UC Davis

#ABG, Asian Baby Girl (ABG): The Making and Memeification of an Asian American Youth Subculture an Asian Female Hypersexual Aesthetic historicizes the Asian Baby Girl (ABG) as both a place-based Asian American youth subculture and racialized social media aesthetic from the 1990s to 2025. Over the course of three decades, the shifting definition of the ABG reflects the desires of post 1965/1975 second generation East and South Asian American young adults to achieve a subcultural “cool” based on a youth-created definition of the (Asian) American Dream. Initially understood as the antithesis of the model minority due to the “original ABG” emerging out of Asian gang culture, the “contemporary ABG” now mirrors attributes of the model minority. However, it continues to resist assimilation into hegemonic whiteness through racialized aesthetics and hypervisible panethnic Asian American community formation. I argue that the ABG, a youth-created Asian American subculture turned stereotype, is more than a humorous meme. As a dominant stereotype within the Asian American community, it shapes the subject formation of Gen Z and Millennial Asian American young adults as they negotiate their race, gender, sexuality, and politics, most saliently within the college context. Drawing on 36 in-depth interviews and 106 survey responses with Asian American young adults and social media analysis, I demonstrate how the ABG’s continuous virality reveals Asian American young adults’ ongoing attachment to an Asian American identity defined through neoliberal multiculturalism, the model minority, and racial stereotypes. #ABG, Asian Baby Girl contributes to Asian American Studies, gender and sexuality studies, and media studies by demonstrating how the identities of youth of color are shaped through digital content creation, consumption, and participation within racialized subcultures, as boundaries between their embodied and social-mediated lives blur.