This study examines affective politicisation in the Spanish manosphere, focusing on the role of disaffection in shaping digital practices and subjectivities. While research has explored the manosphere’s digital affordances, far-right connections, and affective dimensions, the intersection of these elements remains underexplored. Drawing on Yao’s concept of disaffection, the study analyses how dis/affects are mobilised to construct subject positions and facilitate political engagement.

The manosphere is conceptualised as an affective space within broader digital affect cultures, where emotions shape social dynamics and identity construction. Affect not only fosters identification within these communities but also functions as a political tool. Disaffection, understood as alienation from dominant affective norms, operates as a counter-force to feminist and progressive discourses. The manosphere constructs itself as a site of rejection, positioning feminist progress as an imposition of feeling rules that demand male empathy and accountability. By cultivating disaffection, these communities challenge hegemonic affective structures and reframe male grievances into political mobilisation.

Based on digital ethnographic data, the study identifies three stages of affective politicisation: (1) an affective awakening through redpilling, where male discontent is channelled into narratives of victimhood; (2) an emotional interpellation of refusal, leading to detachment from feminist feeling rules; and (3) re-engagement through political mobilisation, where disaffection transforms into camaraderie and counter-revolutionary activism. This process demonstrates how digital affective practices shape political subjectivities, reinforcing the manosphere’s broader ideological project.

K-pop’s global rise has been driven by digitalization (Jin, 2018), participatory media (Jenkins, 2006), and digital convergence (Deuze, 2007), with YouTube acting as a key site for fan engagement and cultural circulation (Jung, 2020). This study examines how local French-speaking girls in Québec appropriate and personalize a Korean global industry, shaping it through their creative practices on YouTube.

Beyond passive spectatorship, these fans engage in dance covers, video editing, and subtitling, transforming their digital participation into creative labour, skill development, and social bonding (Baym, 2018; Lee, 2022). While K-pop’s participatory nature has been widely studied (Jenkins, 2006), less attention has been given to the every day, skill-based practices of fan creators operating in localized contexts.

Based on an ethnographic study of a Montreal K-pop fangirl collective (5EFOR1), this research employs semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and YouTube content analysis to explore (1) how fans use YouTube as a creative space, (2) the community-driven learning processes that shape fan expertise, (3) how fans negotiate between industrial and fan-made content, and (4) the emotional and social dimensions of creative fandom.

This study contributes to discussions on digital participation, informal learning, and the evolving role of YouTube as a participatory media space, demonstrating how young women engage with a global cultural industry while embedding it within their own creative, linguistic, and social realities.

This paper examines how young feminists dispersed across China, some who identify as activists, and others who don’t, engage in fansubbing of foreign (mostly US and Japanese) media content to combat sexism and misogyny. Based on interviews with young, middle-class, urban Chinese women (aged 20-28) and textual analysis of their fansubbed content, I show how they viewed fansubbing as more than a hobby or a mode of entertainment. Rather, motivated by feelings of joy, pain, anger, and hope, they sought to harness the power of networked communication and algorithmic recommendation systems to spread explicitly feminist messages. A range of content – talk shows, sitcoms, NGO videos, and news items – was fansubbed, with some participants focusing on messages they deemed empowering, others on more explicit callouts of individual experiences of sexism, and still others on structural gender inequality. Through drawing on Kathleen Stewart’s (2007) notion of ordinary affects and Michael Lambek’s (2010, 2015) ordinary ethics, I center how the women’s embodied passions and ethical judgments informed their fansubbing. This paper adds to understandings of how feminist fandom practices in authoritarian contexts have the potential if not for societal, then individual transformation. Such individual transformations in turn have the potential to disrupt status quo, “common sense” notions of gender, sexism, and misogyny. Thus, the paper argues that Chinese feminist fansubbing potentially ruptures prior notions of fansubbing and participatory culture in western, liberal democracies.

This research maps the distinctiveness and evolution of Thailand’s (or Thai) creator culture, which refers to the rapidly-emerging platform-based cultural economies vitally distinguished by the practices of social media entrepreneurs, whether referred to as creators or influencers, KOLS or wanghong, YouTubers or TikTokers, game players or mukbangers, and/or vloggers or streamers. This work is framed by the concept of platform nationalism, the multilateral power relations engaged by corporations and governments to engage platform and social media users, communities, and entrepreneurs around nationalistic causes and movements. The preliminary results reveals a vibrant and rapidly-evolving creator economy, paradoxically promoted by government incentives around encouraging soft power abroad, if limited by platform and industry practices that inhibit the growth of sustainable creator businesses. More precariously, Thai creator culture is increasingly distinguished by the seller creator model operating solely off of Chinese owned, or funded, e-commerce platforms.