South Korea or Bust: From Fan Nationalism to Pop Culture Migration Through New Media

The Hallyu (Korean Wave) phenomenon reveals a distinctive migration trend driven predominantly by female and LGBTQ + fans. While scholars have framed this through “fan nationalism,” this perspective overlooks crucial elements: the gendered nature of the fandom and the central role of new media in facilitating both cultural engagement and migration decisions. This study explicitly examines how new media platforms—including streaming services, social media, and fan communities—enable fans worldwide to discover, consume, and engage with Korean content in ways fundamentally different from traditional broadcast media. Through grounded theory and semi-structured interviews with Hallyu fan migrants in South Korea, we reveal that new media creates transnational spaces where fans construct imagined homelands and form weak-tie networks that facilitate migration. Unlike traditional media consumption, new media allows for interactive, participatory engagement that shapes migration motivations. Rather than fan nationalism, we identify “gendered pop culture migration”—enabled and amplified by new media—as the core phenomenon, where women and sexual minorities seek empowerment and cultural freedom through migration to an imagined safe space.