“Sasaengpaen” or K-pop Fan? Singapore Youths, Authentic Identities, and Asian Media Fandom

ABSTRACT

Since the late 1990s, the Korean pop-culture wave has had a huge impact, achieving immense popularity and sustaining a global community of consumers and fans. In Singapore, a significant K-pop fan culture has emerged among youths. In this article, we study the emergence of the sasaeng fan—a stigmatized fan identity that refers to individuals who are unhealthily interested in the personal lives of K-pop idols. Drawing on data from mass and social media, participant-observation, and interviews, we map the significance of the sasaeng fan identity for Singapore K-pop music fans and focus specific attention on how fans negotiate an understanding of their own “authentic” identities vis-à-vis the mediated identity of the sasaeng fan.

Notes

¹ We use the term “stalking” in this article because our research participants used it in everyday talk about their K-pop fandom. For them, the term was not necessarily reducible to the legal sense of a criminal act involving following, pursuing, or harassing a person (i.e., victim). Instead, fans recognized their pursuit of K-pop idols as a chase or hunt in which the idols would either remain unaware of them, or seek to elude them. Stalking was thus a challenging exercise requiring skill and luck rather than a sinister activity.

² Comments on www.allkpop.com came from all around the globe, whereas the comments posted on Yahoo! Singapore Entertainment were more likely posted by Singaporeans. Because we were particularly interested in how the sasaeng phenomenon in Singapore, our comments data came only from Yahoo! Singapore Entertainment.

³ We operationalized “hardcore” as a fan who had traveled at least once to Korea specifically to consume K-pop and who had successfully seen K-pop idols through unorthodox means, such as waiting for chance encounters at entertainment agencies or shops owned by idols.

⁴ On January 28, 2011, Singapore’s The New Paper reported that Leeteuk and Heechul, two members of Korean boy band Super Junior, were involved in a traffic accident the previous evening during rush hour. Eight fan vehicles were trying to get close to the van with the band members, resulting in a six vehicle pile-up, including the idols’ van.

⁵ In everyday speech most young Singaporeans use Singlish, an English-based creole consisting of words from several other languages including Malay, Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, and Tamil. Our social media data included many Singlish expressions and the following are visible: “ah,” “aiya,” “la,” “lah,” “leh,” “lor,” “siao la [siao liao],” and “talk cock.”

⁶ The Charles gang refers to a separate group of fans who were also awaiting Big Bang at the airport and outside the hotel entrance. While they were stalking the idols at the public spaces similar to our study subjects, they did not hire a stalking van. The Charles gang was apparently known for being fans of many other K-pop artists and attended virtually every local K-pop event, thus “proving” their uncritical, mainstream fan status.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

J. Patrick Williams

J. PATRICK WILLIAMS is Associate Professor of sociology at Nanyang Technological University. He has many research publications on the experiences of individuals who self-identify as subcultural and is particularly interested in the social construction of subcultural authenticity. He has edited and authored several books, including Authenticity is Self, Culture and Society (Ashgate, 2009) and Subcultural Theory: Traditions and Concepts (Polity Press, 2011).

Samantha Xiang Xin Ho

SAMANTHA XIANG XIN HO graduated from Nanyang Technological University with a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology degree and from Yonsei University Korean Language Institute in Korea. She currently works as a researcher at the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency in Singapore.