From Empathy to Solidarity: Female Universalism, Participatory Fandom, and the Making of Chosen Communities In the Korean Wave

How does individual affective experience become the basis of collective solidarity? This session addresses this foundational question in the sociology of social love through the paradigm case of Hallyu fandom, the transnational community organized around Korean popular culture. Drawing primarily on Oh, Jang, and Lim’s (2026) theorization of female universalism and its empirical documentation across fan communities in Japan, Brazil, France, and beyond, the session traces a specific escalation pathway: from gendered melancholia as the structural affective condition that Hallyu’s narrative and aesthetic grammar speaks to; through radical empathy (Givens 2021) as the cross-boundary emotional capacity that Korean popular culture actively produces; through participatory fandom as the creative and proactive practice through which individual resonance becomes collective capacity; through chosen family formation as the solidarity structure that fandom communities constitute for their members; to collective action oriented around social causes as the politically consequential manifestation of fandom solidarity.

The session argues that what drives this escalation and what gives it its directionality toward care and solidarity rather than resentment or tribalism is the specific affective and normative content of female universalism: a female-coded universalism grounded in ethics of care, gendered melancholia, and transnational solidarity that constitutes a genuinely post-patriarchal and globally resonant form of social love. Female universalism is not merely the cultural ideology of a fandom but the normative infrastructure of its solidarity, the affective basis on which strangers become chosen family and chosen family becomes civic actor.