Discovering East Asian TV Series in France
In France, the generation fed of Jap’Anime in the eighties became the first readership of Mangas during the nineties. Some of them have become in the last ten years Asian Drama fans. Digital technology and globalization allowed a worldwide organized community of drama fans, constructed on an effective division of collaborative work at a global scale. Cyber ethnography is made on a forum, observing the way South Korean romantic comedy dramas – still a mysterious cultural object for the French fans – are appropriated. As omnivorous consumers of heterogeneous cultural content as well as intercultural elites of globalizing world, the French drama fans, most of them females, are challenging the cultural hegemony of the American TV series. They claim autonomy in their emotions and cultural tastes against the patriarchal pressure and norms. The pursuit of a specifically female pleasure has a Queer reading potential. French female fans’ reception of Asian drama can be understood in terms of a female counter-culture in a digital and global age.