Fandom (Fan Studies)

In 2020, K-pop fans were lauded for their social and political activism. Apart from managing to constantly create and maintain trending topics to raise the popularity of their favorite K-pop bands such as BTS; BTS’s fans, known as the Army, matched their idols’ donation to the Black Lives Matter fund through a very public fundraising campaign on social media. K-pop fans have also been credited for hijacking opposing social media hashtags that were attempting to drown out the Black Lives Matter movement, even going as far as to endorse Joe Biden for the US presidency during the American presidential elections. These fans’ ability to mobilize crowds in a short amount of time, especially their methodical approach to get topics trending on Twitter, have resulted in praise of K-pop fans from various media outlets and academic disciplines that do not often interact with fan studies scholars. This supposed public turn on fans and their practices have led many in the popular press to write about fans, often as a singular identity and a new phenomenon. While many of these opinion pieces are celebratory, some have also highlighted problems with racism and anti-Blackness within the K-pop fandoms. Fans are often credited for being early adopters of technology—explored through the works mentioned under Media, Music, and Sports Fandoms and Technology, Information Science, and Platformization—and in the context of the current digital era and facilitated by social media, fans’ voices appear amplified by these technologies. However, fandom is varied and global, and K-pop fandom, while extensive, incredibly organized, and publicly visible, is not the only incarnation of fandom. K-pop fans also share space and a range of cultural practices with those who are fans of film, TV and literary texts, sports, other musical genres, celebrities, popular cultural icons and the like. Fan studies is a field of research with roots in audience, media, literary, and cultural studies, and while its inception and the bulk of its research (and scholars) are American and British-centric, research, as well as scholars are also emerging from South, East, and Southeast Asia, often complicating assumptions and generalizations drawn in previous studies. In light of the field’s developments, it begs the question of what is fandom(s) and what are fan studies, and how do we begin to research this area.