[0.3] Buckwild, do you think you're darker than you are?
— Tiffany "New York" Polland, Flavor of Love (2006)
[0.4] I'm yellow, but my soul is Black.
— Zico, "Bermuda Triangle" (2017)
1. Introduction
[1.1] On the popular social media site X (formerly Twitter), there is an account dedicated to "documenting the egregious butchering of AAVE (African American vernacular English) in K-pop and K-pop twt." This account runs not only on the collected tweets of its owner but also enthusiastically asks its followers to "dm submissions!" I position this account as one example of how Black K-pop fans engage the industry and its fandoms with anxious alertness and a constant need to watch, prompted by their racial identity. This practice of fan engagement is a performance of what I call "vigil labor." One central concern on the function of this page and other online spaces by Black fans is how Black K-pop fans navigate the rigid positions of expected fan labor within evident anti-Blackness in the industry and among non-Black fans. Within this rigidness and the creative content it produces, how is the position of the Black K-pop fan always already constructed as the antifan? I examine these questions as a mode of expanding current discourse on K-pop fandoms to consider critically the function of the multilayered and often erased labor of Black fans. At stake here is how Black K-pop fans offer an essential consideration of what happens when the Other no longer wants to be eaten (hooks 1992).
[1.2] What is true of most, if not all, fandom spaces is that often the only thing shared by its members is love for the object of said fandom. Like many IRL communities, fans exist within a wide range of racial, class, gender, physical, and sexual identities. However, with the often-naturalized association of fandom with whiteness, the multiple identities of nonwhite fans are often erased (Woo 2018). Nonetheless, Black fan scholars continue to develop a language for denaturalizing the whiteness of fandom (Adams 2022; Wanzo 2016; Warner 2018). Additionally, their works center on how Black fans create and disrupt fan spaces by bringing critical discussions about race into the racism that undergirds fandoms. Such tracings of Black audience practices provide evidence of how digital fan spaces are central locales for enacting racial, gendered, and sexual discrimination. But they also illuminate the unrelenting work of Black fans and scholars alike in countering such discrimination. Outside of fan studies, segregated media spaces have also become subjects of critical discourse. I turn explicitly to Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Alex Barnett (2021), who engage homophily—love of sameness—to examine how online communities often employ the same segregation practices as one would find in American neighborhoods. While users generally view online communities as a location for global interaction, such global communication networks do not exist without our worldly discriminatory practices.
[1.3] While already engaged in digital spaces that position their fan identity in opposition to their racial identity, Black fans employ the digital as a site for critical dialogues. While affirming the potentiality for digital community building, Black fans also question the racially segregated tension that forms such communities. Thus, in online fandom communities, users may exist within smaller niche neighborhoods. These neighborhoods are partly created by those with similar shared interests, racial backgrounds, insider knowledge (references and jokes), and serious, comedic, or satirical language (Brock 2020; Martin 2019; Morgan 2020). I examine the digital neighborhoods occupied by Black K-pop fans, arguing that Black fans not only perform the expected and regulated forms of fan labor but also operate within a constant state of watching, collecting, and performing public critique, which I call vigil labor. This critical labor done by Black fans positions their active watchfulness as inextricable from their fan identity. Through memes, GIFs, videos, and podcast creations, Black K-pop fans utilize their neighborhoods to counter the industry's ignoring issues of racism. Indeed, when these fan creators and their followers gather, they mobilize digital spaces and their comment section as a space for critical collaborative action (Brock 2020). Thus, acts of vigil labor offer a complex view into the work of Black fans who utilize digital spaces as "digital counterpublics" (Hill 2018). For Marc Lemont Hill, a digital counterpublic "refers to any virtual, online, or otherwise digitally networked community in which members actively resist hegemonic power…engage in critical dialogues or negotiate oppositional identities" (2). Here, by speaking back to the K-pop industry and non-Black fans, these creators deploy vigil labor to demonstrate the potentiality of Black fan power in resisting fandom expectations and negotiating the fluid boundaries of being fans.
[1.4] While offering a new term for describing the participatory labor of Black K-pop fans, vigil labor marks only one aspect of the creative works of Black fans. It does not fully encompass the complex and disruptive modes of all Black audience labor. Thus, I engage with existing scholarship on Black audience practices and fandom labor to develop the current definition and pre-existence of vigil labor as Black fan work. Methodologically, I also closely read Twitter and TikTok creations, including specific posts and comments from and two TikToks created by Black K-pop fans. Through their visual and linguistic signifiers and their mobilization of comedy, these creations demonstrate vigil labor. By engaging theories of Black comedic and satirical practices, I explore how these posts utilize comedic resistance, employing laughter to express rage and pain (Haggins 2007; Morgan 2020). Additionally, I study the Black women–led podcast Hwaiting Words, specifically their first episode on Black hairstyles in K-pop, to survey both how the hosts situate themselves as fans with strong social ties to the industry and how their vigil labor tethers these social ties to their verbal critiques.
[1.5] Following Brienne Adams (2022), I also engage in autoethnography as a self-identified Black K-pop fan. I recount my response to the acts of anti-Blackness in the industry that sparked the need for vigil labor. Finally, rather than center only one K-pop group and its Black fans, I examine fan creations without specific attachments to certain groups to broaden the scope of the work. Indeed, the possibility of multifans and the overwhelming positioning of the Black gaze on the industry calls for a mode of analysis that looks more broadly within specific social media sites. Across these digital media platforms, Black K-pop fans engender sites of creative resistance against the consumption of Blackness. In doing so, they resituate their position in K-pop fandoms and further illuminate the instability and weaponization of the antifan category.
2. Vigil labor: Toward a definition
[2.1] Vigil labor is the surveilling of visual and linguistic acts of anti-Blackness within K-pop and presenting findings and judgment through and as creative content. These acts are not limited to K-pop artists but also other fans and may include misuses of AAVE, the fashioning of K-pop artists to imitate Black hip-hop culture, and the digital antagonization of Black fans who speak out on racism in the industry. In using the word "vigil," I return to its formal meanings, the first being a state of wakefulness and a period of purposeful sleeplessness at times when one would normally be asleep (Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/). For Black K-pop fans, keeping vigil means an alertness to the industry and its fandom. These creative expressions of watchfulness point to a central question for vigil labor: if the Other must be eaten, how do Black K-pop fans make this cannibalistic process not one of pleasure? For these fans, vigil labor occurs through disrupting such pleasures by outwardly calling out the origins of their formation. Thus, while vigil labor is not the tool that dismantles the master's house, it is the tool that unearths its foundations, which in the case of K-pop is often Blackness (Anderson 2021). My goals for this term are twofold. The first is to provide a language to categorize Black fans' responses to the K-pop sector and situate this within pre-existing scholarship on Black digital fan work. The second is to demonstrate how vigil labor continues to disrupt the already fluid distinctions between fan and antifan. What follows is an examination of the operationality of vigil labor in discourses on labor and fandom.
[2.2] Vigil labor is a practice that Black fans of other media may have already engaged in before my present coining of the term. Indeed, Black K-pop fans offer just one example of how acts of critical watchfulness are part of the genealogy of Black fandom practice and Black fan studies scholarship. Alfred Martin Jr. offers one instance of examining Black audiences'—specifically Black women's—continuous engagement with media "from which they derive little or no enjoyment" (2020, 167). For Black K-pop fans, vigil labor is the digital performance of this complex relationship in which the object of one's fannish affect is also the object of one's displeasure. Rather than examine why Black fans still engage with media they do not enjoy or find pleasurable, vigil labor examines the work of fans who still derive (some) pleasure and enjoyment from K-pop despite their acknowledgment of its problems. Utilizing this pleasure as a mode of critique in creative productions is the work of vigil labor. Following Martin (2020), I engage the multifaceted ways Black women audiences perform antifandom outside the binary structures of like and dislike, fan and antifan, through the concept of vigil labor. However, vigil labor diverges from the instances of viewership noted by Martin because Black K-pop fans choose continued engagement with the industry and fandom through creative resistance.
[2.3] As a type of fan work, vigil labor muddles surplus and necessary labor. Karl Marx defines surplus labor as the excess labor beyond what is required of a worker as necessary labor ([1867] 1977). In turn, necessary labor is the part of the working day that produces the value of the means of subsistence for the worker. However, fan labor continuously reimagines what constitutes necessary or surplus labor, specifically when many fans voluntarily engage in this labor. In other words, fans are often kept out of the material return of their work. For most fans, the "free" labor of fandom exists as the "literal labors of 'love,'" where fans express their dedication to an artist or idol group without the expectation of financial gain (Warner 2018, 254). However, despite its voluntary nature, Abigail De Kosnik (2013) argues that fan labor is a type of work that "should be valued as a new form of publicity and advertising, authored by volunteers, that corporations badly need in an era of market fragmentation" (99). Vigil labor reappropriates this corporate need for fan labor by resituating the fan as the receiver of the value created by their labor. Thus, vigil labor is the labor from which necessary and surplus labor lose their binary rigidity and instead become more fluid states in which Black fans operate.
[2.4] Vigil labor marks a particular performance of fandom work by Black fans in addition to advertising and publicity. Although occurring alongside expected fandom work, vigil labor as surplus labor is an inextricable part of the necessary work of Black K-pop fans. Vigil labor becomes the possibility for fan work to be a political agenda that undermines industry and fandom structures that erase the presence of critical Black fan labor. This labor dwells within three existing modes of categorizing fan work. The first is what Meicheng Sun (2020) finds to be specialized labor formed by their "creativity, knowledge, and specialized skills" (395). Within this distinct mode of work, Black fans engage with the industry as creative spectators, volunteer employees, and, most importantly, agents of creative disruption of K-pop fandom pleasures. The second and third follow Adams's (2022) argument that Black fans sit within the transformative and active fan categories once coined by Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson (2014). For Adams, Black fans do the active work of "collecting and viewing to analyze and critique" while also doing the transformative work of "creating art works or engaging in many forms of fan participation" (4). Vigil labor involves the affirmative, specifically its attention to critique, and the transformative through the creative productions of Black K-pop fans. However, vigil labor necessitates a resistive fan practice, where the affirmative and transformative merge to form creative resistance. This resistance defies established modes of being a fan, placing critique not only on media objects but also on fandom and, doing so, through its transformative creations. Black K-pop fans are not only collecting memorabilia or fan merchandise: they collect evidence of anti-Blackness against other fans and the industry.
[2.5] The second use of vigil refers to the act of keeping vigil, or "an occasion of devotional watching or an observance. A period when a person or group stays in place and quietly waits" (Merriam-Webster). Here, I emphasize the act of devotional watching and staying in place but, in this case, not while quietly waiting but while engaging in the creative production of displeasure and discomfort for the industry and fans alike. As devotional watchers, Black fans, like other fans of K-pop, keep up with new music releases, streaming experiences, live performances on music shows, military enlistment updates, and more, even when this means staying awake in different time zones. However, Black fans also show their devotion to unearthing the many ways the industry repays their fan labor through performing caricatures of Blackness and non-Black fans' expressions of racism. The need to reveal is why vigil labor is not one of quiet waiting. Vigil labor is not only about being an inconvenience to others but about doing inconvenience even when no end goal is specified (Berlant 2022).
[2.6] One material effect of vigil labor is that it destabilizes the immersion lauded as part of the pleasures of fandom. Black fans disrupt immersive pleasure by reading immersion as the forgetfulness of race within K-pop and its fan spaces (note 1). Their self-assignment of watching for instances of racial amnesia is part of Kristen Warner's object of study, where through the hashtag #KeepIrisBlack, Black female fans tasked themselves "with the responsibilities of protecting and defending the Blackness of the television character [Iris West] as well as the actress who portrays her" (2018, 253). Like Black K-pop fans, the Iris West Defense Squad utilized their collective social media presence and fan love of the television adaptation of The Flash to "transform their adoration of their love object into something of a political action" (253). The refusal of immersion at the expense of ignoring racism engages vigil labor in the transitive work of employing the labor of love as a tool for wakefulness toward the object of their fandom. In turn, these fans publicly position themselves as capable of altering fandom practices, mobilizing their digital neighborhoods, and centering their Blackness in fandom spaces.
3. To keep from fighting: Indigestible Blackophilia
[3.1] The X page dedicated to collecting misuses of AAVE (note 2) has been active since July 2020, garnering over seven thousand followers by collecting and sharing instances of K-pop idols and fans misusing AAVE. This misuse of AAVE is just one way the industry and its fans seek to consume Black culture through their mimicry of assumed Black coolness (Graham 2000; Yousman 2003). The page disavows K-pop's inappropriate uses of AAVE, thus rupturing the state of slumber on race and racism discourses customary to fandom. One of the account's earliest posts featured a quoted tweet by artist Jay Park. In response to another tweet, Park writes, "And ask him to do some ratchet shit too just for fun lol." Although the account does not directly state the misuse of AAVE in Park's post, the use of "ratchet" signifies a performance often associated with Blackness. Indeed, ratchet "has become the umbrella term for all things associated with the linguistic, stylistics and cultural practices…of poor people; specifically poor people of color" (Sesali B. 2013). Recognizing this association of Blackness to ratchetness, this X page places the unmistakable juxtaposition between expected performers of ratchet behavior and the outsider position of Park under digital observance. Here, vigil labor operates as the public presentation and disruption of Park's desires to enter in and out of ratchetness. This desire exemplifies the consumption of Black popular culture that Bill Yousman names Blackophilia, a fetishized adoration of Blackness, which manifests from "white consumption of Black popular culture… from a place of fascination rather than dread" (2000, 375). While expanding on the critical vocabulary available to understand the consumption of Black youth culture, Yousman only examined this phenomenon with white youth. This X page demonstrates how the international movement of Black cultural productions, specifically music, means that Park's calls for ratchetness are a small part of the globalization of appropriated Blackness (Anderson 2021; Johnson 2003). Indeed, Park wields "rachet" as his access to Black cultural codes that allow audiences to read his performance within the linguistic style of Black youth.
[3.2] Park is no stranger to Blackophilia. A known offender in visual and linguistic appropriations of Blackness, Park's presence on the page and the comments garnered reveal an anticipatory mode of wakefulness. The comment section offers a space of nonnegotiation, signaling a space for nonreasoning on matters of Black appropriation; that is, Park is not allowed to perform innocence. Here, fan expectancy of acts of anti-Blackness allows time to collect "digital receipts" (Brock 2020, 19). As demonstrated by the comments under the post on Park, the work of vigil labor is often distributed among followers. With X avatars featuring K-pop idols or albums, these followers are often fans who enter the account's curated neighborhood to demonstrate their resistive fan practice. Through their interactions with the post, followers position vigil labor into the language of legal justice, which further illustrates their perception that it is a crime to misuse AAVE. As one follower commented, "Mr. Park, for the court, could you explain to us what you mean by…*checks notes*…rachet?" This comment operates in multilayered ways. First, it frames Park as "laughable" in his attempt to reduce AAVE to a random combination of words and not a nuanced mode of speech with specific and often geographically based grammatical structures (Morgan 2020, 7). Second, by asking what he means by "rachet," the comment probes Park's failed attempt at embodying Blackness through speech. Without the account owner's verbally directing specific responses to Park, their followers coperform public critique. Here, while the account owner collects evidence and presents Park under vigil labor's constant alertness, followers suggest punishment through verbal contestation. As they question Park, even without his physical presence, fans must position themselves as plaintiff and judge, employing the comment section as their courtroom.
[3.3] These comments also exemplify a collective performance of public vigil. However, in this case, this coming together is not to mourn the memory of the dead. Instead, this digital gathering reflects the collaborative labor of Black fan work. With comments such as "It's Jay Park, are we surprised?" or memes representing their reactions, followers animate the comment section by situating themselves as witnesses to Park's crime. "Are we surprised?" illustrates their watchfulness as they meet Park's history of such crimes with their collected evidence. As willing witnesses, the followers engage in the devotional watching central to vigil labor, where even when the page's creator misses an incorrect use of AAVE, outpours of "I was going to dm you this!" suggest scenes of being collectively affected. The desire to collect and share findings via direct message reveals these followers as "part of an inner group," allowing them to freely share and reach a verdict on Park while "among friends" with knowledge of his crimes (Martin 2019, 161). As members of the same neighborhood, gathering under the comment section is emblematic of the collective work of vigil labor, where followers report activities they find suspicious; these activities are then made public via Twitter, and "justice" occurs as verbal or visual retaliation.
[3.4] While these posts can appear to be doing nothing but surveilling K-pop, their relentless watchfulness demonstrates an indigestible Blackness. The appropriation of Black culture meets resistance at the point of digestion. In short, this creator knows that Blackophilic linguistic cannibalism will occur, but by staging a scene of digital judgment, they work to refuse the cannibal their enjoyment. One should note that this page does not stop the consumption of Blackness. Such an expectation places the onus of unlearning anti-Black caricature on Black fans instead of on performers of said acts. Indeed, this page mainly calls out artists and fans who would otherwise go unpunished. While Black fans' digital vigils may not stop Blackophilic acts, they nonetheless demonstrate the unrelenting labor of meeting appropriation with resistance.
[3.5] TikTok provides another location for the performance of vigil labor. Before examining specific videos, one should note that understanding the TikTok creations of Black K-pop fans requires exploring the comedic elements that aid their enactment of vigil labor. Like on the X page, one of the most popular forms of fan expression among Black fans is creating comedic yet troubling and tense content about the K-pop industry and other fans. Their use of TikTok as a digital counterpublic aids in their transformation of the expression "laughing to keep from crying." Indeed, while these creators are not laughing to keep from crying or laughing to keep from dying, they are laughing to keep from fighting. These TikToks mobilize comedy to critically engage with the K-pop industry and its fans and to express the rage and vulnerability central to the labor that forms the Black K-pop fan identity. Evident in the TikToks analyzed below is the practice of gathering under an attempt at laughter, specifically when the cause of laughter would, in another instance, be the site of anger or sadness. This act is another way Black fans express their disruption of the so-called positive feelings of fandom often formed by anti-Blackness. Following Bambi Haggins's arguments, I consider Black K-pop fans' use of comedy as an act of "laughing mad," where laughter is no longer only an act to keep from crying but a tool for "articulating suffering in muted tones" (2007, 4). In these muted tones, Black K-pop fans operationalize laughter as a "subversive tactic" to "destabilize the mainstream acceptance of and propagation of racial status quo…by feigning carelessness and pretending to disregard the skill required in humor" (Morgan 2020, 2). As these creators laugh, to insiders within their digital neighborhood, their laughter operates as cunning resistance, where understanding the joke requires knowing the anger from which it manifests.
[3.6] On Black K-pop TikTok, this comedic articulation of suffering forms the public performance that tethers creative fan labor to vigil labor. In one popular (now deleted) TikTok video, a Black woman fan edits herself in front of the corporate office of AOMG, a Korean entertainment company primarily focused on hip-hop artists (note 3). The video featured the background question, "Where the hood N-words at? I'm looking for the hood N-words?" Following this sound was the caption, "Me when I get off the plane in Korea." Visually, AOMG acts as a visual synecdoche for the larger body of Korean hip-hop and its extractive relationship with Black culture. To arrive at AOMG is to arrive as the nexus of Black(ophilic) culture and the ideal location to search for "hood N-words." The initial journey to South Korea and the intended reason for doing so offers a critical moment for examining the complexity of Black fan performance. The "love" for the industry is what leads the fan to South Korea and closer to the object of their fan love. But vigil labor recasts this expression of love, and the fan's visit presents a scene of interrogation of the industry. This TikTok illustrates the desire to meet these artists as a fan while refusing to deny their participation in appropriating Black culture. Thus, visiting AOMG fuses expected fan affect with vigil labor and transforms the trip.
[3.7] In this TikTok, the hood holds incorporeal potentiality, making performances of the "hood N-words" outside of Black bodies possible. Indeed, the hood is often lauded as the central location for "real" Blackness, where associations with poverty, drugs, violence, and police presence become the only ways Blackness is legible (Neal 2013). However, this TikTok underscores how non-Black subjects' performance of a hood identity requires the severance of Black subjectivity from Black cultural productions. Like the X account, this TikTok suggests that in the twenty-first century, it is no longer just "white kids wanting to be as cool as Black kids" (Graham 2000); Korean kids want the same. They, too, want to enter the perfected practice of rendering the Black body "'liberated' from time and space, belonging to nowhere and to no one" (Wilderson 2016, 235). The creator takes to task the detachment of Black people from Black cultural objects by visualizing how the "young black male body is seen as epitomizing a promise of wildness" that is both "dangerous and desirable" (hooks 1992, 31). This tension in the Black male body becomes a costume for the rappers at AOMG whose Blackophilic practices reflect a fashioning of non-Black people with Black cultural aesthetics. Indeed, with Blackness available in a liquated state for all to consume, these artists freely fashion themselves to fit the image of a Black male body imbued with dread, "dangerous and alluring" (Yousman 2003, 385).
[3.8] Vigil labor is not the work of resolving this detachment of Blackness from its contexts and its people. Instead, it is the process of illuminating the naturalization of this separation as central to the industry. In this case, the work of vigil labor is not only creating the video (recording, editing, sound selection) but also the constant watching done by Black fans that makes the video's existence possible. The TikTok video merges creative and resistant fan practices, allowing the creator to simultaneously present a love for the K-pop industry, a critique of it, and resistance against expected performances of fan love for it. While this fan and many Black fans are not in control of appropriations of Blackness, they have a choice in their continued engagement with the industry after said acts. Thus, returning to the scene of the crime, the journey to AOMG mobilizes the rigid positionality of Black K-pop fans who demand collective wakefulness. This state of unrest and expectancy of subsequent acts of Blackophilic appropriation illuminates how Black fans wield their vigil labor to bring the industry and non-Black fans into the same wakefulness that forges the Black K-pop fan identity.
[3.9] Like the comedic calling out of this first TikTok, in another example, user @theeshedhead's strategic use of TikTok sounds returns vigil labor to its religious origins (note 4). Evident in this video is not only wakefulness during hours customary for sleep but also during hours when one should be awake, yet fandom continues to sleep, ignoring Blackophilia in K-pop. In their video, the creator imitates the jumps and shouts of a church preacher who, while speaking to his congregation, states, "30 more seconds if you don't know what to do run to a Black person hold on to 'em and say, 'help me!'" This sound is accompanied by the caption "K-pop companies when they've run out of ideas." Then, while offering a side-eye to their camera, their on-screen caption reads, "the racyst stans ain't gonna like this one" (note 5). Here, vigil returns to its relation to Christian liturgy, signaling a religious service held at night. More explicitly, in its Latin origin, vigil, vigilia, meant a watch night. However, TikTok's 24/7 usability annuls this nocturnal mode of watching. Instead, the watching occurs at every hour of the day. In the video, the fan recasts TikTok as the representative space for the anticipatory gathering for the watch night. What this creator watches for are exploitations of Black culture as a commodified product for the industry.
[3.10] The creator's bodily and vocal mimicry of the preacher symbolically ordains them with the authority of the minister. Therefore, their demand from their congregation (viewers) undergoes a transformative process. It is no longer just a fan speaking but rather one using the "body" of God to stake the relevance of their claims. The "holiness" of this message figures the church as the primal space for locating the often-copied expressions of Black bodily movement and performance (Snead 1981). Like the first TikToker, @theeshedhead illustrates a known secret of the industry that many racist fans refuse to acknowledge. The sound selected for this video positions Black people as innovators whose innovations non-Black people can turn to when their creativity falters. Indeed, as Suk-Young Kim (2020) offers, the relationship of Blackness to K-pop often occurs within an unequal and nonconsensual practice of appropriation. Thus, even as Kim argues that K-pop and Black artists occupy comparable spaces of artistic marginalization due to "extractive" or cruel "record label contracts," K-pop's foundational reliance and misuse of Black hip-hop aesthetics fractures the possibility of a reciprocal coinhabitation of this marginal space (93). In other words, while K-pop cries for help, this cry is not one that Black artists or fans can often return.
[3.11] Thus far, I have examined visual performances of vigil labor. However, with the rise of podcasts as spaces for critical dialogue in fandom, vigil labor turns to the Black woman–led podcast Hwaiting Words (2019–22). The podcast takes on the most pressing issues in K-pop and K-hip-hop. Before turning to the episode analyzed here, a focus on the podcast's name presents another example of the compounding of positive fan affect with the negativity associated with antifandom. Hwaiting, in its Korean usage, is a term for expressing encouragement or wishing someone the best of luck, often in relation to tough sporting situations. Here, the hosts already locate the show within a Korean conception of fan love. The hosts express the encouragement and "fight on" affect of fandom while also situating their podcast as a location for such cheering. However, the women also employ its homophonic productivity, thus changing the podcast's name to "fighting words," offering an indication of their vigil labor.
[3.12] While Hwaiting still expresses a "cheering on" of the industry, "fighting" conveys an act of physical violence. Fighting words, when used, can lead to violence or struggle. Their vigil labor situates these fans at the intersection of hwaiting and fighting, where the demands to "encourage" the industry are met with the desire to call it out. As its hosts Bora, Larissa, and Destiny suggest, their focus is on fostering a space to share unpopular K-pop opinions. Unsurprisingly, then, their first episode, "Black Hairstyles on K-pop and K-Hip Hop Artists" (https://open.spotify.com/show/2X3oE0gfFOfQhV75ClMgke), focuses on the widely discussed K-pop fandom topic of Black cultural appropriation. However, aware that their thoughts are unpopular, all three hosts continuously reestablish their love for the industry while conversing about what they consider a performative dislike of Blackness by its artists. This need to indicate their fan status is a sign of how critique has come to figure as the antithesis of fannish love. Thus, these creators must situate themselves as K-pop insiders because many fans receive their unpopular opinion as castigation from outsiders.
[3.13] Abigail De Kosnik (2018) establishes a similar point on fan ambivalence when writing on the position of Filipino fans of American cultural productions, specifically television. De Kosnik argues that "non-American and non-white viewers of US television, including Filipinos, must often love what hates them, or what casually ridicules them" (264). Indeed, as Martin (2020) notes, persistent engagement with media, even after it expresses dislike of fans of specific racial or gender categories, is a complex but common practice. Hwaiting podcast cohost Larissa introduces De Kosnik and Martin into the experience of Black K-pop fans when she speaks about appropriation in the industry, saying, "And I feel like for Black fans, sometimes it can alienate us and make us feel like, well dang, if we were to wear this exact outfit, they would be like, 'you're so rachet, you're so ghetto.' But, if, like, BTS decided to switch up their whole look to be dreadlocks, braids, throw some do-rags in there, they'll be like, 'they're so edgy, this is so artsy.'" Larissa points to a well-understood equation of how Black cultural aesthetics on Black people signal lowbrow-/lower classness, danger, and darkness. However, on non-Black people and the idols of their fandom, it signifies cool and edgy, a rebellious spirit. This spirit points to the violent equation my other examples notice, an equation where non-Black people put on Blackness to situate themselves outside their cultural understandings of normal. To enter Blackness as a way of possessing rebellion and difference means relegating Blackness to abjection (Kim 2020). As the costume for demonstrating societal difference and rejection, wearing Blackness on non-Black skin is the basis for rapper Zico's line in the 2017 song "Bermuda Triangle": "My skin is yellow, but my soul is Black." The Black soul without the Black body provides the edge associated with hip-hop. It is this same edge that the X site excavates about Jay Park, that exists in the "hood N-words" at AOMG, and that prompts the call for Black help in moments of uncertainty on how to perform.
[3.14] Also important is the alienating function of appropriation, as it underscores how the relationship between Black fans and K-pop artists manifests through distance and separation. For many non-Korean or South Korean–based fans of K-pop, distance is a defining factor in their interaction with the industry. For Black fans, this distance is not only physical but also formed by industry practices that contribute to their abjection. However, even when operating from locations that situate them as distant strangers to their favorite groups, Black K-pop fans continue to engage with the industry with a watchfulness over not only their creative productions but also their often-damaging engagement with Blackness.
4. What makes an antifan?
[4.1] Across various media platforms, Black K-pop fans are laughing madly, expressing both their love for K-pop and the suffering they endure as a result. As these creators laugh, they build a community with others doing the same. Together, they attempt to transform fandom engagement by always centering their comedic disdain as part of their labor of making the consumption of Black people and culture indigestible. However, assuming these creative performances of vigil labor occur and are viewed only within Black fan neighborhoods and are thus isolated from negative fan feedback is irresponsible. Paying attention to such feedback engenders a recategorization of fan work based on the type of labor performed and the responses it receives. For example, while the collaborative comments on the X page reveal Black fans' shared affect toward the industry, there are also sets of comments that suggest charged responses to vigil labor, which attempt to categorize vigilant Black fans as antifans.
[4.2] The work of vigil labor carries with it the assumed negativity of antifandoms. Thus, framing critical Black fans as antifans situates their engagement with fandom as antagonistic to the pleasures of fandom space. Jonathan Gray (2003) metaphorically describes the antifan as the "negatively charged electron, not necessarily of those who are against fandom per se, but those who strongly dislike a given text or genre, considering its inane, stupid, morally bankrupt and/or aesthetic drivel" (70). Such an explanation, as Martin argues, "may not be entirely applicable to Black women's anti-fandom" (2020, 168). Martin's return to Gray's taxonomy of the fan and antifan illustrates how Black audiences practice antifandom with a complexity that rethinks the negatively charged electron as the very source of how Black fans express their entwined fan and antifan affects. However, importantly, there are Black fans who do not self-identify as antifans even while their engagement with fandom is received as such via the weaponizing of "Black sensitivity." To be a "sensitive" Black fan is to model what Rebecca Wanzo (2015), borrowing from Sarah Ahmed, refers to as a race theorist killjoy. Indeed, a Black fan who outwardly acknowledges the industry's acts of anti-Blackness is one who kills pleasure and becomes an antifan. Key to this interpellation of Black fans as antis is that it unravels the already theoretically weakened binary of fan and antifan. Gone is the need to perform within Gray or Martin's typologies of antifans. Instead, the antifan becomes a distributed identity, with negative electrons assigned by those who desire to experience fandom as an uncritical and, most importantly, nonracial space.
[4.3] As the harbingers of displeasure, the work of vigil labor often receives judgments as too easily affected or taking things too seriously. Unsurprisingly, the TikToker quoted earlier knows the "racyst" fans won't like this one. One should note here the productive misspelling of "racist" to evade TikTok's practice of deleting reported videos by Black creators with explicit mentions of race, racism, or anti-Blackness (McCluskey 2020). Threatened deletion illustrates how feedback denouncing vigil labor operates as a demonstration of its necessity, and such responses become an anticipated form of engaging with fan productions. The sentiments also range from "Black K-pop stans are really sensitive" to "Black K-pop stans make me so mad. Can y'all leave K-pop alone? You people cry about everything" (note 6). Even those who recognize the unavoidable position of race within K-pop fandoms express oversimplistic narratives such as "I believe it was Morgan Freeman who said racism would end when everyone stops talking about it" (note 7). Central to these comments is the return to Black fans' emotion, sensitivity, and crying that disrupts the positive pleasures often associated with the industry and fandom. Most notable is the organizing belief that K-pop and its fandoms exist in a postracial reality where fandom is more enjoyable when linguistically and visually divorced from discourses surrounding race and racism.
5. The dream of fandom
[5.1] The ceremony for such divorce between fandom and racial discourse marks an impossibility for Black K-pop fans who may find that pleasure in the media object rests in the fractured space between fan and antifan. To elaborate, I present an experience that brought me to the question of Black positionality within the industry. The summer before I started graduate school, I spent time reconnecting with a college friend. As fellow K-pop fans, we would spend most of our summers talking about our favorite groups, first songs, and shocking moments. On one occasion, she asked, "Remember when we thought Kai was Black?" We both laughed, understanding the reference to a member of the popular K-pop group EXO, who, in the early days of the group, was often the object of ridicule for his darker skin complexion. In a particularly shocking moment, another member of the group seemingly jokingly asked if Kai would ever go for skin whitening. This was so prominent that Black fans still often reference his supposed Blackness with laughter. However, our laughter was not at the artist himself but instead an attempt to form closeness with him through shared oppression based on skin tone. We wished to feel connected, but we would go on to feel isolated by Kai's later use of Black hairstyles in the promotion of his solo album.
[5.2] One might ask why Black fans continue to engage with an industry that they note hates them. Stuart Hall (2004) already offers a critical reminder of the negotiation in all mass media between cultural industries and users. So, the question here is less about why we continue to engage with K-pop and more about how fan content produced by this engagement illuminates our mode of negotiation. Key to vigil labor is how it lends itself to complicating the fan and antifan categories and, in doing so, disrupts the dream of fandom. To expound on this dream, I turn to Henry Jenkins, who, to articulate the "universal" experience of fans, writes, "To speak as a fan is to accept what has been labeled a subordinated position within cultural hierarchy, to accept an identity constantly belittled or criticized by institutional authorities. Yet it is also to speak from a position of collective identity, to forge an alliance with a community of others in defense of taste which, as a result, cannot be read as totally aberrant or idiosyncratic" ([1992] 2012, 23). This mode of thought, which transforms fan identity into a category of subordination, also lays the foundation for the slumber which deems vigil labor necessary. I call this the dream of fandom because it suggests a minoritized community who do not see the Other. In this dream, race and fan identity should not compete because fandom is the identity. However, for Black K-pop fans, who are already outside culturally accepted forms of taste, racial identity continues to inform their engagement with K-pop. Continuing to describe the fan experience, Jenkins argues that fans find "pleasure" in "discovering that they are not alone" (23). However, as I have shown, Black fans must often create isolated space from the rest of fandom, who deem discourses of race disruptive to community formation. Within fandom, such Black fans become symbols of the institutional authorities who criticize fan culture. However, through their performance of vigil labor, Black K-pop fans are reconstructing what it means to speak as a fan. In doing so, they are reintroducing a dream of fandom that is interested in critiquing the position of sleep from which fandom dreams form.
[5.3] An even more important question than "why not leave?" is how focusing on Black fan practices in K-pop could offer a different way of reading pleasure, participation, and the status of the antifan. The dream of fandom as a space for one unified body defending against cultural hierarchy has long been unattainable. This is not only because of interfan wars but also because this very dream suggests a system where societal differences are left at the door of fandom. For many Black fans of K-pop, this imagined door signifies a longing for fans outside of the Black experience to continue to immerse themselves in fandom without questioning the source of their fan pleasure.
[5.4] If fandom represents a sense of found belonging, then attempts at destabilizing this space are often read as the destruction of home, or a specifically curated space outside of the real world. Vigil labor puts such a space into crisis by undermining the locus of its formation, thereby demonstrating its impossibility. The idea that Black fans cannot create space without race, gender, sexuality, class, or other vectors of identity is not the antithesis of fandom. Instead, it is the collapsing of the categories of fan and antifan by questioning how one becomes a fan without being an anti and how anti-Blackness forms pleasure and community.
6. Acknowledgments
[6.1] I thank the Visual Culture Working group at UC Berkeley for their gracious feedback and critical engagement with this work. I also wish to thank Professor Abigail De Kosnik for her feedback on the first draft of this essay during her Fandom and Piracy Seminar.