3. Masking Pain, Unmasking Race: Sexual Harassment, Shaming, and the Sharing Economy of Emotions

Abstract

This chapter examines Mia Matsumiya’s Instagram account, called perv_magnet, which aims to raise awareness of online sexual harassment against Asian American women. It illustrates three modes of neoliberal self(ie) production in her social media campaign. First, it introduces a concept, “the sharing economy of emotions,” to point out how the neoliberal economy not only provides technology for people to share access to their cars (via Uber or Lyft) or their living spaces (via Airbnb), but also to their emotions, such as the feeling of pain related to online sexual harassment. Second, it demonstrates how racial oscillation operates in Matsumiya’s phantasmagoria by evoking the trope of masking. It shows how Matsumiya redeploys kawaii aesthetics to mask and unmask race during her social media interactions as a witty way to strike back at harassers and project her bold and bodacious neoliberal self(ie). Lastly, it reveals how Matsumiya uses sarcasm as a strategy of resistance to mask her emotion/pain and thereby preserve the impenetrability not only of her Japanese American feminist agency, but also her neoliberal self(ie) on social media.