Abstract
Keywords
Introduction
It took us a while to find the bus (Figure 1).
The bus we took to explore different spots around Shanghai.
In May of 2024, Henry Jenkins came to China with six graduate students from the University of Southern California—two were Chinese nationals, two had a great deal of experience doing research in East Asia, and two had never left the United States before. Our group traveled to Hong Kong and Shanghai for an immersive trip designed to foster greater connections with graduate students and researchers in China as well as to help ground their research through direct experiences of Chinese fan cultures. We were going to be joined by Chinese graduate students from Hong Kong and Shanghai-based institutions. Many of the contributors to this special issue participated in this adventure. They are all now participants in an expanding research network focused on better understanding transcultural fandom in East Asia and beyond created by Jenkins and his long-time collaborator, Sangita Shreshtova.
After landing at Pudong International Airport, we were welcomed by our friends at Shanghai University, familiar faces from many Zoom calls. However, our first challenge soon appeared: finding our bus. We initially exited through the wrong gate, completely lost despite everyone's best efforts to read signs and check directions. We wandered around, doubling back and correcting our direction until we finally located the correct parking lot. Everyone let out a collective sigh of relief and cheered, delighted that we had finally found it. The fresh, cool air on the bus greeted us as soon as we stepped inside. Laughter filled the bus as we began to introduce ourselves and our shared fandom, chatting about the upcoming schedules for the days ahead. This slight confusion captured much of what we experienced throughout our time together—communication and collaboration across cultures are rarely straightforward and often filled with missteps, adjustments, and moments of shared discovery and reconciliation. Who holds the map, who translates signposts and menus, who extends a guiding hand? We had come together from different universities, regions, and cultural backgrounds, yet the collisions of ideas, laughter, confusion, and empathy have powered our own traveling seminars on wheels.
The question, of course, is: Where is that bus going? In this special issue of the
The “bus ride” as a metaphor for transcultural (fandom) research
The means of transport is largely erased—the boat, the land rover, the mission airplane, etc. These technologies suggest systematic prior and ongoing contacts and commerce with exterior places and forces which are not part of the field/object. The discourse of ethnography (“being there”) is too sharply separated from that of travel (“getting there.”).
—James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures” (1992: 101)
Many metaphors exist to describe the sense of crossing boundaries—bridges, crossroads, or hubs. We add a simpler one: the bus. A bus is utilitarian: it picks people up and drops them off, rarely glamorously. Yet the act of riding a bus, especially in a place not our own, puts you in close proximity with strangers and forces you to pay attention in real-time, whether it's checking the next stop or chatting with seatmates about what is outside the window. In a way, that bus becomes a microcosm of what it means to explore new cultural terrain: a noisy space that speeds us forward while we become, for a moment, a collective traveling along the same route, navigating cultural codes and emotional changes. Sharing a bus with students and professors from Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and Shanghai literalized so many of the themes that shape this special issue. Our conversations flowed fluidly from K-pop choreography to the ongoing discussions about
Driving practices and theories
The terrain of fandom is constantly shifting. If it once seemed possible and almost natural for the field of Fandom Studies to emerge from the Anglo-American realm and remain grounded there, such parochialism seems absurd at the current moment of what we like to call the global shuffle—that is, the way digital and streaming media have put pop culture into global circulation, making things accessible to us that we could never have accessed before. These technologies impact us as fans but also as scholars. Zoom, for example, came of age with the global pandemic, yet it now makes possible a research group that spans continents to meet in real-time every other week, hearing from a geographically dispersed set of speakers, with researchers from multiple countries gathering in breakout rooms and writing articles together. This is as much a part of the current moment of fandom studies as is Archive of Our Own, the vast digital archiving site for fanfiction, where fans can post their own stories using a digital infrastructure programmed by fan programmers, defended by fan lawyers, and studied by fan researchers. The shutting down of Archive of Our Own was what precipitated Jenkins's journey to Shanghai in 2023 and paved the way for the meeting of students from American and Chinese institutions on a bus in 2024. The incident that provoked the shutdown of Chinese access to AO3 centered on a popular Chinese television series,
But first, we want to define some key terms and concepts that will be running across our discussion. The term “fan” is almost as challenging a concept to nail down as Raymond Williams famously found of “culture,” as social media companies, entertainment corporations, journalists, academics, fans, tourism boards, and countless other entities push to endlessly expand what counts as a fan until the word seems to be everything, everywhere, all at once. In their book
Insofar as these networked communication technologies now have the capacity to spread information on a global or at least transnational scale, then all contemporary fandom is transnational to some degree. This special issue starts from the premise that popular culture from Asia is now reaching a global audience of fans, a movement that has occurred in waves starting with Japan, then India, now Korea, and increasingly China, with Thailand and Vietnam building momentum as fans around the world discover new content, new performers, new artists, and new practices. Fandom scholars have preferred the term, Transcultural, rather than Transnational, to refer to such exchanges, a term which Bertha Chin and Lori Morimoto (2013: 93) explain, “at once is flexible enough to allow for a transnational orientation, yet leaves open the possibility of other orientations that may inform, or even drive, cross-border fandom”.
Chin and Lori Morimoto have been the primary advocates of this approach. Morimoto (2017) has shared her own experiences of growing up in Hong Kong but with an orientation towards media from elsewhere—especially pop stars from Japan and science fiction from America. With the growth of the internet, she found herself engaging often with fans from many other parts of the world who shared her interests and tastes, including a growing fascination with same-sex relationships, which were known as Boys’ Love in Asia and Slash in the Anglo-American world. In her scholarship, Morimoto (2018) has stressed what happens when access, affect, and affinity come together, resulting in fans feeling connections with popular culture that does not ‘belong’ to them, was not made with them in mind, may not even know of their existence, but nevertheless speaks to them in powerful ways. That is, fandom follows trade routes, and as we get access to a broader range of cultural materials as a result of networked communication technologies, we also follow the feelings towards fan objects that stir emotion and seem to express something meaningful to us. We find ourselves sharing interests with other fans from the other side of the planet, and as a consequence, sharing information, experiences, and passions together. National differences certainly matter in such encounters, whether understood in terms of geographic boundaries, regulatory structures, or linguistic barriers, but they may be more or less relevant to what draws fans towards such engagements, given that the fan also recognizes something here that may transcend those national distinctions.
We can imagine a range of possibilities — fans may be part of a diasporic community that feels strong cultural connections but is scattered across a range of national contexts; one may feel an affinity with a culture that differs profoundly from your own; there may be multiple cultures operating within the same nation state and thus fans may experience cultural differences without experiencing national differences. Morimoto and Chin (2017: 176) argue: Understood as something that
Almost twenty years ago, Jenkins (2004) described this phenomenon as pop cosmopolitanism, suggesting the ways young people were seeking to escape the perceived parochialism of their own countries by forming new identities around the consumption of popular culture from somewhere else. At the time, he was writing about the self-proclaimed American Otaku who felt active connections with their counterparts in Tokyo and Osaka. These early accounts were idealistic in the ways they imagined such exchanges would build closer ties between nations and cultures, though it is increasingly clear that this may be but is not necessarily the case. We are also discovering the phenomenon of fan nationalism, perhaps most fully embodied by China's “Little Pink,” which actively trolls fans elsewhere in the name of protecting and promoting Chinese popular culture and the interests of the Chinese state. We see fan nationalism surface in less dramatic ways as fans of a K-pop group form attachments or “biases” based on the nationalities of different group members, become offended easily when another group member seems to slight their national culture, call out forms of cultural appropriation, or express hostility to fans from other nations intruding into their domain. We can see fan nationalism at play when we watch the rapid box office success that surrounded
So much fandom studies research over the past two decades has focused on the digital for the reasons cited here and for many others that it is easy to forget that fandom is also lived on the ground, that fan practices are still, to a large degree, localized within particular cultural geographies, and that if we want to understand and experience them fully, we have to travel to meet the fans where they live. In
As an ethnographer, Condry wanted to understand the texts of Japanese hip hop within a broader socio-cultural context and as part of the process of globalization, viewing fans, as we did in the previous minibook, as active agents of both globalization and localization. Condry is not the only scholar who has stressed the importance of understanding global or transcultural fandom in terms of specific locations. In a more recent essay, Marc Steinberg and Edmond Ernest dit Alban (2018: 289) write: Otaku culture, we argue, must be understood neither merely through particular foundational texts nor merely through specific ways of seeing —as it has been understood until this point—but rather through a conjunction of these visual and narrative elements with specific patterns of urban encounters. City spaces and transportable media commodities can become key methodological tools for mapping otaku movement.
They are specifically interested in a neighborhood called Ikebukuro, which they characterize as “a Mecca for female fandom” because of its numerous secondhand shops, where one can buy recycled media, print culture, and clothing that has acquired value through subcultural production. They merge tools from cultural studies, urban history, and cultural geography to discuss the mobility of both media and pedestrians through the space and the way these movements charge the space with affect and meaning.
Expanding those arguments across a series of essays on what they describe as “Otaku Sanctuaries,” including work on Otome Road and Tokyo Disneyland, Dit Alban (2020) has tapped a “pedestrian” or on-the-ground perspective on how fan networks operate and what an understanding of material practices and locations might contribute to our understanding of fan relations. How, for example, might recognition of fan recycling, recirculation, and reselling practices contribute to our comprehension of Japan's “media mix”? Their work brings concepts from cultural geography into conversation with fandom studies, resulting in articles full of maps of specific locations. This is a refreshing shift in focus—the study of online fan practices, while also important, has grown to the point that it deflects attention away from material culture and physical geography, from how and where fans come together. Some of the most valuable insights from the Global Fan Jamboree hosted on Jenkins's blog,
Shanghai is one of the great “ovens” of China. In the summer months, it is too damn hot to walk, so we took the bus. For that reason, while we are inspired by dit Alban's approach and hope to apply it to examples from Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Seoul, we cannot really be said to be deploying a “pedestrian perspective.” But for sure, our bus ride led us to focus on things that were happening on the ground, things we saw at the places the bus stopped or even things we saw out the windows. So, this brings us back to the bus, which allows us to keep our wheels on the ground but to cover greater distances, bringing together observations from different parts of the city, or even making comparisons across national borders as we explore how fans in different locations respond to shared fan objects. As we do so, the bus as a container also produces its own culture, as our conversations with each other take shape, as we exchange ideas, plan projects, compare notes, and develop a shared vocabulary for discussing the new experiences we have in common. Those of us inside the bus included those visiting the country for the first time and those visiting Shanghai for the first time from another Chinese city, as well as locals who knew where we were going and had experienced it as part of their everyday lives apart from the group.
In this special issue, we bring together two kinds of content. On the one hand, we share full-length articles written collaboratively by young researchers, often working together across national borders around topics that emerged around access, affect, and affinity. On the other hand, we invited some more established researchers whose work inspires us to engage in conversations around key themes and topics related to transcultural fandom, especially as it relates to China, Korea, and beyond. Both involve cross-cultural dialogue as we seek to understand phenomena that cannot be fully grasped from a single location, which requires us to merge high altitude theory with grounded research.
The wheels on the bus go round and round: Notes from the field
Throughout this section, we will use excerpts from the field notes that Jenkins took during our travels together to show how specific experiences helped to shape the articles you are reading here. Many, though not all, of the contributors to this issue were on the bus for some or all of its adventures, comparing notes, sharing seats, and admiring each other's purchases at various stops along the route.
Hong Kong, Day 4 (Figure 2)
Prof. Dingkun Wang and his students take us across the city via subway to the Mong Kok area, which is where a kind of low-rent fandom mecca can be found. Chinese fans have taken over a warehouse here. It's pretty seedy but not without its charms. There are five or six floors with a maze of shops on each. Some specialize, like comics and manga shops or those that only sell K-Pop records, but for the most part, they are just a jumble, a bizarre where old fan stuff goes to die or at least to be traded with someone else. There is no effort to sort anything by traditional categories – male/female, old/new, domestic/foreign are all mixed up together.… Fans can rent small clear boxes in which they can sell their own stuff – used toys and fan-made goods, all mixed together. There is also a wall dedicated to fliers for new goods that will be on order soon, so you can sign up in advance for what you will want to purchase. As one of the guys put it, “I work for Bandai,” by which he meant that he spends most of his paycheck to support a local toy brand. He describes his bedroom as a cramped space overflowing with toys and in his case, model kits….
A “closet” stall where fans sell their own merch and second-hand items.
Dingkun and Xiaochun's paper (Wang and Zhang, 2025) turns our attention to an emerging mode of translational fandom in China: the fan podcast. In the wake of the 2021 shutdown of YYeTs, once China's most prominent fansubbing collective, fan translators have found new channels and new strategies. They situate this shift within a “post-fansubbing” moment, shaped by platformization, changing regulations, and evolving fandom tactics. Through close attention to the creative and affective labor of fan podcasters, Dingkun and Xiaochun show how these audio-based translators carry media across linguistic, cultural, and political boundaries not just by converting words, but by curating context, tone, and meaning. Positioned alongside fansubbers, fandubbers, scanlators, and fan game localizers, these podcasters continue the legacy of grassroots cultural mediation. In doing so, they rework the sonic and social textures of transcultural fandom, sustaining local attachments to global media in the face of increasing constraints.
Shanghai, Day 2 (Figure 3)
The best thing about Shanghai Disneyland is the range of costumes the visitors wear — mostly women, dolled up for their day in what Lenore tells me is known locally as “Shanghai's Backyard.” The guys tend to dress down, and the contrasts within couples are stark, though this is not always the case, and we saw plenty of men who are getting into the goofy spirit of the day. And you can see the children – heavily girls here – as also learning the performance skills that will serve them well when they mature. This is the place to be seen and to see your friends. And there are selfies being snapped everywhere you look. Above all, Disneyland seems to be a staging ground for photographs.
Male tourists dressed up at Disney. A cosplayer striking a pose at the fan convention. Henry with two other cosplayers at the event.
Yoonsuh, Lenore, and Tiara's (Jung et al., 2025) paper traces the cultural afterlives of
Shanghai, Day 5 (Figures 4 and 5)
Afterwards, we split with Yvonne, Lenore, and I went to a fan convention centered around the game Yvonne has been studying –
Yvonne, Fanxi, Kirsten, and Samantha's article (Gonzales et al., 2025) explores what happens when a global hit like
Shanghai, Day 6
We have been in the mall for several hours, and I am worn to the bone. I ask about places to sit. There is almost no place to sit in the whole vast mall. I am told Chinese shoppers do not sit. They just press through, even the older ones. Lenore's Mom is supposed to be an epic shopper who wears her daughter down. But Lenore has a solution. We go to a local furniture store where teens are already filling in the sofas and chairs. I ask whether the store will object, and this seems to confuse her, and indeed, we stay on a soft, comfy couch for almost an hour, and I end up taking a nap there. We are never bothered. The cosplayers are in full possession of this mall. Their cash keeps it operating so they can do what they want. By now, there are cosplayers milling about everywhere you look. There is a discrete population from the K-Pop dancers who are also dressed up but in very different clothes. The two do not seem to mix. The cosplayers have brightly colored hair—most of them seem to be cosplaying game characters. Lenore says that this new generation of cosplayers are more daring. She said they had to keep the cosplay off the street, bringing their clothes in their backpacks and changing in the toilets. But these kids come in from the streets dressed flamboyantly and use the mall as a hangout. I ask if any of them go to school like this and then realize the error in my question. Chinese students wear school uniforms and have no options about how they dress, but as soon as they are out of classes, they redress for all of this. I had promised Xinyao to give her some feedback on her research proposal, and we had a great exchange, sitting on the borrowed sofa, digging into the history of feminist responses to
Xinyao and Ruoyu's article (Yuan et al., 2025) explores how
Shanghai, Day 6 (Figure 6)
We go to see the K-pop random play dance. There is a countdown from five to one and then they play roughly twenty seconds of a song. Everyone who knows how to do the dance moves goes into the center of the ring and dances. Sometimes, that's half the pack of maybe a hundred people. Other times, it may just be one. Every song has its own choreography. Some are focused on hand moves and some of the other gyrations—nothing as sexualized as twerking, but there is a lot of hip action going on down there. There are some men dancing but mostly women, mostly in their twenties. This is based more on knowledge than skill. They are confident but not necessarily competent in performing the dances. Knowing the right moves is what's important, not how well you perform them. But Kedi says that the girls also use this to get clips of themselves dancing to share on social media in order to get a chance at being an influencer or a background dancer on videos.
A K-pop Random Play Dance happening in the middle of a Shanghai mall.
Kedi, Yuqi, and Xinyue's article (Zhou et al., 2025) centers on the global phenomenon of K-pop Random Play Dance (RPD), a fan-driven practice that briefly transforms public spaces into sites of performance, connection, and joy. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork across mainland China, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, and Melbourne, the authors explore RPD as a precarious utopian space—an affectively charged moment where fans reclaim visibility through dance, even under the pressures of surveillance, regulation, and commercial constraints. These spontaneous performances are not simply about choreography; they become expressions of collective longing, feminist embodiment, and cultural resistance. Expanding on Richard Dyer's (2005) concept of utopian sensibility, the piece examines how RPD participants negotiate space and identity in the face of intersecting forces, from state control to gendered gaze. K-pop fandom is thus reframed as a site of embodied politics where fleeting performances can carry lasting impacts across cultural and geographic borders.
The dialogic pieces here also build on shared voyages, whether on the bus or via Zoom, which enabled communication, collaboration, and comparison across multiple fan sites and intellectual traditions. The folks we invited to participate have been our expert guides, sharing their research, answering our questions, and helping us to develop the shared vocabularies that make comparative fandom studies research possible. We hope that they will help provide a larger conceptual framework for our readers that will help them understand the more localized case studies that form the bulk of this issue's content. These pieces also model a process of cross-cultural conversation, grounded in mutual respect and radical curiosity, in the desire to share knowledge and foster greater understanding at a moment when world events seem to be sparking greater tension between our respective nations. What do we learn when we follow our desires across borders and boundaries drawn by governments, charted on maps, and experienced on the ground at various checkpoints?
In her intervention, Jamie J. Zhao (2025) explores the ways that transcultural fandom is strongly linked to global queer (or in Chinese, Ku’er) cultures. As she writes, fandom simultaneously bridges and obfuscates cultures that are traditionally classified as mainstream, commercial, professional, official, original, canonical, amateur, underground, derivative, and nonnormative, on local and global scales. Fans are often drawn towards texts that represent and embody alternative sexualities, whether in the form of Boys’ Love (BL) and now Girls’ Love (GL) comics and television series or East Asian Idol groups and their music. Fan groups form around the flower-like features and soft masculinity of beautiful men whose bonds and desires for each other become the drivers of epic adventures across space and time. The fansubbers organize to ensure access to queer-themed texts; fan fiction often pulls out homoerotic subtexts from mainstream and cult media properties; and cosplay provides cover for a great deal of gender-bending activities under the nose of homophobic local authorities. Her essay maps the intersections between fan studies and queer studies as they seek to map and analyze these cross-cultural flows of content and desires. Zhao helps us understand the ways that spaces, such as the Random K-pop Play dance circle, may function as queer spaces, whether explicitly or implicitly, where same sex desire and gender ambiguity are freely expressed.
The exchange between Lori Morimoto, Haerin Shin and Sangita Shresthova (2025)centers on issues of authenticity and ‘passing’ from the perspective of “third culture kids.” Each of these authors shares the struggles they have faced in legitimating their work as well as the pressures they have faced to define their professional identities based on who they were perceived to be and where they were perceived as coming from. In each of these cases, the situation is much more ‘messy’ than initial perceptions might suggest, and the specificities of these conflicts help us to understand more fully what it might mean to do transcultural fandom studies. They remind us that not only are we looking at fan objects that travel across and between cultures, but also fan scholars and fan scholarship that do so. They argue that feeling inauthentic is a defining trait of being a third culture person (one raised in a culture other than that of their birth) and perhaps needs to be one of transcultural fandom studies also.
Drawing examples from both Korean and Chinese culture, feminist scholars Do Own (Donna) Kim and Fang Wu (2025) tackle the shifting relationship between fan cultural expression and political/civic discourse, locating the ludic dimensions of popular protest movements, such as the “K-pop lightstick” protests against now-removed president Yoon Suk Yeol. In the process, they consider what makes a cultural practice “meaningfully playful,” that is, what allows an act that is playful to also be a vehicle through which alternative frameworks of meaning may be expressed. When is it appropriate to characterize fandoms as subaltern counterpublics through which misogyny and homophobia might be addressed? How do fan sites become battlegrounds as celebrity scandals call for the working through of competing ideological frames? How do anti-Hallyu backlashes align with state policies and signify geopolitical conflicts between China and Korea or other East Asian neighboring nation-states? How do those engaged with fan practices develop greater feminist consciousness and acquire new skills and tactics through which to fight for greater empowerment within the larger society?
Building on their collaborative research together on Wanghong cultural production in China, Jian Lin and David Craig (2025) compare notes on the current state of global research on creator culture. Finding common ground across different national perspectives has proven difficult because of a lack of terminological clarity and consistency and different configurations of state, commercial, and grassroots power shaping how contemporary social media entertainment is produced, circulated, and consumed. The two seek to ground this research in ethnographic particulars while also making meaningful comparisons that might lead to shared insights amongst creators, regulators, and scholars invested in this space. This exchange gives us a chance to eavesdrop on the ongoing exchanges between two scholars who are at the forefront of framing our understanding of the global creator movement.
We hope this special issue sheds light on the values and challenges of studying transcultural fandom in East Asia and beyond. Through multiple angles, the contributing scholars show how popular culture flows do not simply unify or homogenize but instead create new identity negotiations, controversies, and ephemeral utopias. Fandom, as these pieces attest, never belongs wholly to a single place or a single ideology. It is perpetually on the move, crossing geographical borders and bridging aesthetic forms,
And so, at the close of that very first evening in Shanghai, as our bus headed to the city center, we sat among our new friends, who were busy pointing out neighborhoods, discussing what they were up to for the upcoming fan event, and telling jokes that soared above our jetlag. It was perhaps a small, unremarkable moment. But at the same time, it was the very essence of transcultural communication: we were traveling together, not entirely sure of the route, but discovering companionship, friendship, and creativity along the way.
It will take a while to find the bus, that vehicle that will bring us together while enabling us to map a terrain that is sometimes familiar and sometimes alien to each of us. This special issue, we hope, is starting that search.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Funding for this research trip was provided by The International Association of Cultural and Creative Industry Research.
Author biographies
Henry Jenkins is a Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at USC. He is the author or editor of 20 books on various aspects of media and popular culture.
Kedi Zhou is a PhD Candidate at USC Annenberg. Her area of research includes feminist theories, cultural studies, and science and technology studies.