Meaningfully playful: Gender, sexuality, and civic imaginations in Korean and Chinese fandom cultures

This dialogical article emphasizes the meaningfully playful character of popular culture fan and audience practices and argues for contextual and transcultural approaches to their meaning-making processes. The authors discuss South Korean and Chinese fandom cultures’ intertwinement with civic engagements, the role that gender and sexuality play in this process, and how such civic imaginations emerge domestically and transculturally. Drawing on cultural and critical scholarship, they examine and compare several illustrative cases on national and global scales, such as civil protests, celebrity scandals, fandom norms, and subversive fan practices. The dialogue elucidates the interconnections between state-level Politics and everyday politics in fan and audience meaning-makings, as well as their interactions with digital infrastructures and cultures. Contextual resonances and differences between China and Korea are discussed.