Hallyu fandom in Mexico City and Lima : soft power, gender, and new media self-fashioning of transcultural youth

This dissertation examines why Hallyu (the global consumption of Korean popular culture in the New Millennium) operates as a class-based and gendered phenomenon in Latin America. With a fanbase predominately comprised of women and LGBTQ+ communities from lower-middle classes and non-White populations, young Latin Americans adopt Korean popular culture to (re)imagine and fashion their identities beyond the social constraints of the nation-state. Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative research methods (in-depth interviews, participant observation, grounded theory) and data collected in Mexico City and Lima, Peru, between 2016 and 2019, I analyze, reconceptualize, and recontextualize less visible layers of Hallyu fandom demographics in Latin America in relation to questions of social belonging. My research reveals that Hallyu fans in Mexico City and Lima are culturally hybrid, technologically savvy, and socially nonconforming young people who resist the normative impositions of a binary gender system and hegemonic social inequality for upward mobility. Hallyu, as a vital point of reference to study the intersectionality of local and global forces, enables us to interpret recent class, racial, gender, and age dynamics in a digitally connected Latin American youth culture in new, still underexplored ways.