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Negotiating Fan Identities in K-Pop Music Culture

Symbolic Interactionist Takes on Music

ISBN: 978-1-78635-048-0, eISBN: 978-1-78635-047-3

Publication date: 1 October 2016

Abstract

In this paper I bring together interaction, media, deviance, self, and identity to make sense of how young Singaporeans consume Korean popular (hereafter, K-pop) music and culture. My overarching goal is to highlight that being a music fan is not a straightforward or even easy experience. Rather, the self as music fan is continually developing within a complex variety of social processes, from the circulation of global, mass media representations to inter- and intra-personal interactions. I present data collected from a study on K-pop music consumption in Singapore, a small island-nation in Southeast Asia with an insatiable thirst for foreign culture. The data show how a group of Singaporean K-pop fans were regularly bombarded with largely negative messages about what it means to be K-pop music fans, and how these meanings affected their own negotiations as fans. K-pop fandom provided a sense of shared identity and status within popular youth culture, yet their experiences were often soured by negative media portrayals of deviant fans, whose behaviors risked stigmatizing the K-pop social identity. This paper thus deals with some of the problems for self that being a music fans entails.

Keywords

Citation

Williams, J.P. (2016), "Negotiating Fan Identities in K-Pop Music Culture", Symbolic Interactionist Takes on Music (Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 47), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 81-96. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0163-239620160000047015

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2016 Emerald Group Publishing Limited