Transnational Bodies: Audience Performance in Anime and K-pop Media and Theatre Ecologies

The transnational circulation of Asian popular culture has grown exponentially over the last few decades, revealing tensions between concepts of nationality and globality as these media are promoted as national products and simultaneously considered emblematic of neoliberal globalization. How do we study these media without forgetting cultural specificity, but also without retreating to ethnocentrism, which promotes national frameworks? My dissertation Transnational Bodies: Audience Performance in Anime and K-pop Media and Theatre Ecologies enters this conversation by foregrounding the vital role global audiences play in moving and co-creating transnational Asian popular culture, and how fans’ engagement with these media negotiates their own racialized and gendered identities.Through specific, historically-situated case studies that span across multiple media and platforms, my research analyzes the worldwide fan communities for K-pop (South Korean pop music) and anime (Japanese animation), and how their interactions form a collective I call “transnational fandom.” Transnational fandom becomes a prime site to uncover tensions within global media surrounding race, gender, and nationality, as fans’ performances demonstrate fraught assumptions about whose body is allowed to co-opt, claim, or otherwise take part in these media’s creation and circulation. In some cases, fan performance promotes bounded notions of identity and shows implicit bias within their own communities, and in other cases, their negotiations with and through K-pop and anime open space for dialogue about complex intertwinings of race and gender vis-à-vis Asian media. Throughout my studies, I argue that fans’ embodied performances are indispensable modes of inquiry to understand how audiences interrogate fixed notions of identity, community, and medium boundaries to form transnational, networked collectives. These collectives point to the uneven, messy, and simultaneous overlaps of transnational identity, but also suggest modes of community building that do not rely on binary constructions or solid borders