Address terms in Chinese popular music fandom: Exploring stancetaking in social media discourses

This study employs the theoretical approaches of stance and indexicality to investigate female fans’ address practices regarding male Chinese pop idols in the fans’ posts on Sina Weibo. Some address terms echo traditional heteronormative romantic paradigms (e.g., husband (idol)–wife (fan)) or non-romantic familial bonds (e.g., son (idol)–mother (fan)). Other address terms subvert traditional gender roles and relationships through unorthodox uses, which still evoke intimacy by placing the male idols in a female position in imagined relationships (e.g., wife (idol)–husband (fan), daughter (idol)–mother (fan)). Theoretically, this study contributes to the theorisation of stance by proposing a specific type of second stancetaker ‘collective ingroup stance subject’ that is a broad audience sharing the same stance as the first stance subject.