According to Rachel Rubin’s article, “Cyberspace Y2K: Giant Robots, Asian Punks”, Rubin wrote about how Asian Americans broke “the Asian American image”, such as “submissive woman or de-sexed man”(pg 11), by using “zines”. Asian Americans young people, in particular women, had found in zines to be great for self-expression and self-definition.(pg 1)
“Asian American identity is a deliberate and motivated thing: experiential rather than biological, grounded in the present as much as or more than in the past” (pg 5). According to Iijima, Asian American cyberzine writers, whose families were immigrants, they could use the invention of the Internet as a opportunity to make people aware of their culture and history. “Zine production, with its anti-professional stance and its edgy aesthetic, would snowball at precisely this cultural moment.”(pg 14) The Asian American image would be changed by the following mainstream media such as Jackie Chan Films, Pokemon, and Hello Kitty and print and cyberzines.(pg 14)
Cyberzines are electronic zines that are more efficient than normal zines. Normal zines are photo-copied and hand distributed, which takes more time to publish than cyberzine. Normal zines are hand-published, so they are limited by the number of physical copies. However, cyberzines’s “potential audience is practically limitless.”(pg 12) This makes the Internet a efficient and economic way to break stereotypes.
Internet is the efficient way to distribute cyberzines. People send both satirical and serious messages through social media platforms such a YouTube and Instagram to change cultural images. For example, the YouTuber David So uses his popular YouTube channel to create a strong Asian American image.