Affective and Intimate Ties Between BTS and ARMY: K-pop, Fandom, and the Feminine Gaze
Bibliographic record
Abstract
K-pop as a part of global popular culture, has had its texts viewed through the lens of local norms and imaginaries in many national contexts, sometimes to the detriment of idol groups and their fans. This thesis examines how race and gender have shaped the reception of K-pop in North America using BTS and their fans, ARMY, as a case study. Through a content analysis of BTS’ music videos and interviews with Canadian ARMYs, this study found that the aesthetics and gendered embodiment in BTS’ music videos align with a feminine gaze and that there is an affective and intimate bond between BTS and ARMY founded on shared (digital) space. Additionally, this thesis concluded that in North American contexts, male K-pop idols are entangled in racial and sexual imaginaries and stereotypes and that young and feminine K-pop fans are infantilized and pathologized by ‘fangirl’ discourses.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".