Abstract
TikTok, one of the fastest growing entertainment platforms, is also a burgeoning space for hosting political expressions and movements. In this study, we examine how Asian/American women creatively occupy the #StopAsianHate hashtag on TikTok to counter anti-Asian racism and form pan-Asian solidarity. We analyze their participation in the #StopAsianHate hashtag as anti-racist space-making practices, which we define as the act of carving out discursive spaces to spread counter-narratives to anti-Asian racism and claiming space through their agentive, visual presence. Drawing upon Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) as our method, we analyze 130 #StopAsianHate TikTok videos by Asian/American women and examine how their anti-racist space-making practices draw upon the features and cultures of TikTok. We illustrate how Asian/American women extend the discussion on anti-Asian racism to include their gendered and raced experiences, and challenge racism in affective and evocative ways. We conclude by discussing how their space-making practices foster an ad hoc community for Asian/Americans across differences amid rising anti-Asian hate crimes.
Introduction
When news of COVID-19 first broke out in East Asia in late-2019 and was later declared a global pandemic, people of East Asian ethnicities around the world became targets of hate and violence (Abidin & Zeng, 2021). In the United States, increasing anti-Asian sentiments were epitomized in the Atlanta shooting case wherein a White man, who was a self-reported sex addict, killed six Asian women in three saunas on 16 March 2021. This case expanded the discussion on Asian hate crimes to include Asian fetishization, sexism, and gendered racism on social media. On TikTok, Asian content creators and their allies have used the platform to speak out against the rise of Asian hate crimes in the United States and other Western European countries by producing videos with several hashtags including #ProtectAsianLives, #AsianLivesMatter (adopted from #BlackLivesMatter), and #StopAsianHate. Among them, the #StopAsianHate hashtag, with more than 2 billion views as of November 2022, serves as a locus where Asian women address their experience of everyday racism and violence as gendered-and-raced beings, referring to the history of Asian racialization and fetishization in the United States. By taking seriously the political engagement of Asian women on TikTok’s #StopAsianHate hashtag, this study examines how Asian women creatively occupy and transform the #StopAsianHate hashtag into a productive space for confronting anti-Asian racism and forming pan-Asian solidarity.
In this study, we focus on the TikTok videos produced by Asian and Asian American women creators who discuss racism through specific incidents that occurred in the United States, such as the Atlanta Shootings on 16 March 2021 and a series of anti-Asian violence in New York City in 2021. While the #StopAsianHate movement took place across many Western countries, this study examines the US case as the movement was particularly intensified after a series of anti-Asian hate crimes in the country. As Asian American studies scholar Erika Lee (2007) argues, White supremacy around the world has been pivoted around the US race system where various racial categories and definitions (i.e., Asian, Black, Latinx) have been formulated in relation to the US history and policies around immigration and chattel slavery. In light of this, we focus on US-specific cases in relation to the US race system, not to reduce Asian/Americans’ experience into the universal Asian experience but to represent the fabric of Asian experience in the West, which resonates with various communities of Asians across regions, cultures, and histories.
In this study, we use the term “Asian/American” with a slash in between when referring to Asian women on TikTok, following Korean American scholar Laura Hyun Yi Kang (2002) who uses the slash to illuminate how Asian and Asian American women are frequently conflated, despite their differences as “the continental (Asian), the national (American), and the racial ethnic (Asian American)” (p. 2), in the US political, cultural, and media landscape. Our use of the term Asian/American is a strategic choice to highlight the inseparable relationship between Asian women and Asian American women in the US race system and to illuminate how the two have been conflated more so in the racialization of COVID-19 as an Asian disease. Indeed, many Asian TikTokers interchangeably use the terms, “Asian” and “Asian American,” regardless of the differences between the terms, to critique how Asians in the United States have become targets of hate crimes in the pandemic.
In our use of the term “Asian/American,” we do not limit the concept only to East Asian ethnicities but consider it as an umbrella concept that includes various Asian ethnicities and nationalities. However, we note that many parts of our data, findings, and analysis revolve around the stories of racism and sexism experienced by people of East Asian ethnicities, who were the main targets of anti-Asian racism exacerbated by the pandemic. This acknowledgment is crucial in Asian American studies, especially when researching cases like the #StopAsianHate movement, because public and scholarly discussions on anti-Asian racism have focused extensively on East Asian peoples’ experiences (China, Japan, South Korea), overlooking the ways in which anti-Asian racism impacts Asian American groups of other ethnicities differently. For this reason, while Asian/American women of non-East Asian backgrounds (e.g., South Asians, Southeast Asians) partake in the movement in solidarity, they often feel marginalized within Asian American Pacific Islander space (Jagoo, 2022). Thus, when using the term Asian/American, we are mindful of the heterogeneity of the ethnicities, cultural backgrounds, histories, and experiences of Asian Americans of Asian descent, which is usually dismissed and lumped into a monolithic racial identity by the US race ideology (Yamamoto, 1999).
Historical Overview of Anti-Asian Racism and Asian Women’s Racialization in the United States
In the United States, Asians have been racialized in two primary ways: made hyper visible as the “perpetual foreigner” or invisible as the “model minority” (Yamamoto, 1999). This contradictory positioning of Asians is a result of the White and Black race paradigm in the United States, which subjects Asian Americans to racial markings of non-difference or difference, based on the needs of the dominant race ideology of the United States (Yamamoto, 1999). The perpetual foreigner stereotype dates to when the fear of the “yellow peril” was at its height in the late-1800s, in which the increasing presence of Chinese laborers in California led to the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 (Lee, 2007). The model minority stereotype of Asians is equally pernicious. In response to the US political needs to cultivate an image of a racial democracy in the 1950s, the United States revised its immigration policies, eliminating race as a barrier to immigration and began cultivating the image of the model minority Asians to assist the US public’s acceptance of these immigration laws (Simpson, 1998). Despite their fraught history with racism in the United States, the model minority stereotype has made it difficult for Asians to articulate their experience with racism as they have been historically framed as “honorary whites” (Zhang, 2010) or superhuman figures impervious to pain (Nakamura, 2015).
Caught in the racial binary, Asian women have been stereotyped as either “dangerous dragon ladies” or “obedient, hypersexualized dolls” (Zhang, 2010, p. 20). The former stereotype was made prominent through a series of immigration laws in the United States, such as the 1875 Page Act enacted to contain the entry of Chinese women into the United States for prostitution and other series of immigration laws, such as the 1945 War Brides Act, which accepted only the immigration of European spouses of American soldiers, limiting the entry of Asian brides from East Asian countries who were deemed as “better prostitutes than wives” (Doolan, 2019, para 9). In US popular media, this imagined threat of Asian sexuality was controlled by representing Asian women as submissive, sexual objects. Against the backdrop of American military presence in Japan, novels and movies popularized the romance between the docile Japanese woman and the American soldier who rescues her from the oppressive, patriarchal Japanese society (Yamamoto, 1999). In these movies, racial tension arising from interracial mixing became resolved by either the death of the Asian woman or her convenient disappearance, rendering her body easily disposable (Simpson, 1998). As Asian American scholars note, these harmful representations have historically conflated Asian and Asian American women (Kang, 2002; Shimizu, 2007), and continue to do so, which Shimizu (2007) describes as the “violent homogenization of Asian American women” (p. 14) whose differences are obscured by hypersexualization.
In the contemporary media landscape, through various modes of online and offline activism, Asian/American women have advanced counter-narratives against the monolithic understanding of the sexually charged Asian female body by approaching it as a complex site where gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality intersect (Kuo et al., 2020). We approach Asian/American women’s participation in the #StopAsianHate movement as a continuation of Asian/American women’s efforts to intervene in the history of sexism and racism against Asian/Americans.
Social Media Hashtag: Affective Racial Counterpublics and Space-Making
Racial justice activism occurs on social media platforms through the formation of racial counterpublics. For instance, Asian American activists have used Twitter hashtags including #NotYourAsianSideKick and #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen to form racialized and feminist of color counterpublics (Kuo, 2018a). Counterpublics refer to the discursive space “where members of subordinated groups invent and circulate counter discourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (Fraser, 1990, p. 67). By disseminating counter discourses to the public, counterpublics seek to challenge hegemonic discourses and empower the voices of the marginalized (Squires, 2002). Hashtagging is one of the most frequently used features in social media activism, which is used to construct counter-narratives, provide strategic guidepost for the course of the movement (Losh, 2014), and serve as nodes for marginalized individuals to connect with similar others, feel intimacy, and affectively mobilize publics by narrating and developing their stories (Kuo, 2018b). As Kuo (2018b) writes, ‘hashtags function as a discursive form that links together streams of information that allows people to ‘feel their way’ into politics” (p. 44).
Notably, connective social media affordances and features, such as hashtags, facilitate the circulation and mobilization of affect and emotions, activating fragmented publics into connected movements (Papacharissi, 2015) and forging “the feelings of community” (Dean, 2010, p. 22). For example, in the case of Arab Spring movements where a series of democracy uprisings was spread mostly via Twitter across the Arab world in 2010, Twitter’s connective and expressive affordances helped users spread news and mobilize publics by blending fact with their interpretations and emotions (Papacharissi, 2015). Similarly, racial minorities’ social media hashtagging practices can be understood as a practice for building communities, in which scattered individuals gather, engage with each other, and develop their affective stories and connections.
According to feminist scholarship on the politics of affect, affect is not nonconscious and prepersonal, but is embodied, contextualized, and always linked to the social (Ahmed, 2004). For instance, how racialized and gendered subjects feel about society, such as their anger toward disempowering social structures, indicate how society is structured and operates along gender and racial lines (Åhäll, 2018). On social media, affect is shared and circulated in response to social issues, in which people are brought together and mobilized toward movements like #MeToo (Sundén & Paasonen, 2019). Affect is thus “productive emotion” (Lopez, 2014, p. 425), which mobilizes people to find and create spaces, such as online counterpublics, to express their experiences of injustice creatively with others.
However, it is difficult for marginalized people like Asian/American women to find safe places, especially in public, to share their stories and emotions with others (Kern, 2021). Feminist geographers highlight how marginalized communities strive to create spaces of disruption to subvert oppressive structures and create ruptures in “normative” spaces through their visibility that challenge society’s expectations of how women, ethnic minorities, and queer people should act in White-centered spaces (Fincher & Panelli, 2001; Kern, 2021). For example, Women With A Vision (WWAV), a Black Feminist social justice collective, has transformed the front porches of their homes as safe spaces for Black women and community members to convene (McTighe & Haywood, 2018). By critiquing normative spaces and envisioning equitable spaces, marginalized communities continuously conduct space-making practices that are processual, ongoing, and aspirational (Kern, 2021).
In this study, we propose to extend feminist geographers’ idea of space-making to Asian/American women’s participation in the #StopAsianHate hashtag. Similar to how feminist geographers conceptualize feminist space-making as the act of occupying and intervening in normative spaces, we look at how Asian/American women discursively and materially take up and form space on TikTok. Feminist scholarship on digital activism describes feminist activists’ political engagement on platforms as the act of occupying and creating “a shared political home in digital space” (Kuo et al., 2020, p. 8) by being together online. By applying the notion of space-making to Asian/American women’s participation in the #StopAsianHate hashtag on TikTok, we illuminate the dynamic and processual act of being and moving in digital space together. We specifically look at how Asian/American women carve out discursive spaces by cultivating, spreading, and building on counter-narratives and physically claim the space with their presence and cultivation of solidarity on the platform, decentering whiteness and White supremacy on social media. Asian/American TikTokers do not merely use the space provided by the platform but make spaces across the networked landscape, expanding the reach of their counter discourses and scope of representation for Asian/American women beyond the narratives of hypersexualized objects and the quiet Americans (Lopez, 2014).
TikTok
In this study, we look at how Asian/American TikTok creators’ space-making practices are shaped by the vernacular cultures and features of TikTok. Despite its relatively short history, TikTok has expanded the tenor of political engagement online (Zeng & Abidin, 2021). TikTok’s technological features, including its virality-centered mechanism (e.g., algorithmically generated “For You Page”) and playful and creative functions (e.g., meme templates, audiovisual effects), lowers the barrier for young people to join social movements and casually discuss social (in)justice (Abidin, 2021). In particular, communicative forms on TikTok, such as comedic, documentary, explanatory, communal, and interactive content, present politics of everyday communicative environments (Schellewald, 2021). Hautea et al. (2021) further note that hashtagged TikTok videos contribute to the construction of affective publics through the usage of audio memes and interactive features like duet and stitch features.
TikTok’s audio function allows users to include the same background audio template (e.g., trendy music, their own dialogues, recordings of vocal messages of other users), which helps users engage with others auditorily in the form of audio memes (Abidin, 2021). TikTok’s unique features, duet and stitch, also enable users to directly respond and react to other creators. The duet feature lets a user’s video play next to another creator’s video and the stitch feature allows a user to build a video on another user’s video by clipping and integrating up to 5 s of the original video into their own. Through these creative features, TikTok allows users to quickly respond to “viral” content (Abidin, 2021), which strengthens their association with other TikTok contents and creators (Hautea et al., 2021). Focusing on the interactive social movements afforded by TikTok’s various technological features, we pay attention to how Asian/American women’s #StopAsianHate hashtagging practices shape anti-racism movements together with the platform’s technical specificities and cultures.
Method
To explore Asian/American women’s participation in the #StopAsianHate hashtag, we address the following research questions: (1) What do Asian/American women talk about through the #StopAsianHate hashtag? (2) How do they develop and share their stories by drawing upon the various features of TikTok? (3) Finally, how do they form solidarity with other Asian/American TikTokers to challenge anti-Asian racism?
From September to November 2021, we observed the #StopAsianHate hashtag on TikTok and collected 130 videos from the Top Video tab. Among the numerous #StopAsianHate TikTok videos uploaded by global users, we manually collected videos by Asian/American women who specifically used the #StopAsianHate hashtag to discuss racism in the context of the United States and verbally (e.g., talking about their racial and ethnic identity in their videos) or textually (e.g., hashtags or TikTok profiles indicating their ethnicity) identified themselves as Asian. We stopped our data collection after we began to see similar patterns across the data set and reached data saturation. Our data set consists of 130 videos published between mid-February 2021 and early-November 2021, each ranging from 900 to 4.7 million views. Most videos under the hashtag were uploaded during March 2021 at the height of the racially motivated crimes against Asian populations in the United States and the Atlanta Shooting on 16 March 2021. At the time of writing, videos continued to be uploaded, with Asian/American women TikTokers extending the #StopAsianHate conversation to violence enacted upon Asian populations beyond the pandemic, including Asian fetishization, Asian cultural appropriation, and microaggression.
Our methodology is grounded in Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA), a multimodal analytic technique which approaches online discourse as technoculturally mediated by the artifact and the cultural perspectives of the user (Brock, 2018). CTDA approaches both online discourse and platform as texts, encouraging researchers to pay attention to the “technocultural mediation of discursive actions” (Brock, 2018, p. 1019). As Brock (2018) writes, CTDA “is not only critical of the content that people deploy as they use ICTs to write themselves into being but also of the ways that the medium hails them into being as users” (p. 1025). Accordingly, we attend to how the technological features of TikTok (e.g., duets, meme templates, hashtags) shape the narrative of Asian/American women TikTokers, how the interactive structure unique to the platform cultivates affective connections among Asian/Americans, and how the subject positions and lived experiences of the users shape their usage of TikTok.
Informed by CTDA, we developed our coding scheme to reflect the discursive, material, and symbolic aspects of peoples’ usage of technological artifacts. We each engaged in inductive reading of the first 25 videos to come up with patterns across the videos. After comparing our initial codes, we came up with the following categories to analyze discourse characteristics of the TikTok videos: Topic (type of anti-Asian racism discussed: for example, Physical violence, Asian fetishization, Racial microaggression), Context of anti-Asian racism discussed (e.g., COVID-19, Atlanta Shooting, everyday racism), and Message Characteristics (e.g., The genre, audience target, and tone of the content). Based on the codes we developed, we read our data set horizontally, which is the exploration of patterns, themes, and discourses that are manifest across different data, and focused on what counter-narratives emerge, how they are spread across different TikTok videos, and how they evoke a shared sense of belonging and community within the hashtagged discursive space.
Then, we read our data vertically, which is the close examination of individual data, by carefully looking at each TikTok video to see its unique feature: how TikTokers narrate their stories and further contribute to shaping the shared counter-narratives, how they interact with their followers and audiences, and what types of TikTok features they use. In this reading, we closely examined the Asian/American TikTok creators and their followers’ use of TikTok features. Drawing upon Zeng and Abidin’s (2021) analytical construct “meme form,” the “content style through which memes are delivered in each video” (p. 5), we analyzed the audio feature, visual feature, and performing feature of each TikTok video. By doing so, we were able to see how the specific platform vernaculars of TikTok (e.g., acting skits, lip syncing, stitch and duets) were being utilized by Asian/American women in their anti-Asian racism resistance. Through horizontal and vertical reading of our data, we explain how individual Asian/American TikTok creators, their followers, and the broader Asian/American culture interact and develop their counterpublic narratives and construct their own space and connections under the #StopAsianHate hashtag.
Following the ethical stance of feminist media scholars who have studied the counterpublics of marginalized groups (Clark-Parsons & Lingel, 2020), we anonymized the TikTok handles of the Asian/American women in our study and do not provide visual examples of the data. Social media users often lack agency over how their publicly made social media data are being utilized (Clark-Parsons & Lingel, 2020). While the TikTok creators made their videos public, we did not receive their consent to have their posts published in academic research. As Moravec (2017) aptly writes on feminist research ethics on digital archives, “their (feminist activists) presence in archives is not necessarily indicative of the creators’ desire to be widely accessed” (p. 198). We became more vigilant about using and publicizing their data after finding out that some of the posts in our data had been deleted since our initial data collection in November 2021, which may indicate the TikTokers’ desire to not have their content remain visible. In addition, considering the fact that Asian women are frequent targets of racialized and gendered harassment online (Nakamura, 2015), we felt responsible for protecting the Asian/American TikTokers in the study from any potential harm when this research becomes public. Thus, while we acknowledge the important and unique function that visual elements of TikTok contents carry in social movements on TikTok, we decided not to provide any screenshots of their videos. Instead, we provide detailed explanations of the characteristics and interactive features of their TikTok videos to the best of our ability to deliver the nuance of visual messages in the original contents.
#StopAsianHate as a Discursive Space
In this section, we examine how the #StopAsianHate hashtag functions as a discursive space to challenge anti-Asian racism. We first provide an overview of the dominant themes of anti-Asian racism shared by Asian/American women. We then discuss how the #StopAsianHate hashtag serves as a discursive space. Finally, we illustrate how Asian/American women enrich and expand #StopAsianHate discursive space through hashtagging practices on TikTok.
Through their #StopAsianHate videos, Asian/American women diversify the discussion of anti-Asian racism into three main themes: (1) physical hate crimes, (2) Asian fetishization, and (3) racial microaggression. First, Asian/American TikTok creators highlight the gravity of physical violence committed against East Asians in the United States since the onset of the pandemic. Discussion of Asian hate crimes includes COVID-19-related hate crimes specifically targeting the Asian elderly population and the Atlanta shooting case. These videos contextualize the analysis of hate crimes in the historical, political, and cultural representations of Asians as the yellow peril in the United States that have been used to legitimize racialized violence. In the videos dedicated to the Atlanta shooting, Asian/American women introduce the gendered dimension of racialized violence and attribute the murder of six Asian women to US history of hypersexualizing Asian women. Extending the conversation beyond the Atlanta Shooting, Asian/American TikTok creators also illustrate how the historical legacy of Asian women’s hypersexualization is experienced in their everyday life. Examples include videos about #AsianFishing (practices of White people trying to pass as Asians through makeup or photoshopping, often called “East Asian baiting,” and practiced through the adoption of a “fox eye” appearance) and #YellowFever. Finally, a considerable number of videos under the #StopAsianHate hashtag discuss TikTok creators’ experiences of sexism and racial microaggressions. These videos mainly challenge stereotypes about Asian women (e.g., Asian women are exotic, submissive, and hypersexual) and problematize White Americans’ unconscious denial of Asians as full-fledged citizens in the United States (e.g., Asian Americans being asked “where are you from?”).
By addressing their experiences and challenging anti-Asian racism through these various themes, the #StopAsianHate hashtag functions as an “indexing system” (Kuo, 2018b) where invisible information about violence against Asian bodies are shared, archived, and made visible. As such, the #StopAsianHate hashtag serves as a discursive space where Asian/American women can deposit and form counter-narratives to anti-Asian racism and share their feelings and experiences with other Asian/American women occupying the discursive space. When public space is constructed in favor of White masculinity and minorities are continuously pushed to marginal spaces, virtual space can function as an alternative space for the oppressed to talk about their own experiences (Cavalcante, 2019) and feel safety within the boundary of the hashtag (Dixon, 2014). While the #StopAsianHate discursive space can be entered by racist and sexist publics, the hashtag represents Asian/American women’s reclaiming of space by making their presence and discourse more visible to online publics.
As philosopher Lefebvre (1974/1998) famously put, space as a social product mediates social relations through which people develop a sense of identity and define themselves within society (p. 26). Neighborhoods like Chinatown in New York City in the United States provide physical space for ethnic diasporas where the minority community members cultivate social networks through ordinary daily conversations, exchange and maintain cultural values and norms of the community, and organize political action (Wong, 2019). In the context of accelerated digitalization during the pandemic where peoples’ mobility is restricted and their daily lives are forcefully integrated into the digital space (Nagel, 2020), such ethnic spaces are newly built into the digital space through racial minorities’ digital media-making practices and media artifacts (Kuo et al., 2020). Thus, the trending #StopAsianHate hashtag on TikTok becomes a political site for Asian/American women to gather and virtually march to express their anger and frustration against the growing Asian hate and advocate for racial justice.
In cultivating and expanding the #StopAsianHate shape, Asian/American women engage in various hashtagging practices. TikTok is unique for its virality-seeking cultures, with users’ engagement centered around the “For You Page” that picks up posts with “high engagements”—measured with views, comments, and shares—and displays them to other users’ main page based on the users’ previous digital footprints (Abidin, 2021). As being picked up by the For You Page allows users to gain views, TikTok creators utilize various forms of trending hashtags, memes, and filters to increase their contents’ visibility. To increase the reach of their #StopAsianHate videos, Asian/American women use the #StopAsianHashtag alongside two types of hashtags: the popular hashtags designed to attract views like #fyp (the abbreviation of For You Page)—which we call exposure extension hashtags; and racial discourse hashtags, which we call narrative extension hashtags (Table 1). These narrative extension hashtags function as subject identifiers, in addition to networking the #StopAsianHate content to various video pages of hashtagged contents on TikTok, which users can enter by clicking on the hashtags. For instance, Asian/American women use #ProtectAsianWomen, #AsianFetishization, and #YellowFever, to connect the #StopAsianHate videos to other contents that deal with the gendered-and-raced experiences of Asian/American women.
Dominant Themes and Types of Hashtags.
Additionally, by utilizing these extension hashtag features, some Asian/American TikTokers attempted to expand the East Asian-centered focus of the #StopAsianHate movement and discourse and critiqued colorism within the Asian American community. For instance, a mixed-race Asian/American (@ms***) linked the #StopAsianHate hashtag to other identifiers such as #mixedrace and #mixedraceAsian and did a duet with another Asian/American TikToker (@ma***) who posted a video about the Asian American community shaming mixed-race Asians for not being Asian enough. In the duet, the mixed Asian/American TikToker nods in response to the original TikToker @ma***’s critique and expresses how mixed-race Asians often feel excluded in conversations about anti-Aisan racism and experiences of being Asian on TikTok. There were also other similar videos that critiqued the #StopAsianHate movement with hashtags such as #AsianAmericanCommunityProblems, for narrowing the focus of anti-Asian racism to hate crimes mainly targeted at East Asian and neglecting the experiences of other ethnic groups, such as South Asians who were subjected to heightened racialized surveillance and discrimination post 9/11. By highlighting the exclusion of mixed-race Asian Americans and Asian Americans of other ethnicities within the Asian American community through the #StopAsianHate hashtag, the TikTokers diversify the counter-narratives under the hashtag, providing various entry points for people to enter into the discursive space.
Affectively Talking Back Through Hashtags
In this section, we examine how the platform vernacular of TikTok—the visuals, performances, and affective storytelling (Zeng & Abidin, 2021)—shape Asian/American creators’ presence in the #StopAsianHate discursive space. In our corpus of data, we noticed how Asian/American women “talked back” (hooks, 1986) to anti-Asian racism through the display and vocalization of anger, frustration, and sadness. Referring to how Black women are subjected to racialized and gendered scrutiny when they act and talk, bell hooks (1986) writes how the act of talking back is a way of speaking as an equal to authority figures and demonstrating their “movement from object to subject—the liberated voice” (p. 128). Similarly, Asian/American women talk back to racism and take space as visible subjects, rather than remaining as hypervisible, docile, and apolitical objects.
We describe the talking back by Asian/American TikTokers as affective, which is supported and intensified by the interactive features of TikTok. In many #StopAsianHate TikTok videos, Asian/American women’s critique of anti-Asian racism is displayed with an amalgam of visible signs of feelings (e.g., tears, laughs) and invisible cues (e.g., tones, attitudes) that convey affective registers around the topics they discuss. In the following paragraphs, we illustrate Asian/American TikTok creators’ affective dimensions in their critique of anti-Asian racism: (1) they claim authority over racial discourse in narrative videos charged with anger and sadness and (2) creatively channel their emotions through humoristic videos. By doing so, Asian/American women TikTokers counter stereotypes of Asian people as apolitical, alien-like, and unemotional (Lopez, 2014).
Evoking the Viewers’ Feelings and Claiming Authorship
One of the most prominent ways in which Asian/American women address anti-Asian racism is by expressing anger, frustration, and sadness through explanatory and narrative formats. In many videos, Asian/American women TikTokers directly stare into the camera against a virtual background or the backdrop of their rooms. Through a conversational format without edits, Asian/American women TikTok creators channel their feelings to the viewers, whom they address as the general public, non-Asian allies, Asian allies, or bystanders. Their tones vary, from softer tones used to address their allies (e.g., “Please engage with this video if you think Asian fetishization is an increasing issue” @lin***, 2021) and to solemn tones when talking to bystanders of anti-Asian racism (e.g., “If we say you are a racist, you are a racist” @ok***, 2021). Some Asian/American women address the viewers more vehemently, such as by cursing at bystanders of racism (e.g., “If you care about Asian lives, listen the fk [sic] up” @vi***, 2021). Asian/American women address viewers through these different emotional appeals, expressing their feelings of anger and sadness through their solemn tone, facial expressions, and hand gestures. For example, in her clip, @ko***(2021) points a knife she was using to cut fruits to the viewers, stares into the screen stony-faced, and expresses her anger and determination to fight against racism. Through these affective acts of addressing the viewers, Asian/American women draw viewers into their feelings of sadness and anger and further captivate them by affectively talking back to hegemonic beliefs about Asians and Asian women that stereotype them as docile and timid yet at the same time hypersexual and exotic.
Other narrative videos mimic the style of investigative journalism reports, with the videos displaying different historical sources, news clips, and statistics of anti-Asian hate crimes against the backdrop of the TikTokers. Asian American perspectives on American politics are largely exempt in the mainstream American public discourse, and Asian/American activists have long tried to remedy this by claiming authorship over political discourse that pertains to them through blogging, zines, and other forms of public expression of their thoughts and feelings (Lopez, 2014). On TikTok, Asian/American women also engage in this political performative act by expressing their anger in response to the mainstream news media’s coverage of the Atlanta Shooting as not racially motivated. Their anger functions as “productive emotion” (Lopez, 2014) which calls people into the issue, leads to dynamic conversation and interaction, and creates space for Asian/American’s authorship over anti-racist discourse. One of the common formats of these journalistic contents would be the TikToker taking the role of a journalist, narrating directly into the camera, and critiquing the mainstream news media coverage of the Atlanta shooting by connecting the murder to US history of hypersexualizing Asian women (e.g., @ei***, 2021). In these videos, Asian/American women replace the mainstream apolitical narrative of the shooting to their intersectional analysis of the murder of six Asian women (e.g., @vl***, 2021). The feelings of disgust, frustration, and anger they feel toward the mainstream racial discourse are shared with their viewers who provide their support and engage in collective feelings for justice.
Laughing at the Racists and Making Feelings Felt
The #StopAsianHate hashtag, while driven by anger against anti-Asian racism, is also energized by laughter, humor, and satire, which can “provide a breathing” space for activists to energize and mobilize action (Sundén & Paasonen, 2019, p. 8). On TikTok where media contents circulate virally in the form of memes (Abidin, 2021), sharing and producing short clips for laughter can create ruptures in hegemonic systems by encouraging others to join the counterpublic in a playful manner. The affective potential of humor and satire in mobilizing resistance to racism is observed in Asian/American women’s resistance to anti-Asian racism. Asian/American women occupy the hashtag by partaking in and creating trendy TikTok meme templates to address anti-Asian racism. Skits are the most common types of playful content, often employed to act out the TikTokers’ experience with gendered racial microaggressions. For example, in a skit, an Asian/American TikToker @im***(2021) performs as a racist by adding a ghastly facial filter on her face and says “ching chong.” Then she acts as herself, holding tightly onto the wrist of the hand she is holding her scissors, trying extremely hard to stop herself from attacking the racist.
Audio memes and dances are also frequently used to bolster users’ affective statements. In the context of the #StopAsianHate movement, the meme templates enable TikTokers to channel their affective reaction to injustice through personalized narratives. The audio meme “magic bomb dance,” which is a trending sound on TikTok accompanied by dance moves to the sound of the beat, has been used to answer “Things I have been asked as an Asian Woman.” In one of the videos which generated a flurry of angry comments, TikToker @za*** (2021) who identifies herself as ethnically Chinese responded to the questions “Is your (cat emoji) sideways?” which is a question that asks whether she has a sideway pussy. Sideway pussy is the dehumanizing stereotype of Chinese women and other East Asian women as having vertical vaginas due to their work as prostitutes during the 19th century in the California goldmines (Tso, n.d.). @za*** responds with a firm “no,” looking frustrated, but unwavered.
The humor and satire of the #StopAsianHate TikTok videos show what Pham (2011, p. 17) calls “radical politics of sentimentality” among Asian/American women, where they challenge feeling structures that have historically positioned Asian/American women as victims and given White people the feeling of satisfaction to act as their saviors. These feelings are shared through the replication and sharing of memes, with satire and humor becoming a leading sensibility in which Asian/American women can channel and make sense of the historical and everyday subjugation of Asian women. As these comedic videos represent, Asian/American women are not left helplessly dealing with feelings of harm.
#StopAsianHate as an Ad Hoc Community for Pan-Asian Solidarity
The #StopAsianHate hashtag brings together the stories of Asian/American women and facilitates a sense of community among Asian/American creators and viewers. As Saraswati (2021) writes in her book on feminist activism on social media, hashtags “function as a mode of curating and imagining one’s community,” encouraging participants to be present “with” and “for” others (p. 160). Through their participation in the #StopAsianHate discursive space, Asian/American women TikTokers and their supporters stand “with” and “for” Asian/American women by validating their experiences of racism, sexism, and oppression. The validated feelings and narratives under the hashtag offer Asian/American women a chance to engage with similar Others across physical, ethnic, and national boundaries within the virtual TikTok space. For example, in @on***’s #StopAsianHate video, the TikToker teaches her baby to say “I love you” in different Asian languages using language cards. The video states, In support of Asians here and all over the world who are being targeted, we’re gonna learn how to say “I love you” in some of their native languages. [. . .] In Chinese, we say “Wo ai ni” (我爱你). In Korean we say, “Salangae” (사랑해). In Filipino, “Mahal kita” [. . .] And together we say, let’s stop Asian Hate.
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To this video, more than 7691 comments were posted wherein people from various Asian backgrounds expressed their support to other Asians against the rise of anti-Asian hate, by checking up on each other and saying “I love you.” Through interactive features of sharing, likes, and comments, the TikToker and her followers were building pan-Asian solidarity under the broader concept of “Asian-ness,” based on their shared history, culture, and experience of racism, rather than on specific racial features of Asians (Kibria, 1997). In this manner, when Asian/American women occupy the hashtagged space on TikTok and claim it as their own spatial property, the space becomes an Asian community where individuals build their social networks and mobilize collective action against Asian hate, standing together in solidarity with each other.
The social networks of Asian/American women expand through TikTok’s infrastructure and communicative affordances. Asian/American TikTokers continue to build and strengthen their relations with their followers in the community by making interactive conversations with them. In our data corpus, many TikTokers do not just broadcast their experiences, but also ask for others, including their followers and audiences, to share their experiences and thoughts about racism. For example, in her video of calling out a White woman’s violence against 6-year-old Asian children in a shopping mall, an Asian/American TikToker encourages her followers to share their opinions and speak out their voices against anti-Asian racism: Do you guys see this Cuckoo? [. . .] [she] punches a 6-year-old Asian kid in the neck. [. . .] Mall security lets her go. What?! What?! What are your thoughts? Post your comments. (@gir***, 2021)
Through TikTok’s communicative affordances, Asian/American TikTokers and their audiences facilitate their “cultural conversation” about anti-Asian racism, which is exclusively understood among members with shared histories and knowledge of their subcultures (Clark, 2015). The conversation exchanges not only remind TikTokers and their followers of their Asian identity but also cultivate what Sundén and Passonen (2019) call “affective homophily—a love of feeling the same” (p. 8). In virality-centered TikTok environment, the sense of homophily quickly spreads as “viral warmth” (Sundén & Paasonen, 2019) among the community members within the TikTok space, aided by TikTok’s creative, communicative, and interactive affordances.
For example, the day after the Atlanta shootings, Sam Hyun, a famous TikTok creator, posted a video of him saying the victim’s names and saying “Enough is enough. Hate is a virus. Stop Asian Hate” (@samueljhyun, 2021). This video instantly became viral and was re-made into more than 2,700 videos as many TikTokers created duets with the original video and posted TikTok contents using Sam Hyun’s narration as an audio meme template. For instance, @wha***, who specializes in makeup and beauty genre, writes “STOP ASIAN HATE (all letters capitalized)” in black and red ink below her eyes and across her nose to the audio template of Sam Hyun’s “Enough is enough” narration. As such, through TikTok’s creative features like duets and voice over, people not only spread the counter-narrative messages but also creatively engage with others, in which interconnections between scattered individuals are forged within the community. The movement and community also quickly scale up in TikTok’s mimetic culture accordingly (Sadler, 2022).
The #StopAsianHate space for Asian/American women, however, is neither fixed nor permanent, and so is the pan-Asian community in the space. When social media hashtags serve as community spaces, public communication within the hashtag communities form an “ad hoc public”; people voluntarily organize and participate in the collective hashtag activities based on their interest, and temporarily gather for a certain goal (Bruns & Burgess, 2015). Here, we would like to expand on Bruns’ and Burgess’ conceptualization of social media hashtags as ad hoc publics and further argue that hashtagging activism is a space-making practice that helps people build “ad hoc communities.” The community-building of ad hoc publics through social media hashtags occurs on an ad hoc basis, in which a sense of community is virtual and temporary, felt through interactive participation of members whose membership is not clearly defined.
By watching, responding to, and posting comments to the TikTok videos and messages deposited to the #StopAsianHate hashtag, Asian/American TikTok users with different Asian backgrounds feel a sense of alikeness and connectivity, through which their membership is casually reminded and exercised. At the same time, the community is neither permanent nor fixed, as the sense of belongingness is temporal and only active through such interconnective features of TikTok. While counter-narratives of anti-Asian under the #StopAsianHate hashtag instantly reinforces the sense of identity and belonging, affect may not linger for a long time and instead vanish within a few minutes due to the seamless streaming of different videos suggested by the TikTok algorithms. Since people’s engagement with others in the hashtag space is not persistent but one-time only in many cases, the community may easily shrink and become inactive if people stop posting any more videos to the hashtag.
Furthermore, when the community is created and functions on an ad hoc basis in response to popular trends in the virtual space, the formation of counterpublics may be weakened. When a certain aesthetic style goes viral, repeatedly recreated, and consumed as a meme template of the counter-narrative message, the creation of similar contents may dilute the affective solidarity conveyed through the original message, but instead feed into the viral trends of “fun” (Sadler, 2022). The popularly trending #StopAsianHate can be used as a placeholder for virality for microcelebrities on TikTok (see Abidin, 2021), which may engender the decontextualization and depoliticization of long-standing Asian American politics. Indeed, we noticed some videos hashtagged under #StopAsianHate were not related to the anti-racism movement, but were random posts tagged to generate views and likes. These contents reveal that not everyone participates in the movement with the same commitment, intention, and emotional intensity.
Conclusion
As we were finalizing our study, we were furious, disheartened, and devastated to hear of the continued violence committed against Asian/American women in the United States. On 15 January 2022, Michelle Go, a 40-year-old Chinese American woman, was shoved onto the subway tracks by a stranger in NYC. Less than a month after, on 13 February 2022, Korean American Christina Yuna Lee was murdered by a stranger who followed her into her house. These crimes, which have specifically targeted women of East Asian descent, have not been labeled as racially motivated hate crimes (Reilly & Studley, 2022). However, crimes committed against Asian women cannot be separated from deeply entrenched racism in the United States, which regards Asian women’s bodies as submissive, weak, and easily disposable. How we talk about racism and racially motivated violence matters. In our study, Asian/American TikTok creators spoke with their lived experiences, bodies, and emotions to tell the world that anti-Asian hate crimes are not random occurrences but are reflective of systems designed in place to uphold White supremacy and subjugate the lives of Asian/Americans.
Through their anti-racist space-making practices on TikTok, Asian/American women create an ad hoc community for other Asian/American women, their followers, and users, to make sense of anti-Asian racism. In this community space, Asian/American women bolster each other’s raced-and-gendered experiences by drawing upon the communicative features of the platform that enable them to interact, network, and show support. Also significantly, they mobilize affect toward racial solidarity of differences, rather than a singular identity, as Asian/American women are attentive to the histories of how their differences have been constructed to be seen as monolithic. Yet, the ad hoc community, which is subjected to the flow of virality on TikTok, makes it difficult for Asian/American women to develop ongoing and meaningful interactions with others and making tangible outcomes from the hashtag movement.
While Asian/American women’s participation in the #StopAsianHate movement does not immediately translate into the subversion of deeply rooted racism in the United States and the broader global society, we argue that they propel us to resist racism and feel our way into their worlds. Our study has examined a segment of an ongoing process of Asian/American women’s space-making on TikTok. The anti-racism space led by Asian/American women continues to change course as we write, as Asian/American women challenge their lived experiences of racism by archiving and connecting their experiences to new racial discourse hashtags and new contents. Their space-making online may seem transient and volatile, especially as their practices are structured by TikTok’s logics that prize visibility, virality, attention, and entertainment, which may not always benefit the goals of activists and their ways of communicating about racism. However, here we would like to emphasize that their spatial practice carries immense symbolic power; Asian/American women enter and claim digital spaces by disrupting dominant race narratives and making visible their underrepresented perspectives, narratives, and lived experiences. Change can be slow and gradual, but it cannot be stopped as long as we continue to resist racist ways of seeing and living.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
