Virtually Multicultural: Trans-Asian Identity and Gender in an International Fan Community of a Japanese Star

Abstract

While recent analyses have helped to challenge commonly-held stereotypes of fans of popular cultural texts as freakish individuals ‘without a life’, few studies have focused on texts produced and/or consumed outside the United States and Europe. Even fewer have considered the particular significance of the advent of the internet as a tool for intercultural fan activity. This is what this study attempts to accomplish through an ethnographic and textual analysis of an online community of fans of Kimura Takuya - one of the most popular Japanese male celebrities of the moment - dispersed across 14 countries. It explores, in particular, how participants defined their fan, gendered and cultural/global identities through their involvement with each other and with their favorite star, and negotiated as a group the complex process of virtual cross-cultural identity formation.

Re-Envisioning Language, Literacy, and the Immigrant Subject in New Mediascapes

“…( Darling-Wolf, 2004;Jenkins, 2004;Sefton-Green, 1998). Younger generations of immigrants use e-mail and chatting as less-expensive forms of communication (compared to long-distance telephony) to maintain ties with friends and families in their native countries; Internet Web sites, blogs, chat rooms, and newsgroups provide opportunities for the diaspora to socialise and organise around mutual interests of various nature be it for social, cultural, or political purposes (Landzelius, 2006;Miller & Slater, 2000;Mitra, 2001;Valverde, 2002).…”

“…In these concurrent timespaces, the adolescent computer user may be presenting himself or herself as an immigrant in the United States, but this identity is simultaneously meshed with or resignified by that of a diasporic Indian (Mitra, 2001), Filipino (Ignacio, 2005), or Trinidadian (Miller & Slater, 2000) in a global community of diasporic youths interacting in an online chat space. Moreover, the status of an Asian immigrant as an English-as-a-secondlanguage learner gets translated into the linguistic mainstream once he enters an online fan community of Japanese pop culture whose members are located in parts of the world where English is mostly spoken as a second or foreign language, and a virtual cross-cultural identity becomes the source of privilege and pride (Black, 2005;Darling-Wolf, 2004). Hence, as immigrant students traverse different timespaces in their daily lives, it is important to note how their identity formation and socialisation in the use of languages are defined not only by the imagined community of the nation state (Anderson, 1991) but also by various imagined communities on a global scale (Appadurai, 1996).…”

Mediating Diasporas and Fandom: Second-Generation Korean American Adolescent Diasporas, Identification, and Transnational Popular Culture

“…Fans also differ because they often create communities, drawing pleasure from shared interests and a sense of collective pride that defends against attacks on their fan practices or on the object of their interest (Darling-Wolf, 2004). Participation in fan communities like all cultural groups is governed Downloaded by [Universidad de Sevilla] at 03:09 03 February 2015 by norms in the group and by larger sociocultural contexts that shape fan desires (Darling-Wolf, 2004), and it is shaped by those with greater cultural capital, who are able to discriminate and confer legitimacy to other fans (Fiske, 1992). In some cases, fans also contribute to cultural production, creating fan fiction and imagining stories outside of the narratives provided (Storey, 1996).…”

Establishing an ImaginedSMTown: How Korea's Leading Music Company Has Produced a Global Cultural Phenomenon

“…As a result, advanced communication systems blur national divisions and intensify translocal connections (Giddens; McLuhan and Powers). In addition, the audience constructs emotional attachments to local cultures, regardless of their physical locations and national identities (Darling‐Wolf).…”