Kpop Fandom and Queerbaiting
A redditor replying to the r/kpopthoughts post titled "Idols are real people, REAL👏🏻 PEOPLE👏🏻 CAN'T 👏🏻 QUEERBAIT 👏🏻" writes:
No, that saying ["real people can't queerbait"] exists because people like coming up with blanket rules for complex cultural situations and feel comforted by their certainty even though they won’t be accurate in every situation.
What it originally meant was ‘if a straight actor plays a queer character, they’re not trying to trick you into thinking they’re really queer’ and ‘if a straight person has mannerisms or styling you associate with queerness, you have to remember those things aren’t prescriptive. They’re just being themselves and you’re reading too much into it’.
Idols are part of the entertainment industry. They’re presenting fictional versions of themselves when they’re on the clock. If one of them is straight but deliberately pretends to be attracted to the same sex in a way that toes the line between drawing in queer-friendly fans but not alienating homophobic fans, they are doing it to market themselves to both audiences simultaneously. That is them being a real person who 100% meets the definition of queerbaiting.
Just because the consequences of proving it are too severe to be worth it doesn’t mean they’re not doing it. Can’t we just get comfortable with the idea that it’s not our right to know if they are or aren’t rather than trying to trick people into believing the obviously not always accurate ‘real people can’t queerbait’?
As of the time of writing, their comment is scored at -10 votes.
I think this comment mainly caught a lot of heat because of its confrontational framing. A distaste for perceived shallow activism and sloganeering is evident - understandable, if not totally relatable.
Even though they didn't need to be antagonistic about it, the commenter got a lot of things essentially correct:
Slogans are for providing people with simple closure on an idea or a simple animus for a cause, because no one has the time to intellectualize about every little thing.
Slogans, even effective ones, can be inaccurate, misleading, or require clarification.
"Queerbait" is a good descriptive term for an unscripted, cynically safe-queer idea in entertainment that is for marketing purposes rather than for queerness' sake.
In what's maybe a deviation from the commenter's seeming inclination to understand the queerbaiting phenomenon as emerging from individual perpetrator-characters, but still has some common ground with their ideas, I would add:
- Accusing a random public figure of embodying that queerbait simply because they do queer-coded things is presumptuous, impractical, unnecessary, and potentially harmful for closeted idols.
With this in mind, it's true that "real people shouldn't be accused of queerbaiting just because they do queer-coded things because that would be regressive" is more accurate and clear, but it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.
Actually, I think that a problem with "real people can't queerbait" as a slogan isn't that it fails at being a slogan - it's easy to understand and remember, it has a finality to it, and it does the same job as our longer slogan in shutting down the dumb endeavours in question (in this case, accusing the explicitly out queer Lara Raj of Katseye of queerbaiting) - rather, it's that it doesn't redirect that energy at the broader structures of power that make queerbaiting an issue in the first place.
Looking back at our reddit post, the writer uses a common device to understand entertainer behaviour - the idea that entertainers are performing a "fictional" persona that can be understood similarly to the fictional (this time without scare quotes) characters in the scripted media that the term queerbaiting was originally meant to criticize for the noncommittal nature of their queerness. Presumably, this stands in contrast to an entertainer's authentic self, which may be more or less revealed at times, and the authentic selves of non-entertainers.
But really, it's more the case that everyone always employs personae - different, curated public selves for different purposes and contexts. The very idea of the perceived authenticity of a public figure is itself first negotiated, then performed, then interpreted subjectively, just as our own perceived authenticity is negotiated, performed, and then interpreted by those around us.
If we presume that there is a true, authentic self that might be contradictory to our personae, it can still only be perceived by others through interacting with them. In other words, seeing the self is filtered through a persona - one negotiated through context and then interpreted by an audience. The boundaries of any "real" self blur with the boundaries of our personae, just as a K-pop idol's authentic self is blurred with the persona that fans bond with.
This framework of many ambiguous personae, rather than one of a purely fictional self and a true authentic self, can illuminate what seem to be contradictions. What we feel is our authentic self can be expressed through performance, potentially revealing something genuine while performing at the same time. It shows that it is the ambiguity between persona and self present in all people, not just a "fictional" persona unique to entertainers, that is the enticing and productive feature of idols.
The actual difference between idols' personae and ours is the many additional filters that define them. Idols - and the broadcasters, editors, advertisers, and whoever else maintain their personae - are subject to the coercion of their bosses. All are beholden to shareholder value contingent on selling things to, or competing for the attention of, an audience that includes many homophobes as well as many fans excited to not only see queerness in media, but to identify with queer, or at least queer-friendly, figures.
These filters create idol personae that, understandably, are perceived as queerbait-y. Further, the more filters, the more difficult it is to maintain perceived authenticity, blurring the lines between the persona being received as either representation or exploitation.
It should be noted that this dynamic exists regardless of fan attempts to "vote with their wallets" - it exists structurally, and the incidental boycott of, for example, an exposed homophobic queerbaiter doesn't alter that structure. The exposé was only an isolated failure of the intentional ambiguity that is still a fruitful paradigm for capitalization otherwise.
A cute common refrain in K-pop fandom in response to queer fanservice discourse, one that I also do like, is "I'm a fan and I've been serviced." I think a generally positive outlook toward even vague queer themes seeping into K-pop is good, and it acknowledges the limitations of the fan-entertainer relationship, at least on a surface level. Still, like "real people can't queerbait," it doesn't address the political issues that are inseparable from, and that shape the conditions for, cultural issues.
So, then, it would be really great to get fans interacting with politics: the human endeavour to influence power relations and group decision-making. However, what I've been observing seems more like a de-politicization of fandom.
Political issues are being subsumed into fan-wars as all entertainment refocuses on catering to cross-cohort scores of elite hyper-nerds who control social media narratives and have near-fully saturated engagement with their entertainers. Social media accounts adopting the identity and brand signifiers of their favourite entertainer argue over whose favourite entertainers are more or less deserving instead of arguing for all workers' rights. Accounts argue over whose favourites are more or less authentically queer instead of arguing for queer liberation. Fans do entertainment companies' promotion and PR work for them even as fandom itself becomes less of a niche dedication and more like the way we are all routinely capitalized upon.
I don't have the new, perfect slogan that will motivate all these fans into a political frame of mind. But I hope to see more people rejecting the circular firing squad of clout-chasing with these issues as cover.