Korean Wave| K-Pop Fans React: Hybridity and the White Celebrity-Fan on YouTube

Abstract

Reaction videos by White celebrity-fans of K-pop reveal hybridity’s formations in the global reception of K-pop in the West. A deeply understudied genre of YouTube, the reaction video needs scholarly attention. This article reveals that White celebrity-fans produce YouTube reaction texts that perform limited hybridity. Their hybridity is open to the symbolic meanings of K-pop texts and resistive practices demonstrated through deep commitments to non-White music and performers, but it is constrained by White racial logics that support postracism and gendered logics of their local spaces.