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.

Since the late 1990s, the Korean pop-culture wave has had a huge impact, achieving immense popularity and sustaining a global community of consumers and fans. In Singapore, a significant K-pop fan culture has emerged among youths. In this article, we study the emergence of the sasaeng fan—a stigmatized fan identity that refers to individuals who are unhealthily interested in the personal lives of K-pop idols. Drawing on data from mass and social media, participant-observation, and interviews, we map the significance of the sasaeng fan identity for Singapore K-pop music fans and focus specific attention on how fans negotiate an understanding of their own “authentic” identities vis-à-vis the mediated identity of the sasaeng fan.

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.

While "Global North" parasocialism tends to lean towards nonreciprocal parasocial interaction of fans merely admiring a celebrity, parasocialism in K-Pop fandom proves to be a more multi-directional devotion. And perhaps it is this veneer of a profoundly forged bond of mutual affection and the perceived authentic reading of an idol, that enables fans and fandoms to keep a measured distance from a structure of industry that encourages intense training, overexertion, and harsh social environments. Global North critics may be able to readily imbue projections of individualism, self-care, and self-preservation into their readings of this industry, condemning what, on the surface, appears to be a monolithically troublesome business. It is essential, however, to understand the underlying cultural foundations of industry mechanics to be able to fully reconcile why these seemingly exploitative tenants will remain, while some facets of the industry’s structure can be “fixed”.

Political engagement is often a conscious strategy for some celebrities and their fandoms, yet it can also be taken in unintended or undesired directions, most notably in contested practices such as calls for the cancellation of pop idols. This research compares fans' perception and reactive engagement in two such empirical cases in China and the United States, namely "the 227 Incident" and controversies surrounding Taylor Swift. Through close readings of these two cases, coupled with in-depth semistructured interviews, the authors compare how transcultural pop idols' fandoms interact with politics in China and the West. The authors propose to adopt the lens of neo-tribalism to study these practices to explore how fandoms as neo-tribes are framed in conventional politics and how fans negotiate between their neo-tribal and conventional political identities when in conflict.

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.

This chapter presents a case study of fans censoring and regulating the media industry through fan labor as a way of maintaining the moral economy of K-pop. By discussing the history of music chart manipulation and related legislation, it aims to explore how fans have gained their status not simply as eager promotors of their favorite singers but also as investigators who monitor suspicious media manipulations conducted by rival companies. If the 18th-cen- tury peasants conducted collective practices such as uprising to practically maintain their subsistence and morally defend traditional rights and customs, K-pop fans investigate and report suspicious media manipulation acts to practically secure their fandom while morally keep the mutual fidelity with their idols. Fans make their financial support indispensable in an idol’s career and maintain their dominance over the industry by policing and legally reporting rival companies’ chart manipulation.