Mature Female Fandom and the Hong Kong Boy Band MIRROR

This paper considers the under-examined phenomenon of mature female fandom, deploying the Hong Kong boy band MIRROR’s fan base as a case in point. Hong Kong recently witnessed a revival of Cantopop after its decline in the 2000s, as the 12-member group has taken the city by storm––receiving millions of YouTube views and major music awards. Bearing resemblance to K-pop boy bands in terms of styling, MIRROR can be said to embody what Chuyun Oh terms “liminal masculinity” (71). Their fandom is populated with mature women, including mothers and grandmothers. Particularly intriguing is the parallel between their fan practices and those typically adopted by adolescents––creating fan clubs on social media and collecting artifacts; a group of fans even paid to have an individual member’s face plastered on a tram and featured on billboards. This paper aims to investigate their fan practices in the public sphere and relevant narratives in local media. I argue that the mature female fandom of MIRROR can be seen as an active resistance to gender (and age) norms in Hong Kong as a Confucius patriarchal society. These mature female fans formulate a heterosexual female gaze which is fixated upon men who display liminal masculinity, thereby calling into question how a (mature) woman should behave and what a (young) man should look like. Through publicizing and celebrating their desire, these fans renegotiate what it means to be participants of the boy band fandom, a subculture that is traditionally seen as exclusive to the experience of female adolescents.