LAUSR

ABSTRACT This paper examines the TikToks of mixed race Japanese Australian content producer Jiyayjt. Jiyayjt provides insights into growing up as a mixed race boy in Australian and Japanese society, and in an interracial family. His interest in Japanese and broadly Asian popular culture appears a significant part of his diasporic subjectivity, and he offers interesting racial commentary on the figure of the ‘weeb’ as a counterpoint to mixed race Asian identity. This essay argues that Jiyayjt’s masculine performance is shaped by increasingly influential Asian popular cultural representations of soft masculinities, sometimes called softboys, flowerboys, bishonen (beautiful boys), with links to the manga genre of Boys Love. TikTok, like other new media platforms, has been described as a heterotopic space where the values and norms of multiple global contexts flow into individuals’ screens. Transnational conceptions of boyhood or boyishness within contemporary masculinities are evident in TikTok fandoms engaged in Asian popular culture, such as Jiyayjt’s. This article argues that the increasingly powerful influence of Asian popular culture and values offers new possibilities in the construction of mixed race Asian Australian masculinities. These possibilities include the reimagining of masculinities through feminist questioning of hegemonic gendered norms.