“We Are Bulletproof”: The Transcultural Power of Fandom in #StopAsianHate

Abstract

Fears of COVID‐19, alongside existing anti‐Asian sentiment, resulted in 11,467 documented hate incidents against Asians/Asian Americans in the United States between March 2020 and March 2022, per the Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center. In response, #StopAsianHate and #StopAAPIHate were used on Twitter to increase public awareness. Considering anti‐Asian racism transcends geographic boundaries, we interrogate: how does engagement with these hashtags reflect the transculturality of responses to anti‐Asian racism in a digital environment? We analyzed 920,271 tweets between March 19, 2020, and May 31, 2022, containing either hashtag, defining a “spike” in engagement as any day with >5,000 tweets, and found that of 25 spikes, 11 immediately followed the 2021 Atlanta‐area shootings—however, another 12 spikes were related to South Korean megagroup BTS. We further compare the results of two topic modeling methods, LDA and NMF, to examine how the use of and engagement with these hashtags shift over time primarily due to BTS fans (“ARMY”). This work joins emerging scholarship on race, fandom, and activism through cultural production in order to advance our collective understanding of modern digital activism and racial politics. Overall, we interrogate fandom's contributions to combating anti‐Asian sentiment, build on existing literature exploring the potential for fandoms to advocate for social justice, and argue that the transculturality of BTS, ARMY, and their affective ties represent an opportunity for accessible global discourse about anti‐Asian racism.