ABSTRACT:

As Seen On the Internet: Recapping Online
Interaction in English-Language K-Drama Fandoms
Regina Yung Lee (University of California, Riverside)

This chapter deals with a subsection of Korean popular culture in American contexts through an analysis of cultures of reception and response which read, popularize, and transform the source texts of Korean drama. K-drama audiences include flourishing viewerships within a technologically mediated diaspora: often decoupled from primary experiences of Korean language and culture, they nonetheless participate at several levels of remove, from within communities of enthusiasm and critical response, the "participatory culture[s]" which media scholar Henry Jenkins has called fandom.

The importance and implications of Korean drama's availability floats transnationally through intricate online interconnectivities. These ecologies require a language to match – namely, English, that restless tongue. In particular, transpacific fan cultures rely on the dedicated work of other fans, some with specific linguistic facilities, some with specific literacies in coding and propagation, as well as familiarity with online interaction and K-drama convention. The fans at Dramabeans.com create and maintain a complex array of cultural production, as well as an open space, a clearing in which far-flung fans may be gathered into a profound critical and affective engagement with the source texts. Site owner and moderator javabeans declares the recaps and site content to be critical responses which strives to "Deconstruc[t] kdramas and kpop culture," not simply report it.

We need new theories to account for these transnational, translational considerations, even as the fans' responses further redefine fixed notions of canonicity and source. An analysis of this proliferation of meaning must include an inquiry into the ways the K-drama recap and response assemble, produce, and reconfigure the source text, refashioning it again through fan-based analysis and response. For example, this textual participation could be read as a form of spectacular exoticized consumption, what Lisa Nakamura calls "identity tourism"; Thomas Foster's analysis turns from the paucity of identity as defined by ahistorical stasis toward the ongoing negotiations between situated material beings. Both refute the subtle race-blindness of some strains of cybercultural studies, eschewing technoecstatic sublimes in their call for rigor and specificity in the analysis of online interaction. In this chapter, I will attempt that more nuanced approach to fandom interaction and response, acknowledging the radical creativity of gift-based, peer-level transfers taking place within the circuit of multiple-authored, affective participation.

Regina Yung Lee is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside. Her fields of interest include francophone literature, sinophone film, feminist theory, science studies, and new media.