How Fandom Works—and Acts
From streaming drives to election campaigns: ten studies on K-pop fans' labour and activism
K-pop fandom has long been described as a working fandom: streaming, voting, translating and making promotional content are tasks fans take on, and they form part of the industry's backbone. When K-pop fans flooded hashtags and mobilised during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in the US, it became clear that the same organising capacity could turn political. This feature gathers research on both faces—labour and activism.
On labour, the verdicts diverge. A study of GOT7's Chinese fans sees fan labour as indispensable creative work that is also exploitation; a study of ARMY reads the same unpaid work as making fans active agents of Korean soft power. The old question—exploitation or empowerment?—remains open in K-pop too.
Recent work has shifted to platforms. Fan platforms such as Weverse, Bubble and Lysn have pulled self-organised communities into paid services, and researchers describe this with concepts like 'communication consumption', 'platform fandom' and idols' 'relational labour'. Because both what fans do and what idols do become platform products, the labour debate now looks at both sides of the relationship.
Activism research is spreading geographically: from BLM and #StopAsianHate in the US to protests and fundraising in Indonesia and Thailand and 'civic stanning' in the Philippines' 2022 election. Studies of Chinese fandom, by contrast, show that activism need not look like resistance—quietly continuing to consume Korean culture amid anti-Korean sentiment can itself be political.
Read together, these studies suggest that the distance between chart-oriented organising skills and political participation is shorter than it looks, and that those skills are increasingly cultivated inside corporate platforms. How much autonomy fandoms keep is likely to be the next question.
K-pop fan labor and an alternative creative industry: A case study of GOT7 Chinese fans
Through participant observation and in-depth interviews with Chinese fans of GOT7, Sun identifies three kinds of fan labour: specialised, managerial and unskilled. She argues that fan labour is indispensable creative labour, turning K-pop into an 'alternative creative industry'. Fans comply with and are exploited by the industry's commodification while seeking empowerment in production and distribution—and labour itself becomes the line between 'contributing' fans and casual self-proclaimed ones.
Labour of Love: Fan Labour, BTS, and South Korean Soft Power
Using political economy alongside participatory-culture theory, Proctor treats BTS's ARMY as an organised labour network. The free, affect-driven work fans do online to promote and spread BTS, she argues, has made the fandom itself an active agent of South Korean soft power alongside the group. The starting point is that fans' contribution is largely invisible when the state and industry use BTS for nation branding.
The Fans who Consume ‘Communication’ : The Idol Fan Platform and Reorganization of Fandom
Interviews with 11 users of fan platforms (Weverse, Universe, Lysn) examine how self-run, free fan communities on portal cafés, social networks and forums are being absorbed into paid platforms built by industry capital. Arguing that existing fandom theory cannot fully explain this shift, Kang proposes a framework of 'communication consumption': what fans pay for is not only content but the act of communicating with idols itself.
The Labor Process of Relational Labor: The Case of the K-pop Fan Platform “Bubble”
Applying labour process theory to the fan platform Bubble—its interface, artist contracts and messaging system—Lee and Prey argue that platforms have produced a new form of commodified relational labour by idols. Concepts of monopoly capital, control and deskilling/reskilling show how the industry capitalises on the work of maintaining intimacy with fans. It extends the fan-labour debate to the idols' side of the relationship.
Platform Fandom: Weverse and the Technological Domestication of Fan Community
A critical study of Hybe's Weverse and Weverse Shop that coins 'platform fandom': a corporatised technical relation designed to foster and manage affective bonds between stars and fans. As a result, the authors argue, fan communities lose geographic specificity and with it the ability to cohere by negotiating who is in and who is out. Notably, they position Weverse as a distinct model between American and Chinese platforms that advances Korean corporate interests.
“Make It Right”: Why #BlackLivesMatter(s) to K-pop, BTS, and BTS ARMYs
Examines why K-pop fans and artists became visible political actors in the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, focusing on BTS's ARMY. The authors argue that the fan–artist relationship is mutual rather than one-way: Black ARMYs called out racism within the fandom and asked BTS and fellow fans to support BLM. The paper also documents the organised streaming, voting and radio-request campaigns fans run for charts and awards.
Exploring Youth Political Participation: K-Pop Fan Activism in Indonesia and Thailand
Looks at K-pop fan activism in Indonesia and Thailand, where fans have raised humanitarian donations, criticised new laws and protested against governments. The analysis runs along four axes: the intersection of cultural and civic participation, the tension between participation and resistance, affect and collective identity, and impact. It extends a debate centred on the US BLM case to Southeast Asia.
Contested fandom and nationalism: How K-Pop fans perform political consumerism in China
A digital ethnography on Weibo of how Chinese K-pop fans keep consuming Hallyu despite informal state curbs and nationalist anti-Korean sentiment since the THAAD dispute. Fans adopt a self-effacing ethos yet act as deliberate consumers; this political consumerism is both a form of fan activism and a safety valve for negotiating with nationalists without challenging the ideology. Activism, it shows, does not always look like street protest or hashtag campaigns.
“We Are Bulletproof”: The Transcultural Power of Fandom in #StopAsianHate
Analyses 920,271 tweets using #StopAsianHate or #StopAAPIHate between 19 March 2020 and 31 May 2022. Of 25 'spikes' (days with more than 5,000 tweets), 11 immediately followed the 2021 Atlanta-area shootings—but 12 were related to BTS. Comparing LDA and NMF topic models, the authors show how hashtag use shifted largely because of ARMY, and argue that the fandom's affective ties can open accessible global conversations about anti-Asian racism.
Civic Stanning and the Semiotics of K-Pop Fan Activism in the Philippines
A digital ethnography of Filipino K-pop fans who backed Leni Robredo's 2022 presidential bid. Fans re-worked K-pop signifiers—lyrics, imagery, fancams—into hybrid political messages, practices the authors call 'civic stanning': fan-based enactments of citizenship. It shows concretely how familiar fandom aesthetics become a language of electoral participation in a restrictive political climate.
How papers were chosen
OpenAlex searches for articles from 2020-01-01 on terms such as 'k-pop fan activism', 'BTS ARMY', 'k-pop fandom labor' and Korean-language equivalents, with titles and abstracts checked by hand. Only papers that directly address fan labour, fan platforms or fan activism, and whose abstract states the object and method, were kept; well-cited studies were preferred while including a Korean journal (Korean Journal of Journalism & Communication Studies) and cases from Southeast Asia, the Philippines and China. Excluded: a paper with a truncated abstract (Kanozia & Ganghariya 2021) and a 'cultural report' (Cho 2022). Citation counts from OpenAlex as of 2026-10-09.
Bài viết liên quan
How this article was made: read official statements, court/regulator records and at least two independent outlets; community posts are used only as attention signals. Written by Hallyu Wiki editors with AI assistance — check the sources.