#FeministAntibodies: Asian American Media in the Time of Coronavirus

Abstract

This article examines the tensions, communal processes, and narrative frameworks behind producing collective racial politics across differences. As digital media objects, the Asian American Feminist Collective’s zine Asian American Feminist Antibodies: Care in the Time of Coronavirus and corresponding #FeministAntibodies Tweetchat responds directly to and anticipates a social media and information environment that has racialized COVID-19 in the language of Asian-ness. Writing from an autoethnographical perspective and using collaborative methods of qualitative discourse analysis as feminist scholars, media-makers, and interlocuters, this article looks toward the technological infrastructures, social economies, and material forms of Asian American digital media-making in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

#StopAsianHate on TikTok: Asian/American Women’s Space-Making for Spearheading Counter-Narratives and Forming an Ad Hoc Asian Community

“…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.…”

“…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.…”

Migrant Racialization on Twitter during a border and a pandemic crisis

“…For example, UK media acknowledged the role of migrant and non-migrant Muslims in the National Health Service, while still speculating that many would not comply with social distancing due to their culture, which was a ‘neo-orientalist’, Islamophobic framework ( Poole and Williamson, 2021 ). As argued, ‘The mediatization of Asian-ness’ as contagion has been a large part of the information environment surrounding the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic ( Kuo et al, 2020 ). But this, at least in the US, was challenged in social media via antiracist and anticapitalist feminist positions (Ibid.).…”

Responses to health risk and suffering: ‘China’ in the Italian media discourses during the early stage of the Covid-19 pandemic

“…In addition, Wahl-Jorgensen (2020) points out that the British media used the sensational term ‘killer virus’ to amplify risk. The studies on media discourses around Covid-19 mostly focus on the social media networks (including Weibo, Baidu, and Twitter) within China and among the Chinese diaspora (Carvajal-Miranda et al, 2020; Kuo et al, 2020; Zhang and Zhao, 2020). We study news coverage because it continues to play a fundamental role in constructing wider cultural understanding of health and disease (Briggs and Hallin, 2016).…”