Research On Transcultural Fans’ Identity Construction With The Spectacle/Performance Paradigm

The involvement of fans drew the attention of netizens,the media and academics when the ’Diba Facebook incident’ emerged in 2016.Subsequent events have made these actions a daily practice for fan groups,and during the Beijing Winter Olympics,a number of Chinese K-pop fans engaged in heated battles with Korean netizens over incidents such as foul play by Korean athletes.From this phenomenon,this study takes Chinese K-pop fans as an example,and uses semi-structured interviews,textual analysis and virtual ethnography to analyse the collusion between fan identity and national identity among the members of the K-pop fan groups on the Douban platform,focusing on three questions: how K-pop fans construct their own identity in their transnational fan behaviour,focusing on how K-pop fans’ transcultural behavior produces identity conflicts,and how fans come to balance.This article begins with the transnational spread of the K-pop industry,explains how K-pop culture products attract audiences in foreign countries,explains why the construction of transcultural fan groups is possible,and then summarises the imaginary of dual identity produced by fans in the fan behaviour.The study finds that national identity has always been manifested in a covert way in the practices of transcultural fan groups,that the national imaginary community is summoned through talking,choosing,exhibiting and consuming,and that the daily fan behaviour of K-pop fan groups are shuttled between the emotional community of idols-fans and the national community.The inclusion of some online marketers and nationalists in the area of fan performances has led to a distortion of the boundaries between the internal and external communities of fans.At the same time,the fan community requires individuals to trust their idols,but the production of idol texts is often influenced by realpolitik as well as by the idol subjects themselves,which may bring about events that break the norms of the nation-state,and therefore fans need to make value trade-offs.As a result,Chinese fans embed an entertaining political expression in their transnational fan behaviour based on an imagined response to the other that is not an in-group member,and a highly sensitive sense of normality and self-censorship arises from internal interactions.For individuals,the shift from the high-involvement’production norms’,which focus on the reproduction of idol texts,to the low-involvement ’consumption norms’,which present themselves as consumers,is a defensive strategy in the face of conflict.It is worth noting that the over-generalised definition of ’insult’ that produced from the interaction between fans and external members of the group may reinforce fans’ sensitivity to self-censorship,and may also lead some fans towards historical nihilism and numbness in the other direction.