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.

This article examines the representation of Ali Abdul, the Pakistani character in the global Netflix hit Squid Game. While Ali has been celebrated for increasing South Asian representation in Korean media, we contextualize his portrayal through the lens of Korean multiculturalism. In doing so, we consider how the representation of Ali reflects the conditional acceptance of migrant men established by state-led Korean multicultural policies and politics. Through a close reading of the conditions that humanize Ali as both worthy of sympathy and unequal to his Korean counterparts, we argue that Ali’s acceptance hinges upon his relation to Korean protagonists in ways that further a vision of ethnocentric nation-building through the racialization of dark-skinned masculinity.

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