Gambling for Love: Chinese Women’s Engagement in K-pop Fandom

Abstract

Situated at the affective and geographical margins of the K-pop industry, Chinese female K-pop fans are reshaping the contours of idol-fan relationships. Through financial investment, embodied participation, and transnational mobility, Chinese fan-sign girls are continuously asserting cultural and economic agency and contributing to their ideal intimacy in the K-pop industry. Rather than viewing fandom as a space of irrational obsession or escapism, this thesis considers fans’ participation as a construction, curation, and negotiation of their “love”, exceeding traditional understandings of para-social interaction. With participant observation, digital ethnography, and in-depth interviews with Chinese high-spending K-pop fans, this thesis argues that Chinese female fans reimagine relational architectures that challenge inherited binaries of fan/idol, virtual/real, and consumption/devotion. Fans’ emotional strategies, contradictions, and active choices, reframing fandom as a metaphor of desire, intimacy, vulnerability, and agency. The fan-idol relationship thus becomes a contested zone where the margins are continually rebuilt economically, geographically, and emotionally. Chinese fans’ purchasing power and participation depth allow them to move from peripheral consumers to indispensable stakeholders in the transnational K-pop idol economy. In resisting stereotypes of the "fanatic" fangirl, they deploy curatorial strategies to present themselves — sometimes as people who share intimate interactions and unique emotional bonds with their idols, sometimes as thoughtful, intentional, and emotionally literate participants. In doing so, they challenge the idea of Chinese K-pop fandom that frame women’s devotion to idols as irrational, passive, and illusory. Overall, this thesis examines the diverse investments and engagement of Chinese female K-pop fans, revealing how they negotiate desires, curate ideal intimacy, build allyship, deal with conflicts, shape new fandom dynamics, and navigate industry trends through economic contributions and emotional labor.