Session
‘We are Bulletproof’: The Transcultural Power of Fandom in #StopAsianHate
During the COVID-19 pandemic, people of Asian descent have been victims of physical and verbal harassment. Fears of the virus, alongside existing anti-Asian sentiment, resulted in 10,905 documented hate incidents against AAPIs in the United States, per the Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center. In direct response to the rise of anti-Asian hate, most significantly after the Atlanta area shootings, people on social media began using the hashtags #StopAsianHate and #StopAAPIHate to increase public awareness of such violence. Considering anti-Asian racism also exists beyond the US, we ask: how does the use of these hashtags reflect the transculturality of responses to anti-Asian racism in a digital environment? To examine this, we used an open-source Python library to scrape 920,271 tweets between March 19, 2020 and May 31, 2022 that contained either hashtag. We defined a “spike” in engagement as any days where there were more than 5,000 tweets containing one/both hashtags, and found that of 24 spikes, 11 immediately followed the Atlanta-area shootings, unsurprisingly — however, an additional 11 spikes were related to South Korean megagroup BTS, primarily driven by responses to instances of discrimination against the group. Accordingly, we further examine engagement with these hashtags and discourse on Twitter largely driven by ARMY, the BTS fandom, to explore alternative pathways to combating anti-Asian sentiment. Taking seriously the role of fandom, we argue that the transculturality of both BTS and ARMY and the affective ties between them present an opportunity for accessible and sustained discourse about anti-Asian racism.
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