Live streaming, one of the most popular forms of digital media in today’s Chinese society, has a user base of approximately 63% of all internet users in China. It affords intimate modes of interaction and connectivity between streamers and their viewers while also achieving hyper-commercialization through implementing different monetization mechanisms in a diverse range of steaming genres. This talk draws from my book project Scalable Intimacy: Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in Chinese Live Streaming, which explores how live streaming mediates narratives and experiences of gender, sexuality, class, and intimacy at scale in contemporary China, and proposes scalable intimacy as a conceptual tool for understanding social relations mediated by emerging technologies and shaped by the political economy of digital platforms. Exploring the emergence of intimate publics within live streaming, I survey four popular genres—showroom, counseling, talent show, and e-commerce—for a comparative analysis of the affective-material practices of commercialized intimacy and feminized work in each. I also contextualize live streaming’s prominence in China by examining the platformization of media entertainment and social life, the adaptive state-industry governance that problematizes the intimate aspects of streaming content, and the digital culture in which contested discourse of gender and sexuality can be found alongside class struggle and solidarity.
Jingyi Gu is an Assistant Professor in the Communication Program at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s School of Communication and Information. Through transnational and critical lenses, she studies issues of identity, relationship, governance, and resistance within global digital cultures and economies. As an interdisciplinary scholar, she combines ethnographical and discursive methods to understand the social and cultural aspects of emerging information and communication technologies, such as platforms, algorithms, and data.
Le LIN, Associate Professor, Sociology, UHM
Yiting Wang, Ph.D. Candidate in Communication and Information Sciences, UHM
