FANtasy Changes the World: Straight Korean Female Fans, Their Gay Fantasies, and Korean Popular Culture

In January 2021, a national petitionon the website of South Korea’s Blue House (Cheongwadae, the executive offices for the head of state) called for punishing writers and readers of so-called RPS—real person slash, a fan-produced fiction genre of same-sex romance primarily taking real-life male K-pop singers as characters. The request generated a heated debate about gender hierarchy, fandom culture, and celebrities’ human rights. It was the first time that the four-decade long fan subculture about male-male romance was in the limelight, capturing wide public attention across the country. Historicizing and contextualizing this fan-fiction subculture in Korean society, which I call FANtasy culture, this talk discusses how a central demographic—that is, straight-identified female fans with access to newer media technology—has interacted with global media culture, local institutions, and other segments of society. Their fannish activities have contributed to increasing the visibility of sexual minorities in Korean mainstream media and transforming a local popular cultural industry into a transnational one. Granted, there has been a backlash against FANtasy and controversy over its political legitimacy, but the subculture raises crucial questions about the heteropatriarchal paradigms fermented in Korean society. Its trenchant critiques incrementally make FANtasy a transcultural, transregional, translingual, and transmedia phenomenon.