The Intimate Geopolitics of Fandom:Censorship, Celebrity Bans, and Chinese Fan Practices

What becomes of fandom when the state renders its object politically 'un-lovable', and what draws some fans to remain, or even join, after a ban? This article examines how fans of banned celebrities sustain transgressive attachments under authoritarian rule, drawing on 32 semi-structured interviews with Chinese mainland fans of Denise Ho (何韻詩/何韵诗, HOCC), a Hong Kong queer, pro-democracy singer-activist whose work has been subject to sustained but uneven forms of erasure, including platform removals, market compliance, and industry self-censorship in mainland China since 2014. I theorize fandom as a site of intimate geopolitics, where state power intervenes in everyday cultural consumption and fans transform affective attachments into precarious forms of resilience and resistance. Extending feminist geographies work on intimate geopolitics and queer Sinophone work on affective geopolitics, I demonstrate how fandom itself becomes a terrain where geopolitical conflict is felt, contested, and reimagined. A key finding is that most participants became fans after 2014, when HOCC’s Sina Weibo account was removed—an initial sign of the informal, platform‑driven ‘ban’ that unfolded across the Chinese mainland digital sphere. I conceptualize these modes as quiet attachment: this article's central conceptual contribution to fandom studies, reorienting the field away from its emphasis on algorithmic or physical visibility and collective performance toward the encrypted, emotionally charged practices of persistence that emerge when fans sustain ties to a censored figure under authoritarian constraint. Slow endurance, expressed through archival fragments and discreet circulation, sustains attachment under erasure, while rapid improvisation enables agility in moments of digital crisis. These are not opposites but co-constitutive rhythms: complementary tactics of survival through which fan labor transforms cultural participation into affective and political work. Loss and silence are thus reworked as resources for solidarity, countering disappearance with persistence and surveillance with encrypted care.