[Ads-l] Wasian

[Mark Mandel]

#Wasian Check: Remixing ‘Asian + White’ Multiraciality on TikTok
by Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain

https://www.mdpi.com/2313-5778/6/2/55

[ORCID]
Department of Sociology, Maynooth University, Maynooth, County Kildare,
Ireland
Genealogy 2022, 6(2), 55; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy6020055
Received: 21 December 2021 / Revised: 8 April 2022 / Accepted: 7 June 2022
/ Published: 15 June 2022
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Beyond the Frontiers of
Mixedness: New Approaches to Intermarriage, Multiethnicity, and
Multiracialism)

Abstract
TikTok is the fastest growing short video application and immensely popular
with younger generations to express their thoughts, ideas, and most
relevant to this issue, their identities including mixed-race identity.
This paper asks: How did young mixed-race people choose to express their
identity on TikTok in the #wasian trend and how does the app shape these
mixed-race identity expressions? The answer lies in how the emotional
affordances of TikTok app itself shape how it is used by creators in
mimicking and mimetic ways and how people respond, through video and text.
The article argues that the #wasian trends reinforce the racial and
genealogical legacy of mixedness, often through showing parents or blood
relatives, which is in creative tension with simultaneously remixing and
asserting racial multiplicity. The claim to wasianess moves the private
sphere (bedroom culture, family and notions of race) into the public and in
so doing creates new potentialities for the creation of a global #wasian
community on TikTok.

Keywords:
wasian; #wasian; mixed-race; Asian; TikTok; transconnective; digital media;
social media

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