K-pop fandom as ‘sub-visible culture’: Digital work and enjoyment in the precarious present

Abstract

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.