White-expat-fans’ performing K-pop Other on YouTube

Abstract

ABSTRACT White Canadian Simon and Martina Stawski’s Eat Your Kimchi vlog complicates the interpretation of YouTube fandom as counter-hegemonic. Combining performance studies and media studies, we suggest “white-expat-fans” to explicate their racialized, spatialized and fannish negotiation and (dis)identification with K-pop. As fans, they identify with K-pop and subordinate themselves to its singers. As expatriates lived in South Korea and fulltime bloggers, they are responsive to local culture and financially rely on K-pop fans locally and globally. As whites, they parody, mock, and pathologize K-pop as a feminized Oriental Other and reclaim racial privilege, compensating their feeling of marginalization from spatial and fannish orientations.