Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study systematically reviews and investigates the relationship between African American and K-pop fandom, examining how hybridity, cultural appropriation, racial capitalism, and identity work shape their participation in a globalised cultural form. A thematic literature review was conducted, drawing on 62 peer-reviewed literature sources published between 2000 and 2024. Databases searched included Web of Science, Scopus, ProQuest, and Google Scholar. Keywords included K-pop, Black women, fandom, intersectionality, cultural appropriation, racial capitalism, and hybridity. Inclusion criteria prioritised works addressing race, gender, and fandom politics in relation to Korean popular culture. The analysis identifies five interlinked contradictions shaping Black women’s positionality in K-pop fandom: (1) the simultaneous familiarity and distance produced by K-pop’s Black cultural foundations, (2) the celebration of Black aesthetics alongside their erasure within industry structures, (3) the provision of gendered affective alternatives tempered by persistent stereotypes, (4) the coexistence of inclusive branding and anti-Black exclusion in fandom spaces, and (5) the tension between identity re-creation, activism, and the policing of critique. This review addresses a critical gap in fandom studies by centring Black women’s perspectives, revealing how their cultural affinity for K-pop coexists with racialised marginalisation, and developing a transferable framework for analysing contradictions in other transnational popular cultures. Highlights Reveals how K-pop’s African American cultural roots foster affinity while industry structures perpetuate racial exclusion Identifies five interlinked themes: hybridity, cultural appropriation, gendered affective connections, anti-Blackness, and identity re-creation. Demonstrates how Black women use fandom as a site for activism, cultural translation, and resistance. Offers a transferable framework for studying race, gender, and global fandom politics across transnational popular cultures.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.013 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".