#StopAsianHate on TikTok: Asian/American Women’s Space-Making for Spearhead
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.
Data
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.
Method
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).
主題：身體暴力、亞洲戀物癖、種族微攻擊
消息特徵：例如，內容的流派、受眾目標和基調
Questions
(1) 亞裔/美國女性通過#StopAsianHate 話題標籤談論什麼？
(2) 他們如何利用TikTok的各種特點來發展和分享他們的故事？
(3) 最後，他們如何與其他亞裔/美國 TikTokers 團結一致，挑戰反亞裔種族主義？