This thesis centers on Hmong women and Hmong feminist epistemologies in addressing violence in Hmong communities. Many studies seek to understand violence in the Hmong community in order to address it. Culturally competent state care has been heavily pushed, only to continue falling short of fully meeting the needs of Hmong women. Instead of investigating violence in the Hmong community to create culturally competent care, this thesis studies the Hmong Story YouTube channel, the care work of the channel’s host, May Vang, and neej neeg storytelling to consider what we can learn from how Hmong women are organizing for care and addressing violence in their communities.

This mixed-methods thesis project investigates the politics of race and gender in the Virtual Youtuber (VTuber) community. Through semi-structured interviews with a VTuber named Haewon, visual analysis of VTuber models, and critical analysis of social media posts on Twitter, VODs on Youtube, and online web articles on VTubers, I argue that the racialization and commodification of racial identities present in the general VTubing community is obscured by notions of play and fantasy, which has racial and gendered implications on the ways that VTubers navigate digital platforms and labor online. Haewon the Heartstring is a Korean American female-identifying independent VTuber who produces content related to autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) and roleplaying, occasionally as part of the girlfriend experience (GFE), with some ties to lewd VTubing. A comparative analysis of Haewon’s experiences with other female-identifying VTubers who have produced ASMR, GFE, and lewd content sheds light on how this niche of Vtubers engage in digital and intimate labor to produce emotional intimacy and affective ties with their viewers beyond physical space, leading to new community formations online. Digital platforms online also provide them with autonomy to determine the way that they labor online and create safety in ways not present through other forms of intimate labor. This thesis project emphasizes VTubing as an online phenomenon that cannot be separated from the material conditions that impact our daily lives and calls for critical attention to their supposed absence.