Virtually Multicultural: Trans-Asian Identity and Gender in an International Fan Community of a Japanese Star

Abstract

While recent analyses have helped to challenge commonly-held stereotypes of fans of popular cultural texts as freakish individuals ‘without a life’, few studies have focused on texts produced and/or consumed outside the United States and Europe. Even fewer have considered the particular significance of the advent of the internet as a tool for intercultural fan activity. This is what this study attempts to accomplish through an ethnographic and textual analysis of an online community of fans of Kimura Takuya - one of the most popular Japanese male celebrities of the moment - dispersed across 14 countries. It explores, in particular, how participants defined their fan, gendered and cultural/global identities through their involvement with each other and with their favorite star, and negotiated as a group the complex process of virtual cross-cultural identity formation.