Interpreting Gender Role Subversions in K-pop Fandom

According to Liew Kai Khinu’s article, in the YouTube clip, Thai gay men, called “Wonder Gays”, performed the dance choreography of Wonder Girls’ Nobody. They presented the feminine dance in male bodies through their physical movements. Their body becomes the new form of cultural production as “subversion of the prescribed gender roles of K-pop groups”(172). Dee Kosh parodied Psy’s “Gangnam Style” and published to criticize the authorities and politics. It is called “Singaporean Style”. By changing the lyrics of the original song into their own language, they conveyed the messages. In this sense, the cyberspace became the own Singapore society. In the cyberspace, they used the K-pop to criticize the society. Wonder Gays’ performance of “Nobody” and a Singaporean fans’ remake of “Gangnam Style” can be explained with the concept of fandom and Fiske’s performative dimension of fandom, claimed by De Kloet and van Zoonen in “Fan Culture – Performing Difference”.

The concept of fandom indicates that Wonder Gays and Dee Kosh are both the fans of the singers of original version of their performance, Wonder Girls and Psy, respectively. It is because they have detailed knowledge of their artistes, spend large amounts of time learning and replicating the

They reproduce different values from the original contexts through their production. It explains their dance covers, the performance and the reproduction. For example, “Wonder Gays” catches the otherness of the original version of Wonder Girls to represent their difference: gender. It means, as mentioned, “Nobody” also reinterpreted the theme of retro in the 1960s in the U.S with the Koreanness, and reproduce the Korean style female group. “Wonder Gays” also recreate and reinterpret the otherness of female characters in “Nobody” and reproduce it through their sexual difference,