Music, Healing, and Personal Fanship: Communication, Affect, and Cultural Meaning

This open session panel investigates music as a communicative and affective medium through the concept of personal fanship – a private, introspective relationship with music that is distinct from collective fandom or celebrity‑centered media consumption. Personal fanship highlights how individuals use music to construct meaning, manage emotional life, and negotiate identity within contemporary communication environments.

The session places particular emphasis on women across the life course, reflecting the growing visibility of middle‑aged and older female listeners in East Asia and beyond. K‑pop and other global pop genres provide rich sites for examining how cultural texts circulate transnationally and become embedded in everyday emotional practices. Through this lens, the panel explores how music operates as a communicative resource, a symbolic technology of healing, and a medium through which listeners articulate wellbeing, recognition, and empowerment.

By integrating sociological, cultural, psychological, and musicological approaches, the session advances RC14’s interest in meaning‑making, affect, symbolic communication, and cultural practices. It aims to develop a comparative and interdisciplinary framework for understanding how musical experiences shape emotional life across gendered, generational, and transnational contexts.