In explaining transregional media flows, cultural proximity has been embraced in academia and industry. However, in the past decade, drama series produced in traditionally peripheral media hubs in the Global South have been increasingly circulated on major pay TV platforms in sub-Saharan Africa, despite crossing geographic, linguistic, and cultural boundaries. This article investigates how television buyers as institutional cultural intermediaries navigate the interplay of the global media industry, commercial goals of media institutions, social stratification of local societies, and interpretations of audience proximity to mediate the contact zone between content alternative to globally dominant productions and audiences in sub-Saharan Africa. Centralizing alternative media flows in a region historically at the margin of the global television market, this research complicates the traditional discourse of proximity, suggesting the fluidity of culture and identity in the interaction of the local and global, and contributes to media industry studies with the Global South perspective.
This paper analyses YouTube comments on the viral short “ Do NOT Interrupt Our Mukbang!” from the Netflix phenomenon K-pop demon hunters to explore how participatory culture and parasocial interaction intersect in digital fandom. Drawing on 1,798 comments, we show how fans collaboratively construct meaning through humour, insider knowledge, and affective identification with animated idols and the K-pop industry beyond them. Commenters blend discourses of food, fitness, body ideals, and K-Pop industry realities, collapsing boundaries between fiction and reality. These practices illustrate a dual parasociality in which intimacy is projected onto both fictional characters and real-world idols. Through such playful and emotionally charged exchanges, fans transform online commentary into a participatory, interdiscursive space that negotiates identity, belonging, and critique. The analysis highlights how affective engagement and cultural production converge to sustain collective intimacy within transnational K-pop fandoms.
This article examines how postfeminist empowerment is mediated and reconfigured within China’s platformed media ecology, focussing on narrative design and affective mechanisms. Drawing on two female-centred Chinese costume idol dramas, A Dream of Splendor (2022) and The Legend of Shen Li (2024), the study combines close textual reading with contextualised paratextual analysis of highly visible discussions on platforms such as Douban, Weibo, and Bilibili. While both series share a genre logic centred on female growth and emotional autonomy, their pathways of empowerment diverge significantly. Female subjectivity is predominantly validated through affective labour, emotional stability, and relational repair rather than sustained structural confrontation. Platform curation and audience affective engagement further consolidate this logic, transforming empowerment into a highly shareable and emotionally resonant cultural form. Through comparative analysis, the article reveals an inherent tension within postfeminist empowerment in the Chinese platform context, where female agency is simultaneously foregrounded and depoliticised.
This study examines how the digital restructuring of drama production and distribution has reconfigured actors' position in the Korean television industry within global digital capitalism. Drawing on in-depth interviews with actors and industry professionals, supplemented by document analysis, it demonstrates that global streaming platforms and advanced production technologies are transforming capital-labor relations in the Korean drama acting ecosystem by reorganizing distribution and production. The findings suggest that global streaming platforms amplify the value of globally marketable actors while shifting control over them to global capital through IP monopolization. Digital production technologies, including generative AI, further extend actors' marketability by transforming stars into sites of intensified value extraction, converting embodied performances into data, and reorganizing performance labor under more direct technological control.
Situating the popularity of queer reality TV shows Queer Eye and RuPaul’s Drag Race against the haunting spectre of far-right populism, this paper examines how progressive audiences engage with queer reality TV in order to negotiate the challenges of a turbulent political milieu and the contradictions of “woke” subjecthood. In contrast to assumptions that audiences primarily experience reality TV as a form of indulgent, escapist entertainment, this paper uses data from interviews and focus groups to show how audiences position their spectatorship of QE and RPDR in unexpectedly solemn ways. Focussing on the mandate to “know one’s place” and practices of audience distancing, I examine how QE and RPDR are taken up as moral objects through which audiences negotiate the uncertainties of their political subjecthood and attempt to position themselves as “good” people. I argue that these audiences conceptualise their viewership of queer media as a technology of moral citizenship.
