Abstract
Design students Esther Fan and Olivia Park created the Sad Asian Girls Club (SAGC) as an online community platform for artistic self-expression with a political mission. This chapter considers how the SAGC used multiple digital platforms (a Tumblr blog, a Twitter account, a YouTube channel, an Instagram account, and a print magazine) to mobilise collective and collaborative life narrative that aims to intervene in pervasive stereotypes of Asian girls and women. I consider the SAGC blog’s engagement with the cultural politics of speech, language, and silence through activist practices of “speaking back” through art and media.
This chapter considers how Fan and Park facilitated community-driven automedial practices and used online networks to coax, create, assemble, and deploy a collective, cross-platform genre of collaborative automedia.
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Notes
- 1.
The collective began as Sad Asian Girls Club (SAGC), but later changed its name to Sad Asian Girls (SAG) in late 2016. In this chapter I predominantly use SAG unless referring to a resource created before the name change that specifically uses SAGC, but both SAGC and SAG refer to the same collective.
- 2.
I also refer to this title via the shortened form of Now More Than Ever.
- 3.
In fact, some studies (such as Ghobadi 2015) indicate that the problem with online activism is that it “help[s] organize collective actions and amplif[ies] the conditions for revolutionary movements to form” (2015, 52) stating the problem, instead, that this large-scale dissent provokes a reaction of censorship from elites and increases a digital divide. Other studies (Milošević-Dordević and Žeželj 2017) showed that in fact online and offline activism appeared to go hand in hand.
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Maguire, E. (2018). Sad Asian Girls and Collaborative Auto Assemblage: Mobilising Cross-Platform Collective Life Narratives. In: Girls, Autobiography, Media. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74237-3_6
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