Precarious utopia: The affective politics of transcultural entertainment in K-pop Random Play Dance

K-pop Random Play Dance (RPD) has emerged as a global fan practice that transforms public spaces into sites of participatory performance and community-building. This research examines K-pop RPD as a precarious utopian space, where global pop culture is reinterpreted within local contexts to produce fleeting yet affectively powerful moments of joy, collectively, and self-expression. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews across mainland China, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, and Melbourne, our study explores how RPD participants navigate capitalist infrastructures, state regulation, and gendered surveillance while reclaiming space through dance, demonstrating how public performance can be both vulnerable and deeply empowering, especially in heavily policed social environments. By extending Richard Dyer's framework of utopian sensibility, our study introduces transculturality as a key utopian solution in global fan practices to explore how young adults understand cultural belonging and negotiate risks within transcultural media consumption.