On 2 September 2021, Mainland China’s top media and broadcast regulator State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) announced guidelines to “clean up” the entertainment industry, including banning the morbid aesthetic trend of “sissy idols” and immoral culture of danmei (male-male romance by and for women and sexual minorities). A few days later, Sina Weibo, one of the biggest Chinese social networking sites, banned a series of K-pop fan accounts, including those of BTS, who just the year before had faced backlash over Korean war comments. These harsh crackdowns on “toxic” fandoms imposed by China’s authorities illustrate various anxieties elicited by male effeminacy and homoerotic shipping practices of K-pop idols.

This presentation examines queer fandoms and challenges to the status quo in terms of gender and sexuality through a case study of China’s boycott of BTS. Specifically, we will focus on K-pop shipping practices—when fans imagine romantic relationships among real people or virtual characters—in China. While previous studies have discussed how homoerotic K-pop idol shipping culture enables heterosexual women and queer fans to affectively explore sexuality and potentially increase queer visibility in South Korean, Japanese, Australian, and Philippine contexts, less attention has yet to be paid to the Chinese context. Employing discourse analysis of media articles, editorials, and netizens’ comments in response to the boycott of BTS, we argue that although Chinese queer K-pop fans are empowered to objectify male bodies and explore sexual desire via creative shipping practices of androgynous idols, their agency is often limited and complicated by fervent nationalistic sentiments, heteropatriarchy, and heteronormativity. This study is timely for reflecting on Chinese pushback against the Korean Wave as a purportedly corrupting force, especially for its young women and LGBTQ+ consumers.

𝗕𝗶𝗼:
Zishan Lai (she, her) is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Communications and New Media (CNM) at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Her interests include digital intimacy, East Asian popular culture and fandom, lying at the intersection of feminism and media and cultural studies. Her ongoing dissertation project is about understanding how Chinese women’s love and intimacy relate to otome (female-targeted dating simulation) games, and to the political economy in which they are embedded.

Michelle H. S. Ho (she, her) is an Assistant Professor of Feminist and Queer Cultural Studies in the Department of Communications and New Media (CNM) at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Her interests lie in gender and sexuality and their intersections with media, popular culture, race/ethnicity, and affect/emotion in contemporary Asia. She is currently at work on a monograph exploring trans/gender issues in late capitalist Tokyo, Japan through an ethnographic study of josō (male-to-female crossdressing) and dansō (female-to-male crossdressing) cafe-and-bars. Publications from this project are in Sexualities, Asian Anthropology, and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. Find out more at: michellehsho.com.

Event Name: Queering the Korean Wave: An International Symposium
Hosted by: Macquarie University, Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Languages, and Literature
Supported by the Academy of Korean Studies, Korean Studies Grant No. AKS-2022-R033
Date of Event: December 8-9, 2022
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