 1990s in the USA, and how such experiences inform her identity as a cultural critic. The essays are presented as chapters and arranged chronologically, taking up key popular cultural texts (mostly filmic) that influenced Phillips’s journey. Apart from reflecting on the ways in which these texts have interacted with political events—for instance, she reflects on how 9/11 was a seismic shock that stretched the interpretative capacities of the superhero genre—the essays also chronicle the changing modes of their transmission due to changes in technology and media consumption. They also track how physical fandom spaces such as conventions have changed from somewhat niche, community-focused events to being largely corporatized mega-proceedings as fan culture has become more mainstream.

These trajectories have also been documented by fandom scholars, but there continues to be a lack of work which includes perspectives from fans of colour. As previously noted, fans take great interest in how their activities are documented and historicized. This has mostly been seen in positive ways by fandom scholarship, framing fans as highly knowledgeable and engaged historians. This is certainly true to an extent, but has also meant that histories of critique and pushback to white-centricity in these spaces have been largely neglected. That is not to say that historical accounts of activities of nonwhite fans have not been produced, but these continue to be othered and not given their rightful space in popular retellings of media fandom histories. This has meant that racial identity is always perceived as an additional element to these histories and spaces rather than constitutive of them. As Philipp Dominik Keidl and Abby Waysdorf observe in their introduction to a special journal issue, fandom histories ‘shape the structures of fan communities. Covering the complete political spectrum, fan-made histories can focus on marginalized groups or contribute to their marginalization, making history a central space for debates about who is welcomed as a fan and who is excluded.’ In this context, Phillips’s work not only functions as an individual’s narrative of finding fandom but also does the vital work of rehistoricizing spaces where whiteness is simultaneously unnamed in analyses yet remains the default.

Another notable aspect of Phillips’s writing is the diversity of texts she includes in her narrative of fandom experience. This includes not only Western superhero franchises like Superman, Batman, and Spiderman, but also notable Japanese anime television series such as Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z, and Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, all of which were aired on North American television in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Phillips discusses the ways in which these series, even though sometimes edited and altered significantly to conform to US broadcasting standards, brought greater complexity to the portrayal of gender and sexuality than was available to young viewers at the time. This wide-ranging account pushes against the ways in which academic fandom scholarship has usually focused on one media text or franchise, for example surveying only Star Wars fans or Doctor Who fans, or has grouped its analysis by specific fan activity, such as convention attendance or cosplay. As noted in the introduction, this pattern was also reflected in many of the fandom studies publications of the year under review. This is not to detract from the value of such focused work, but Nerd is a richly nuanced illustration of how fans can and do move between media texts and fandoms more fluidly than is registered in scholarship.

The other key aspect of the text is Phillips’s deep engagement and familiarity with non-US texts, which are discussed organically alongside Western ones. This brings into question another aspect of siloing that has occurred in fandom studies, which is the category of ‘transcultural’ fandom. This is a somewhat clunky term, as arguably significant portions of US-based fandoms have always been transcultural. In practice it usually signifies that the fan cultures under discussion are ‘outside the dominant paradigm that grants certain texts and fandoms canonicity, either by geographic location or language, or both’ (Pande, Squee from the Margins, p. 6). While multiple scholars have complicated this assumption, the category remains in use within the discipline. There are multiple implications of this assumption, but the two that are most relevant to this discussion are, firstly, that the default for ‘universal’ fans and fandoms remains located in the Global North, and secondly, that even within the Global North, the fandoms of non-anglophone texts are seen to be largely niche and distinct from the aforementioned assumed universal ones. Phillips’s account of her fandom experiences complicates that idea and aligns with more recent research, which has found overlapping patterns of media consumption with significant participation by fans of colour in particular. This activity, however, has gone largely undocumented in larger histories of media fandom, which mostly concentrate on white fans of anglophone texts. Phillips’s narrative is further evidence that absolute distinctions between fandoms of anglophone and non-anglophone texts may not hold true for significant numbers of young people in the US. Moving forward, the discipline would do well to address this gap so that the interconnections between different kinds of fandom can be mapped more accurately. This would also allow fandom studies to be more prepared for the challenges of an increasingly globalized mediascape.

3. Transcultural Flows

Due to the sectioning off of fandoms from beyond the Global North, scholarship on them is rarely seen to be relevant to broader conceptualizations of the discipline of fandom studies, and such work rarely attains canonicity within the bibliographies and reading lists of the field. Not only does it exemplify a bias within the field that should be corrected from an ethical and equity-based perspective, but it also has significant material implications for the capacity of the discipline to reflect and anticipate trends in contemporary fan cultures. For instance, while the Hallyu wave that has been a significant force in global mediascapes is far from recent, the explosion of its popularity was only seen as significant enough for Western academia to take note of once K-Pop bands like BTS and K-Dramas like Squid Game had made a noticeable impact in the US. This is a concerning lag in scholarship as the Hallyu wave has extremely crucial lessons for all fan scholars on broad-ranging issues from fan tourism to the integration of fanfiction platforms like Wattpad into corporate branding. But such a knowledge gap is perhaps an inevitable product of the siloing of fan studies focus areas that have been discussed so far.

The Cambridge Companion to K-Pop, edited by Suk-Young Kim, is illustrative of the dynamics discussed above and aims to provide context for the evolution of this cross-cultural phenomenon. In the introduction, Kim states that rather than a single musical genre or even industry, ‘K-pop’ designates an ‘ever-morphing cultural scene’ that encompasses different aspects for different populations. For some Koreans it is ‘an epicenter for rallying ethnocentric pride’, while for others it is ‘a symptomatic ailment of the media-saturated youth of today’. Further, for the Asian diasporic community in the US, it ‘carries the refreshing banner of Asian cool’. Conversely, she notes that ‘For some critics in the West, K-pop idols have reconfirmed their long-standing prejudice against Asians as mechanical, machinelike disciplinarians devoid of humanity.’ However, K-pop’s most notable aspect is perhaps its massive fandoms, which Kim observes have resulted in an ‘unprecedented degree of community building’. Finally, the production, transmission, and reception of K-pop is inextricable from digital platforms and has ‘presented a prime case of branding and marketing in the age of the metaverse’ (p. 1). It is also notable that K-pop has always drawn from a great range of local and international cross-cultural influences for its multitudinous musical identities, performance styles, and choreographies, as well as for the industry structures that manage the training, circulation, and promotion of idol performers.

The collection contains a total of fourteen chapters divided into six parts, titled ‘Genealogies’, ‘Sounding Out K-Pop’, “Dancing to K-Pop’, ‘The Making of Idols’, ‘The Band that Surprised the World’, and ‘Circuits of K-Pop Flow’. The first section is devoted to chapters that provide context concerning the longer prehistory of K-pop. Roald Maliangkay begins by discussing Korean music industry formations in the late colonial period of the 1930s and 1940s, which foreshadowed the modern talent discovery system and the growing influence of neoliberalism on the same. On the subject of fandom, Maliangkay observes that in the colonial period, ‘Fandom was liberating, as it appealed to modern sensibilities around class, gender, and community. By lending them a voice and highlighting their economic and cultural capital, it gave fans a sense of empowerment’ (p. 21). However, this empowerment did not always lead to a challenge to the larger business model of talent shows, both at the time under analysis or indeed in contemporary contexts of K-pop in general. He notes, ‘Since fandom presents an avenue for young people to distinguish themselves, even strong criticism of talent shows may be geared less toward generating systemic change than toward generating likes. Pop culture fandom is aspirational; it yields greater agency to the subordinated, even though the majority of critically engaged fans may not seek control over particular media to reverse their subordination, however loud their voices’ (p. 13). This is an important observation, as analyses of fan power in participatory fandom spaces must always be cognizant of how that is co-opted into neoliberal power structures. Next, Hyunjoon Shin examines the forms, characteristics, and operations of music-related companies during the 1990s, which paved the way for the current K-pop companies’ global emergence and their star-making practices. His survey traces the influence of cultural, economic, and political developments, including movements for greater democratic representation, industrial deregulation, globalization, easing of censorship, and the rise of television networks and record companies which established the contours of what is known today as K-pop.

The following two sections take up the musical and performative aspect of K-pop for deeper analysis. First, Jung-Min Mina Lee interrogates whether K-pop can be considered a single musical genre and how its various stylings have evolved since the 1990s. She also charts the spread of its influence and popularity over the years, from its initial boom in Asia, to the Middle East, South America, and finally its current boom in North America and Europe. The next essay, by Hye Won Kim, examines the ways in which advances in technology and the interconnected acceleration of globalization have affected the recording and production of K-pop soundscapes. Moving on from sound to performance elements, Chuyun Oh argues that K-pop dance ‘is an emerging “social popular dance of global youth” who perform alternative racial, ethnic, gender, linguistic, and sexual identities through their localized adaptations’ (p. 98). Here again fandom is an important part of how K-pop dances move across cultures mediated by various forms of technology from recording equipment to social media platforms. She also emphasizes that as there is a significant amount of participation by non-Korean musicians, dancers, and choreographers in the production of K-pop, ‘Such transnational collaboration makes it challenging to define K-Pop’s identity as solely limited to geographical boundaries’ (p. 100). K-pop’s fundamental transnational and transcultural character, from its production to its circulation and reception, is reflected throughout the volume. While in the context of this publication this is seen as something unique to K-pop, I would argue that contemporary media texts and their fan cultures are increasingly structured in similar ways. The next essay, by Cedarbough T. Saeji, further expands on fandom influence on circulations of K-pop dance through her examination of the rise of cover dances which provide ‘an offline immersive experience that builds particularly strong community bonds’ (p. 121) amongst fans. The popularity of fan cover dances has also facilitated the rise of cover groups which in North American cities with large Asian immigrant populations can offer alternative career pathways to younger people. For non-Korean participants, they often function as pathways to education and awareness about Korean culture.

The next section focuses on the mechanics and politics of the ‘making’ of K-pop idols, who generally go through a rigorous training regimen including music, signing, dance, and etiquette before being debuted by various companies. Stephanie Choi states that her goal in her chapter is ‘not to perpetuate the myth of K-pop as magical and/or abusive but rather to reveal the complexity and fluidity of human relations in the popular music industry’ (p. 140). Choi highlights a key component of K-pop fandom wherein idols are not just expected to be musical performers but also to build and encourage (at least the appearance of) close relationships with fans via regular interaction on social media and other channels of communication. The breakdown of divisions between public and private spaces via technology has also accelerated this form of expected intimacy between idols and fans. Idols are in essence both entertainment and affective labourers whose exchanges with fans have complex power dynamics. This is illustrative once again of how issues regarding the empowerment of fans in contemporary media spaces can have multiple effects on media industries as well as on individual performers. The next essay, by So-Rim Lee, interrogates the limits of K-pop’s image of cultural hybridity and globalization by taking up the case study of ‘Z-pop’, which attempted to build a pan-Asian group via televised audition competitions in 2018–19. The resultant groups were not allowed to perform on mainstream Korean music shows, ostensibly because they sang songs in English. As Lee points out, this objection has not been made to performers from countries such as the US, who regularly appear on such shows, highlighting the complexity of inter-Asia tensions within the cultural field of K-pop, where certain countries (and their cultural products) are perceived to be inferior. While the productive possibilities of K-pop’s transnational character and circulation are well documented, Lee’s work is an important reminder that racial and ethnic tensions continue to be very present within both industrial and fandom structures.

The next section consists of three chapters on various aspects of the success, particularly in the context of the US, of the K-pop band BTS by Kyung Hyun Kim, Suk-Young Kim and Youngdae Kim, and Candace Epps-Robertson. The individual essays span the ways in which the band has leveraged its active and organized global fandom to power its meteoric rise through transmedia storytelling, projections of authenticity, and fandom outreach efforts, including philanthropy. As Kyung Hyun Kim observes, it is crucial to note that a significant part of BTS’s success hinges on their ‘transmedia storytelling campaign [that] enables the group’s members to solidly link their identities with their fans in order to forge a sense of collective spatial belonging that serves as a postethnic, postnational, and postlinguistic home’ (p. 179). This ‘home’, while generally framed as one where community bonds and education are nurtured, is evidently also a space of conflict due to this construction. Finally, the last section of the volume focuses on the ways in which K-pop fandoms produce and consume diverse types of content, from aiming to create ‘real-life’ immersive experiences via cover dances, reaction videos, etc. (Michelle Cho), engaging in imaginative ‘shipping practices’ between idol group members leading to the creation of fanwork and, in some cases, community spaces for queer K-pop fans (Thomas Baudinette), to engaging in fan tourism activities (Youjeong Oh). Once again, while all the contributions analyse the ways in which K-pop fandom spaces have provided new forms of identity articulation and empowerment to fans who might experience marginalization through various axes of identity such as gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, and racial identity, they also provide cautionary notes about the limits of these expressions. As Michelle Cho maintains, ‘fan-inflected participation’ does not always constitute ‘a utopian space of collectivity’ (p. 247).

Conclusion

The aim of bringing together these diverse publications from the year’s work in fandom studies is to illustrate the urgent need for fandom scholars to understand the interconnectedness of the global mediascape that fans inhabit and increase their knowledge of media texts, communication platforms, and fan communities outside those that have been perhaps over-surveyed in existing scholarship. By doing this, it will also allow for expansions of existing models of fan identity to address intra-fandom conflict to seriously account for evolving patterns of fan communities deflecting structural critique of issues such as systemic racism by framing such work as efforts to censor and police fanwork. Finally, this widening of the field will equip fandom scholars to understand that all fan communities today are interfacing explicitly with deeply entrenched, globalized, and networked social formations that are amplifying fascist politics, including white supremacy, racism, gender-essentialism, xenophobia, religious fundamentalism, ethnonationalism, and neocolonialism amongst many others. While fandom scholars are well aware of these issues, their study of them continues to set up binaries between assumedly progressive and reactionary fandoms, thus missing how a larger cultural shift to the right is expressing itself. Each publication reviewed offers concrete examples, case studies, and methodological steps that fandom scholars can engage with in order to decentre the Global North and whiteness from their own research practices. It must be said here that these are all recommendations that have already been made multiple times by critical fan scholars. The challenge remains, as ever, for fandom studies as a field to take them seriously.

Books Reviewed

References