The patriarchal Western gaze and the discursive policing of fandom: “Koreaboo” as stigma

During the Black Lives Matter protests, several articles marveled at K-pop fans’ support for the social movement as well as its opposition to the Trump administration (Lee and Kao, 2021). Despite the many thought pieces, podcasts, and news articles, there was scant scholarly research on cross-racial audience reception in the US, and only a few researchers have addressed Korean popular culture fans of color outside of these spectacular moments of fan involvement (see Kim, 2023a, 2023b). Toward that purpose, this article addresses fans of color and how they navigate everyday transnational and transcultural fandom in a society marked by White racial hegemony. Specifically, I am interested in the mocking label, “Koreaboo,” which is generally understood within the US and, at a minimum, other Anglophone nations, as a fan with excessive, irrational interests in Korean popular culture. The term is differentiated from the sasaengpaen (사생팬), a Korean word for a fan who obsessively stalks their celebrity interest (Williams and Ho, 2016), because the “Koreaboo” does not engage in anti-social behaviors but, rather, ordinary fan excess – romantic/sexual desire, merchandise collection. What is considered anti-social and irrational is fan interest in East Asian celebrities and texts. Functioning as a disciplinary discourse, being referred to as a Koreaboo mocks, threatens and shames. With this in mind, this article addresses the following question: how do fans of color negotiate “Koreaboo” within and against dominant culture's gendered racial logics in the United States?

Despite its narrow focus, the article contributes to fans of color research generally. Fan studies is dominated by White scholars, who have inclusively studied gender and sexuality but who have had a blind spot for questions about fandom and race (De Kosnik and Carrington, 2019; Kuipers, 2006). This is especially true for transnational studies of fans of color. There are only a few critical race studies that address the transnational reception of Korean media, anime, Bollywood, or other contra-flows into the West. The article contributes by directing scholarly attention toward the marginalized – the minoritized woman fan – and how they navigate their transnational fan pleasures in a culture in which their interests are mocked for their difference from bourgeois, White masculine tastes. By pulling these threads together, this article is among only a few studies that consider transnationalism and racial taste hierarchies.

In this article, I argue that fans of color respond to the Western gaze of the US by dissociating from the label of “Koreaboo,” who they construct as the racially problematic White fan – bizarre mimicry, fetishized interests, and appropriative actions. The Koreaboo, then, is reimagined not to be the generalized fan of Korean media but the specifically White fan, who oversteps boundaries of allyship and cross-racial interest. Fans of color deploy Koreaboo to protect their stigmatized racial, gendered, and fan interests in the US by displacing it onto White fans. I begin by contributing to the small, extant literature that applies Bourdieu's work on taste hierarchies to consider race as well as its usual application to class. To organize the article, I describe how Koreaboo is used by non-fans to stigmatize and discipline fans of color for their fan tastes and romantic desires, and how Koreaboo is leveraged by fans of color, displacing the stigma from themselves to the imagined extraordinary, bizarre White fan. The accusations made by fans of color in this study toward the unusual White other is overtly constructed as a defense of Korean people and culture, but the defenses are rooted in their own positions of racial marginalization and accusations against the oppressiveness of White supremacy.

Taste hierarchies, race, and Korean popular culture fans

In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Bourdieu's (1984 [1979]) central thesis is that tastes are socially constructed to create “distinction,” which separates the classes and produces a sense of superiority. What is valued are cultural tastes that “cannot be acquired in haste or by proxy, and which therefore appear as the surest indications of the quality of the person” (Bourdieu, 1984 [1979]: 281). The rarefied taste is constructed as cultured and the common taste as vulgar. Dominant classes not only use taste hierarchies to determine superiority, but they also negate the tastes of marginalized groups. “Tastes are perhaps first and foremost distastes, disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance ‘sick-making’ of the tastes of others” (Bourdieu, 1984 [1979]: 56). Although most studies of taste hierarchies adhere fairly closely to Bourdieu's class categories, it is possible to understand that other hierarchical formations (race, gender, religion) construct taste distinctions.

Layne (2023: 34) writes, “His [Bourdieu] blind spot in regard to race, however, makes it absolutely crucial that we ensure that his work does not continue to stand alone, as has so far often been the case.” Comparing Bourdieu with his contemporary, Langston Hughes, she notes that Hughes considered both race and class to be central to the construction of taste in his essay, “The Negro and the racial mountain” (2023: 33). Further, Johnson (2013) argues that it is necessary to move beyond Bourdieu's “methodological nationalism,” which does not consider cross-border operations of race, power, and taste at sites of colonial domination. In Bolivia, for example, “being associated with Westernness, thus, also means being in a social position that benefits from and allows for the reproduction of racial differences” (Kollnig, 2020: 26). Writing about the context of South Africa, Dolby (2000: 12) claims, “Taste does not operate alone – it functions within a matrix of other factors, including economic realities, the remnants of apartheid and the new context of white resentment.” Their resentment at a perceived loss of relative cultural authority produces distastes, particularly for the different tastes of an upwardly mobile Black South African elite. When race is not aligned directly with class, distaste becomes operative.

It should be noted that Whiteness generally does not produce distinction but rather invisible normativity (Dyer, 1988), so it is necessary to understand how racialized tastes operate differently. Just as Whiteness is formed in opposition as a referential identity through the mockery of the racial other, White tastes are formed, in part, through clear recognition of distastes. For White racial hegemony to operate, rogue desires are disciplined through discourses of disgust and threat of contamination. Although White tastes can desire the other (hooks, 1992), the tastes of people of color that do not align with White interests are regulated. In Korean media's cross-border “contra-flows,” race is articulated such that the media of the racial other is what is desired in that movement. If racial and class distinctions that favor the White bourgeoisie are to be maintained, contra-flows and counter-tastes of racially different media must be disciplined, and although cosmopolitanism is usually understood to constitute the habitus of high culture (Holt, 1998), Korean popular culture fandom is seen as crass and lowbrow, producing distaste and mockery rather than distinction. In Lyan's (2023) analysis of the New York Times' coverage of the “Korean Wave,” she found that fans are often represented as quasi-religious for having irrational interests that are stigmatized, for having a largely women-centric fandom outside Korea, and for having “improper” and “unnatural” interests in non-Western media (2023: 32). “The general tendency of American society to label K-pop fans as Koreaboo is problematic, as it works to uphold the racial hierarchy by constructing K-pop as an undesirable Asian culture and exoticizing the romantic desire for Korean men” (Lee et al., 2020: 5910). By deploying the label, Koreaboo, fans’ interests are disciplined, their romantic and sexual desires chastened, and their interests publicly disavowed.

Methods

To study Korean popular culture fans’ understanding of “Koreaboo,” I recruited and conducted three focus groups in March and April 2023 ¹ on the campus of a medium-sized university in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. The requirements for participation included self-identification as a Korean popular culture fan and, because of institutional review, a minimum age of 18. Perhaps, reflective of who is attracted to Korean popular culture, most participants are principally interested in Korean popular music, “K-pop,” while most were also fans of Korean television, “K-dramas.” Isabelle was the only outlier, as a fan of horror films (see Table 1). All eleven participants identify as cis-hetero women of color, including two self-identified Black participants, two mixed-race participants, three Latina participants, and four Asian participants.

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Table 1.

Focus group participants*

Pseudonym	Self-identified race	Popular culture interest
Abby	Black	K-pop, dramas
Diana	Black	K-pop
Ella	Asian	K-pop, dramas
Faith	Asian	K-pop, dramas, film, webtoons
Lucy	Asian	K-pop, dramas
Summer	Asian	K-pop, dramas
Rebecca	Asian-Arab	K-pop, dramas
Skye	Mixed-race Asian Latina	K-pop, dramas
Betty	Latina	K-pop
Celeste	Latina	K-pop
Isabelle	Latina	Horror film

*All participants identify as cis-hetero women.

To guide the focus groups, I used an unstructured format in order to follow conversational flows and to gain deeper insights. Instead of scripted questions, I based the conversation around four major themes: (1) their self-identification as fans and their Korean popular culture fan interests, (2) their uses of Korean popular culture and their fan activities, (3) their understanding of what Koreaboo means, (4) their interpretation of how their racial identifications matter in their experience of Koreaboo as a label. On average, the focus groups lasted about two hours and 15 minutes, and each focus group was video recorded in order to identify speakers. Each recording was deleted after transcriptions were completed in June 2023, and the reported names are pseudonyms. Identifying information has also been scrubbed from the transcripts and the report.

I chose focus groups as a method because they provide a safe space in which fans of color, who are usually marginalized for their interests, could be less guarded in a supportive community. Regrettably, because of the contracted time frame to use grant funds and the lack of Korean popular culture fans on campus, I was only able to recruit and conduct focus groups during a five-week time frame. Other than a handful of participants who signed up for the study together, the participants did not know each other. The stigma of being a fan means that the participants in this study only “came out” to their close friends and family. With more participants, I might have been able to distinguish subtle differences based on participants’ racial differences, and perhaps I could have found White, queer, and men fans, whose standpoints would likely point to different interpretations. Instead, this research articulates participants’ self-construction as an imagined community of women fans of color.

Because of the relatively low number of participants, I cross-checked focus group data with 15 Reddit threads that asked what other fans understood Koreaboos to be, or whether their behavior could be understood as the actions of a Koreaboo. The 15 Reddit threads included 789 posts with most threads created within the past five years. Reddit data were primarily used as a check to ensure that participants’ quotes are not outliers since Reddit users’ identities are unknowable.

Following the principles of grounded theory, I open-coded transcriptions and Reddit posts for careful deconstruction, axial-coded to organize themes, and selective-coded to draw relationships between themes (Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Strauss and Corbin, 1998). As the study's analytical lens, I used critical discourse analysis, because it is particularly sensitive when examining hidden ideological structures through discursive practices such as labeling, othering, and the construction of us–them binaries (van Dijk, 2002; Wodak, 2002).

Patriarchal white gaze and the Koreaboo stigma

Focus group participants define Koreaboo as a mocking insult that is deployed by non-fans against any fan of Korean popular culture, irrespective of the fan's race. Even Asian American participants understand it to perform disciplining work, although it is a bit less potent when used against East Asian American fans. The word has taken on such powerfully derogatory connotations that it has become taboo to the extent that participants would not even jokingly refer to themselves or other fans as Koreaboos, nor do they find any redemptive value in its co-optation. Though Koreaboo can be a slippery signifier, in all cases they understand it to be a powerful, disciplining discourse. This differs somewhat from “weeaboo,” to which participants drew obvious linkages, because of its discursive similarity, oftentimes overlapping interests, and reference to fans of another East Asian popular culture. However, the playful fan co-optation of weeaboo was not evident in relation to the use of Koreaboo, either from participants or in Reddit comments. Zealousidealife2301 wrote, “Yeah, I’ve also noticed that Weeaboo tends to be used in a more light-hearted manner while Koreaboo is meant to be an actual serious insult.” Although the reasons are unclear, it could perhaps be because of Japan's elevated status in the US imagination relative to Korea or because of the cultural odorlessness of its texts, which mostly rely on hand- and computer-drawn characters (see Iwabuchi, 2004). Outside of these possibilities, Skye believes that the difference has to do with sexism and the gendered differences in their respective fandoms, saying, “Like I think the way I’ve always kind of thought of it is like or not always, but men tend to be most of the weeaboos or weebs and then now realizing that Koreaboos are mostly women.”

As such, fans are disciplined by the watchful patriarchal, White gaze, which has the power to control and judge (Kuo, 2018; Shome, 1999). It constructs difference for the White imagination (Prashad, 2000), tolerating difference as long as it remains distant from the cultural center and as long as it is positioned in ways that are legible and desirable to the White gaze (Gabriel, 1998). White supremacy, however, is threatened by K-pop fandom in particular, because the music provides a different lens that challenges Western-centrism (Yoon, 2021) and a way to see themselves outside the White gaze (Yoon, 2022). Furthermore, fans are often mocked as irrational in their affective investments (Hills, 2007). Because taste hierarchies operate to reinforce social boundaries (Jenkins, 1992), the mocking nature of Koreaboo can be understood as a way of constructing it as vulgar, racially irrational, and lowbrow, justifying visceral hate.

Rebecca and Lucy, for instance, talked briefly about the discursive violence they have seen online when fans express Korean popular culture interest. Rebecca said, “And, then, there's like, you’re a Koreaboo, you should kill yourself.” Lucy affirmed that she has frequently seen these comments online, but rarely in person, because she hides her interests. Recalling situations in which she was asked about her musical tastes, she said, “I never like said K-pop even though I really enjoy it…. I would like choose not to, until, like, I feel safe, knowing that they wouldn’t like make fun of me for it or like judge me for it.” As Korean popular culture has become more visible as a counter-flow, it is no longer ignored and trivialized, but it is sometimes met with overt disgust by non-fans, who have internalized the US racial order. Yet, instead of prejudice and violence producing a greater sense of distinction as it has with British Goths (Hodkinson, 2002), Korean popular culture fans avoid stigma and moderate, rather than deepen, affective commitments.

Although most participants did not discuss verbal or physical violence, they all point to the shaming that Koreaboo does as a stigmatizing label. On the Reddit threads, several users posted explanations about Koreaboo's discursive work to shame and discipline interests.

jiniary: But to be very honest, the whole “Koreaboo” act has made me (I’m not sure about others) really insecure about appreciating Korean culture.

lemonality: I think it's kind of a loaded term that's used to put people down for having interests the western mainstream finds creepy or cringeworthy

In the Reddit posts, there is no ambivalence about Koreaboo's intended cultural meanings in the US. It is understood as a dominant cultural reaction to fan interests in a racial other that is positioned as worthy of disgust, and as jiniary's post indicates, it is a powerful discursive means of making fans anxious about their interests. When I asked Summer if she had ever used the term, even jokingly, she replied, “I can’t see a situation where I would ever go you’re a Koreaboo. It's so derogatory that I don’t think I would ever do that.” In a brief exchange, Faith, Skye, and Betty, worked out and agreed upon the purposes of Koreaboo's boundary work.

Faith: So, the reason why they like coined the term Koreaboo in the States as a bad term is because if like, if they didn’t put a bad meaning towards liking Korean culture, being obsessive over it, then eventually like everyone would be interested and no longer be interested in like, like you know, like pop.

Betty: Yeah, like slow the growth of Korean influence.

Skye: Like, gatekeep it.

As Kim (2023c: 99) writes, Korean popular culture fandom is “related to the cultural tastes of subordinated formations of people, particularly with those disempowered by race, gender, and class”. Given the participants’ standpoints as marginalized fans and as women of color, they interpret the visceral distastes as internalized, subconscious protection of the existing racial order. Naming performers such as Bad Bunny or Tyla, they claim that White supremacy does not shut out all foreign performers of color, but that it only legitimates performers of color who fit existing racialized taste hierarchies. Korean popular culture, particularly K-pop, is understood as being at odds with racialized taste hierarchies. In the US racial imagination, East Asians are generally constructed as nerds and stripped of masculine cool and sexuality (Eglash, 2002). Abby said, “It's also like xenophobia majorly. Like saying like K-pop is gay or like seeing the guys as, like, really effeminate.” Reddit user, rosier7, posted a similar comment: “Apparently if you’re a male and you listen/watch to kpop/kdrama they just call you gay. I hate the fact that I had to listen to my favorite song in secret. Not hating on gay people, but when you’re straight and called gay it [is] pretty uncomfortable.” Within a US frame, K-pop is mocked and treated with disgust, as well as its fans, for violating heteronormative expectations of racialized masculine performance.

Because K-pop, in particular, tends to attract women fans of color (Kim, 2023c), participants noted that the disciplining of fan interests was gendered and regulated the politics of desire. Betty, for instance, highlighted the queering of fan interests. She said:

Like if a guy likes Blackpink, and the hypermasculine man goes that's gay or something like that. Like they will casually throw that word around it and just do it like that because a man likes Blackpink or Twice. God forbid a man likes Twice.

Her examples are particularly interesting because Blackpink and Twice are both all-women groups that have fairly large Korean men fandoms, but outside Korea, to be interested in these groups and then, especially, to be interested in “boy bands,” is understood as outside heteronormative masculine tastes.

In the racial logics of the US, in which Blackness is hypermasculinized and Asianness hyperfeminized (Oh, 2012), Asian/American men are emasculated as the least sexually desirable (Espiritu, 2004). Not only are women fans generally derided for developing “irrational” romantic fantasies (Stanfill, 2013), the women fans in this study feel that they are disciplined against being attracted to culturally degraded men. Diana claims, “I feel like women take more of the heat for, like, guys, it's just like, oh, like, he just really likes Asian girls. And for girls, it's like that's a little weird. Like, you seem obsessive over it.” Visible in the claim of a double standard is the idea that racial attraction is gendered in ways that police desire. Frustrations about attractions being called bizarre and fetishizing are particularly evident on Reddit:

machinavelli: The idea of a Koreaboo was created to create shame for liking Asian men… no one accuses non-white women of fetishizing white men if she likes One Direction or whatever.

Florence218: I think people have just become so used to white/western culture that anyone who enjoys anything outside of that is classified as odd/fetishising/otherwise weird if they themselves are not a part of that same demographic. If I date a black guy, no one bats an eye, but I’m with an Asian and people lose their shit? Miss me with that double-standard discrimination, and let me enjoy my dating experience, dammit!

Fans’ frustrations can be understood as an articulation of a counter-hegemonic desire in the politics of attraction in which they resist shaming and disgust. As their fan desires transform into cross-racial ones, it works against the internalized racial habitus of gendered racial constructions of Asian men as least desirable and the implicit construction of White men as most desirable. The cultural unusualness of heterosexual attraction to Asian men becomes vilified as unhealthy, irrational compulsions. Romantic interest in Korean men, or East Asian men more broadly, is disciplined in order to substantiate the racial politics of White racial hegemony.

Because fan cultures are “poached,” piecemeal cultures that do not work explicitly toward counter-ideological purposes (Jenkins, 1992), participants do not generally engage racial reflexivity in order to subvert the patriarchal White gaze but, rather, they avoid making their fan interests known because of their anxieties about being called a Koreaboo. Ella, for instance, said, “Even though, like, now that I’m older, I still am afraid of like saying to certain people that I’m a fan of K-pop because I’m just afraid that, like, I’m going to be made fun of, and it just, like, makes me feel bad.” Lucy, similarly, said:

I had to be, like, self-aware about, oh, should I say that I like K-pop to this person? Like, how would, how would they react? Like, I feel growing up, growing up with the internet and everything, like, I had to become self-aware from such a young age in order to protect myself.

The anxiety not only manifests in the words themselves but is expressed through the repeated use of “like” as a verbal filler. The anxiety, thus, appears to be viscerally felt and embodied even in the safe space of the focus group. Because the abusive term and subsequent insults could come from anyone, regardless of gender, race, national origin, education, or any other more easily identifiable markers, fans feel anxious and vulnerable and cannot safely and openly share their interests.

Of all participants, it was only Isabelle and Celeste who did not express such anxieties. This may be because Isabelle is only a fan of Korean horror films, which allows her to distance herself from other media and to share interests in a masculinized medium and genre, and because Celeste believes she has “overcome” her anxiety by couching her interest among a panoply of other musical genre interests, in order to present herself as a cosmopolitan, cultural omnivore.

Hiding fan interests was a recurrent strategy to manage the dangers of the patriarchal White gaze. Diana, for instance, says that her fan consumption is safe because she hides it. “I don’t show people, and if I’m watching it, I’m in the comfort of my own bed, under my blankets, where no one can see me.” Summer, who is Filipina American and lived in predominantly White suburbs, noted that it is White people who cause the most anxiety. She said, “When it's someone who's White, I feel my radar is especially up.” Although Summer and other participants point out that other people of color also discipline and cause anxiety by insulting them as Koreaboos, they perceive White Americans as especially invested in disciplining standards of good and bad taste in order to maintain hegemonic regimes of White patriarchy.

The internalized patriarchal White gaze and intra-fandom disciplining

Heretofore, this article has elaborated upon earlier research about the stigma of being a Korean popular culture fan. Where it now turns is the uncharted terrain of fans’ mobilization of “Koreaboo” against other fans. By doing so, this article contributes to the literature in three ways. First, other research on race and intra-fandom disciplining has generally not studied the transnational audience reception of fans of color, nor the ways fans stigmatize one another. It also contributes to the specific understanding of how Korean popular culture fans of color project their view of the bad fan onto other fans. As Stanfill (2013) argues, fans stigmatize the bad fan as extreme, as wasteful in their fan consumption, as trivial, as out of touch with reality, as abnormal, as emotionally immature, and as gendered feminine through their irrationality and romantic fantasies. This is true for the participants of this study, as well, who shift the Koreaboo insult onto “bad fans.” The difference being that Korean popular culture fans are defined less by a specific text but by their interests in Korea – its popular culture, its ordinary culture, and its people. Perhaps because of the “K” brand, Koreanness is overdetermined, and fans especially feel the controlling gaze of Western patriarchy.

Re-directing dominant culture's trivializing view of Korean popular culture fans, participants deflected, rather than challenged, the stigma of the Koreaboo onto what they view as the “extreme” fan who defines boundaries of what and who is and is not acceptable. Skye, for instance, said, “It's more like they’re just insanely obsessed.” Here, the association between obsession and mental illness is clarified, wherein being obsessed is understood as irrational. This is a stigma from which fans dissociate. Celeste said, “I’m trying to justify that I’m not that obsessed. I don’t want to be seen as someone who's obsessed.” Reddit users’ comments were largely similar.

jennkyube: I feel like “koreaboos” should only be reserved for those annoying, obsessed, stalker-like, spamming-fancams-in-replies, extra-AF fans.

Emeraldhealing: It should be reserved for people who are really obsessed and committed to “becoming a Korean.”

To distance themselves, fans transfer the Koreaboo onto the bad fan, who is most saliently embodied in the person of Oli London, a social media influencer, who claimed to be a transracial Korean and who is well-known for undergoing multiple operations to resemble Jimin, a member of the K-pop group, BTS. The Koreaboo-as-intrafan-insult operates similarly to insults from non-fans in that they both warn fans from becoming obsessive and overstepping boundaries of appropriate fan interest. Fans of color have already transgressed, so they displace the “bad fan” onto the Koreaboo, and they primarily reserve this insult for White fans, thereby partially and ambivalently challenging the White gaze. This affirms Yoon's (2022) claim that Asian Canadian fans use Koreaboo as a moniker to refer specifically to the over-invested and immature White fan.

Betty recounted a story of a White fan at her school, who centered Korean popular culture in her conversations and claimed expertise despite being a fan for a relatively short time.

But, there was this one girl, and it was the first thing that she always brought up. She was blond hair, blue eyes. Oh, she just got into it like recently, so she tried to talk to me about it and, at first, I was all for it. I was like, oh my god. Yay! I have someone to talk to about K-pop boys and K-dramas, but she made me uncomfortable, and I’m not even Korean.

Participants in this focus group argued that because of the cross-racial nature of the fandom, White fans are most susceptible to problematic behaviors because White privilege means they do not have a sophisticated cross-cultural toolkit and are thus more likely to engage in cultural fetishization and a desire for assimilation, and even transracial change. In one of the only studies of Korean popular culture fans of color, Kim (2023b) argued that fans of color claim that White fans frequently express racial ignorance, which makes fans of color more guarded when interacting with them.

This does not mean that fans of color view Koreaboo as exclusively the provenance of White fans but that White fans’ racial privilege and standpoint mean that they are more prone to what is perceived as cross-cultural excess. Skye said, “Just a lot of the White fans don’t know how to act… Like, I think it starts out wrong. Yeah, it's like a thing of privilege. Like, a lot of White people aren’t really aware when they’re being ignorant.” Perhaps, as a way of arguing that privilege is learned, Betty said, “I feel like also because it's so common I guess for White people to not be corrected when they do stuff like that, so they never learned that it was wrong, so they just keep doing it.” When their behaviors are corrected, Diana claimed that White fans are unwilling to learn from criticism. “I guess to them when they do something, they can never do anything wrong, but to others, it's just like they kind of do too much and then look at us like we’re crazy because we’re telling them they’re doing too much.”

The first major excess the fans talked about, perhaps because of the salience of Oli London as an exemplar, was a desire for race-change, to become Korean or to fantasize about assimilating into Korean society. Summer said:

The thing with Oli London is that they wanted to be Korean, and they wanted to identify as Korean and that was I think, like, oh, that's what I would consider a Koreaboo; someone who wants to, like, will go to very extremes.

As such, the extreme of fandom is perceived to shift from excessive interest in the fan object to a desire to be Korean. Even if the change is not surgically created, participants pointed to White fans, who use make-up so that their eyes appear Korean in an Orientalist imagination. Betty and Faith had a brief conversation discussing “Asianfishing,” in which White fans use cosmetics to make their eyes appear “elongated.” It is important to note that these criticisms by Black, Latinx, and Asian participants signal a criticism of Whiteness's consumptive desires to become the Other. As bell hooks (1992: 21) writes, “Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.”

The idea of changing to Korean is not limited to the physical but also to cultural performances of Koreanness, particularly through “cringy” uses of language. Abby said, “They just act in a really, really weird way where they feel like they're Korean or they can speak Korean.” Abby continued by describing these behaviors as “cringe,” suggesting White fans’ performances of Koreanness is forced and inauthentic. Rebecca said, “I think Koreaboo is like someone who is very, very much into Korean culture, and like they reject their actual identity and identify themselves as Korean and are just very obsessive over it.” For people of color in the US, becoming bicultural is normatively perceived to be the most preferable way of understanding one's identity, so White fans’ desire to be and perform Koreanness is antithetical to the ways the participants of color understand healthy fan consumption of a transcultural and transracial object.

The othering of the “Koreaboo” has echoes of intra-fan projection that problematizes the excessive fan as gendered in their desires for romance and their irrational attractions. Betty pointed out that fetishization for Korean men is especially problematic because it is not as discursively constructed in US dating culture, a “preference,” but, rather, it is a culturally specific desire. She said, “Fetishization, where you will literally turn down other men that are not East Asian just because they’re not East Asian, and you will fall in, fall in love with someone who is East Asian just because they are East Asian.” Although this cultural specificity might indicate counter-hegemonic resistance to Asian racialization, it is vilified for being out of touch with reality and connected to fantasies of a Korean future. Likewise, in Reddit threads, it was common to discipline heterosexual women's romantic, excessive desire for a Korean man with claims of fetishization.

San7129: I just relate koreaboo with those who fetishize koreans because they like kpop. Like those who see an asian guy and start acting weird and being excited just because he is Asian.

Libby_Lu: Koreaboos become problematic when they show interest in a particular person because they look “korean” but immediately lose interest once they find out they aren’t Korean.

The intra-fandom disciplining appears to be a commonly available discourse of improper ethnoracial desire and irrationality, but the difference with the focus group participants is that they argued that it is specifically the White “Koreaboo” who fetishizes Korean men. Indeed, criticisms about racial fetishization are so salient that they were echoed by every participant. Lucy said:

That also reminded me of, about the discussion of heterosexual women, like wanting to, um, date and marry and then have a baby with a person who is like, like of another race in order to have mixed children. I feel like that also somewhat like ties to that because I feel like they also want to have that fantasy of having like Korean American children.

White fans who want a specifically mixed-race Korean-White child are mocked as Koreaboos because of its proximity to race-change criticisms. Making this connection explicit, Skye said, “Because most of the time, I feel like their intention is to, like end up married to a Korean person or become Korean.” Race-change and assimilation merge through the heterosexual mixed White-Korean family and the imagined child who anchors claims to White women fans' fantasized Korean life. Diana claimed that Koreaboos want “their kids to have those features,” and Rebecca said:

I’ve seen people say like, I’m learning Korean so I can go move to Korea and marry a Korean man or marry a K-Pop member or something like that. They don’t have a real reason why they want to do it. They just want to do it because like they have this fantasy in their head that they’re going to go to Korea and that they're going to have like such a good life, they’re, they’re going to meet idols to marry someone, but they don’t think about anything else.

As such, these criticisms pull together discourses about the bad fan in addition to the problematic White heterosexual woman, whose excesses are understood to exacerbate exercises of White privilege and, implicitly, healthy cross-cultural and cross-racial relationships.

Embodying this cross-cultural excess and fantasy-making is, thus, understood as the Koreaboo, the bad fan, from whom they distance themselves. Although this projection of the Koreaboo can be a counter-hegemonic critique of White heterosexual privilege, it is also under its gaze. The participants feel a social need to other (White) Koreaboos in order to avoid stigmas about Korean popular culture fans. It is a reaction to the patriarchal White gaze, which counters rather than subverts.

For instance, there is some evidence that Koreans, who are culturally Korean whether in Korea or as sojourners, are unaware or uninterested in the label. It is not native to Korean society nor important to problematize fan behavior that does not invade privacy or cause distress to celebrities, such as stalking. On Reddit, users explained Koreaboo's specifically Western usage:

DRevolutionPresident: Also my korean friend told me that “koreaboo” is not a word they use in Korea is 100% Western. He told me that they honestly don’t care. As most westerners are the ones to throw the word koreaboo around and not actual asians.

Jobant: I’m ethnically Korean and … want you to know that Koreans don’t know what a Koreaboo is or what the concept even refers to. The term “Koreaboo” is almost exclusively a Western term- pretty much usually used as a tool for either gatekeeping [or] … a tool to express barely masked xenophobia.

Their explanations point to Koreaboo discourse as a disciplining mechanism that has little, if any, currency among culturally Korean people, pointing instead to the racial taste hierarchies of the West, that use it to express distaste. This, however, only explains one part of the question – why Koreaboo is used in dominant culture, not why Koreaboo is used within the fandom, particularly not why fans of color use it.

When participants were asked why they care about fetishization, appropriation, and race-change that are explained as qualities of Koreaboos when most Korean people themselves are not even aware of the term, participants expressed surprise, and ready explanations were not found. After some thought, Rebecca noted that she could not recall when Koreans used the term. She said, “I don’t think I’ve seen any, like, actual Koreans calling a non-Korean a Koreaboo.” It raises the question of why participants of color are concerned about behaviors they read as deviant against Korean people and culture when Koreans are unconcerned about them.

I interpret this attempt to protect Korean culture as a localized reception practice that is meant to protect themselves, as people of color in a White racial hegemony. In this case, Korean popular culture becomes a terrain in which local ideological struggles occur, to define proper ways for people to “appreciate” cultural difference. As such, the stakes are directly relevant to the participants as fans of color. In one of the focus groups, both Summer and Celeste used the pronoun “our” to refer to Korean media on separate occasions. When it was brought to their attention, Summer claimed that it was because as a Filipina American, “I just see all the Asians as one big thing, but I just see all the Asians together as one big community.” In her case, the “our” refers to the ways Asian Americans draw upon multiple transnational Asian cultures to form identities in a pan-Asian pastiche (Park, 2008). Another question, though, is what “our” means for people of color, who do not identify as Asian American. The answer that emerged was that they viewed themselves as belonging to a coalition of people of color in which they have a shared standpoint of racial marginalization.

In some cases, interracial alliances and affinities between people of color were seen as an explicit response to White supremacy. Isabelle said:

I feel like it's more like White people minimizing minority music rather than like other groups of color because like other groups of people are more open to like everyone's music, but when it comes to Asian or to like reggaetón, they try to minimize it, you know. I think with it's like Asian, what is it? The minority. What is that thing? It's like that thing was created by White supremacy to make like Asian people and Black people to clash.

Isabelle described affinities as being based in a shared experience of racial marginalization. Her view looks past ways that racial groups have been pitted against one another by referencing the model minority stereotype, which has been used as an ideological wedge to divide Black and Asian American communities from seeing their shared marginalization within White supremacy (Eng and Han, 2018; Oh and Eguchi, 2022). Unlike US popular music, which is heavily consumed by White American fans, Skye reads K-pop as an exemplar of minoritized difference. She said:

Maybe it's like a thing of like you have Western media, then you have K-pop, and it's kind of like if we see it that way, it's like, oh, well, if only White people can be like the face of Western, then K-pop's like the underdog.

Interestingly, the use of the pronoun, “our,” did not include Black American participants. The reason is unclear, but it could be because Black American fans may see Korean media as adjoined to but sufficiently separate from their racial identities and their experiences of anti-Black racism. Nevertheless, Korean media, for fans of color in this study, are defended against perceptions of White excess in order to criticize White supremacy rather than to protect actual Korean people. As such, Korean popular culture in the US becomes a proxy space for ideological resistance by fans of color.

Conclusion

Stanfill writes, “To be that fan who loves so fully and is so without regard for norms is foreclosed, but that very foreclosure means that fans cannot even grieve the loss of being that fan” (Stanfill, 2013: 129). This is a regrettable conclusion that I felt as I conducted the focus groups. Korean popular culture fans are not allowed to engage in the pleasures and excesses of fandom because of the ever-present gaze of patriarchal, heterornormative White supremacy. It requires that the fans sneak around in the shadows lest they be discovered and attacked for having vulgar tastes – lowbrow for its Korean origins and its appeal to girls’ interests. Indeed, a common criticism, which only works ideologically if patriarchal discourses are taken as common sense and without reflexivity, is that fans of K-pop are tween girls. The gendering, infantilizing, and racial othering of taste hierarchies betrays how they are constructed through race, gender, and heteronormativity.

The presence of the patriarchal White gaze even shapes fans’ views of themselves. They do not argue for different tastes, but they only argue against problematic practices from which they disidentify. They internalize the gaze such that they define themselves as “normal” against the specter of the “bad fan,” the Koreaboo. As such, they position the Koreaboo as a “folk devil” (see Williams and Ho, 2016),” which the patriarchal White gaze sees, while they position themselves as “normal” fans, who can claim proximity to White patriarchal norms. This implicitly reinforces White patriarchy. Yet, at the same time, for Korean popular culture fans of color, they partially challenge Whiteness by casting the excessive, heterosexual White woman fan as the Koreaboo. In this way, they are doubly distanced, and they can use the (White) Koreaboo as a means of challenging the appropriative and fetishizing practices of Whiteness while distancing themselves from being called a Koreaboo by virtue of their racial difference from Whiteness. The melancholy comes, however, because Korean popular culture fans cannot enjoy Korean media freely. They are unable to enjoy it openly, nor can they enjoy it too much.