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When investigating the structures that support Asian American media, previous scholars have centered the role of Asian American media arts organizations and their yearly film festivals. Longstanding institutions such as Visual Communications, the Center for Asian American Media, and Asian CineVision have played an important role in shaping the rise of Asian American cinema through providing exhibition opportunities, funding, education, preservation, and advocacy. At a broader level, they have also created and maintained connections between Asian American media organizations and communities, facilitating the flow of Asian American media texts, resources, and communication within maker communities and outward to wider participants. But it has been less clear how these organizations and their events now fit into a broader Asian American media system. In analyzing participants such as filmmakers, media professionals, staff, and media audiences, but also components such as funding programs, distribution systems, and digital platforms, research has charted the evolution of these networks over time.

Amidst the outpouring of conversation surrounding the popular romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians (2018), a common response by Asian American audience members centered on the experience of crying at ...

One way of orienting a genealogy of Asian American feminist media studies is through the dialectic of pain and pleasure that has come to dominate the way we understand images of Asian American sexuality. We can begin with Renee Tajima's 1989 article “Lotus Blossoms Don't Bleed: Images of Asian Women,” in which she describes how the mainstream media has caused Asian American women pain through its consistent portrayals of hypersexualized stereotypes, including lotus blossom babies, geishas, prostitutes, picture brides, mama-sans, concubines, China dolls, and dragon ladies.1 These simplistic figures are reduced to the availability of their sexual bodies and often serve as expendable mates for white male leads. Gina Marchetti notes that such representations have allowed white audiences to flirt with the titillating taboo of interracial sexual mixing without actually disrupting Western dominance.2 These various injustices are of course matched only by the general dearth of Asian women in film and television, and the pain of symbolic annihilation. While the preponderance of these representational harms within the mediated sphere has been one site of historical pain for Asian American women, another persistent site of exclusion and misunderstanding has been within the feminist movement itself. During its rise in the 1960s, many politicized and radicalized Asian American women started to come together within their own …

This article examines the emerging media institution of Hmong teleconference radio, a global form of mobile communication that is largely operated and accessed by Hmong American women. Interviews with Hmong Americans about this participatory form of mass media reveal the ways in which it is opening new pathways for diasporic communication, but also the ways that it is criticized and delegitimized. It argues that Hmong teleconference radio offers a rich case study for analyzing mobile phone cultures in a digital era, ultimately showing how women's labor and entrepreneurship within the mobile media realm can be minimized or altogether obscured through gendered hierarchies of value.

In lieu of a one-time and in-person roundtable conversation, the following discussion took place between October 10 and December 15, 2017. We asked scholars from a variety of media studies traditions to contribute to a text document that was being updated on Google Drive. The shared document afforded each scholar the opportunity to contribute to the conversation at his or her own convenience, thereby enabling the discussion to develop organically during the ten-week period. The online format was thus our own attempt to experiment with the concept of media dialogues. Our eight panelists were Miranda Banks (Emerson College), Cynthia Baron (Bowling Green State University), James Buhler (University of Texas at Austin), Nina Cartier (Northwestern University), Liz Greene (Liverpool John Moores University), Lori Lopez (University of Wisconsin–Madison), Miguel Mera (City, University of London), and Jacob Smith (Northwestern University). We encouraged each panelist to share links to websites and videos, and we have added images from these links in order to preserve the interactive experience of the original conversation.

People have been forming communities using digital communication technologies since long before the web as we know it today. Social media are only the latest in a long series of digital forums that have enabled global conversations and connections around nearly any topic imaginable. With its emphasis on public accessibility and real-time content production, Twitter has become a major hub for communities of all types and sizes. The issues and voices of people of color and women have attracted much attention from professional journalists over the past few years. Yet many such individuals have criticized journalists’ portrayals and coverage of issues that are important to them. In response, some participants have assumed the role of news creators and distributors, focusing on their communities’ particular concerns. Understanding these emerging social subcultures will allow more accurate portrayals of diverse communities and yield insights for better journalistic engagement in the digital age.

This research examines the use of Participatory Action Research (PAR) methods in conducting a media messaging campaign designed to increase the visibility of queer people of color in a local community. Rather than focusing on the impact of viewing the campaign on the local community, this project assesses the way that participating in creating a campaign can positively impact a grassroots social justice organization. Here we see that the process of creating and managing an image campaign can serve as an opportunity for education and capacity-building for organizations that is distinct from the impact of the media campaign on its target audience. This includes achievements such as expanding the capacity of the organization to engage in strategic media work now and in the future, developing the ability for members of the organization to clearly articulate the goals of the media campaign and engage in productive conversations about the campaign within the community, and strengthening community buy-in for the...

This chapter explores the history of race and feminism within digital media studies, moving from the recognition that race was often a blind spot in early cyberfeminism to discussions of the complex ways in which theories of intersectionality have been contested and debated. The realm of digital media is an important site for theorizing the way that intersectional identities are made visible, but also where new strategic alliances must adapt to the affordances of the digital network. It points to new directions for future research in this area, including building from rhetorical studies of feminist coalitions and considering the specificities of digital platforms so that we can more accurately assess contemporary forms of anti-racist and feminist activism that are happening online.

The Asian American blogosphere has developed to encompass a variety of voices regularly providing readers with news items, opinions, and personal narratives of life in Asian America. In this article I investigate the relationship between emotion and activism in order to better understand the potential for using blogs as part of a sustainable social movement, as well as to theorize the kind of labor that activism can entail. This study is based on interviews with 15 bloggers who have created or written for blogs that focus specifically on Asian American issues. Through an analysis of the bloggers’ interviews and their blogging archive, I argue that emotion can play a foundational role in generating activist interventions and building the necessary community required for contributing to social change, but can also have a deleterious impact on the individuals involved. It is only through recognizing the ambivalent role of emotion within the affective labor of activism online that we can work toward more sustainable participation and impact.

When the producers of the film The Last Airbender announced their casting decisions, a large collective of fans became irate – they argued that the original cartoon was set in an Asian world, so all four lead roles should go to Asian American actors. Instead, producers cast three white actors as the heroes, and an actor of South Asian descent as the villain. This article investigates the fan-activists who organized to protest the casting and utilized the skills they developed as fans to participate in larger conversations about politics and race. Within their demand for changes in the representation of Asian Americans in entertainment media, these politicized fans offer new ways of considering the potential impacts of ‘racebending’ and the politics of minority representation.

This article analyzes the highly politicized Asian American newspaper Gidra as a way of expanding our conception of ethnic media beyond mainstream publications to include radical ethnic media. In contrast to the notion that ethnic communities might shy from exposing the internal conflicts that jeopardize their own community’s stability, Gidra demonstrates three different kinds of conflict: external conflict, internal conflict, and conflict that is produced by the paper itself. Through this exploration, the different ways that Asian American identities were created and discussed during the late 1960s and early 1970s are also assessed, as the radical contingent of the Asian American Movement used print publications to redefine what it meant to be Asian in America.

Multiracial individuals are often uncritically venerated as a beacon of post-racial progress, as if their mere existence serves to mark the end of racial anxieties. LeiLani Nishime's book Undercove...