Scalable intimacy: gender, sexuality, and labor in Chinese live/life streaming

This dissertation is a multi-dimensional account of the formation of intimate relationships within Chinese live/life streaming, using a combination of research methodologies including digital ethnography, interview, and discourse analysis. This approach is set to address the multifaceted phenomenon of live/life streaming in contemporary Chinese society, as it rises to be one of the most popular forms of digital media and a lucrative culture industry in the past ten years. It becomes an increasingly important social venue where personal relationships are formed at scale, but also reveals a particular gender imbalance in its ecosystem. At the same time, this type of interactive and commodified steaming content is deemed problematic under the regulation of the Chinese party-state, because of its sexual implications. This research draws on the narratives and practices of live/life streaming to understand examine how it becomes a form of cultural and economic production in which gender and sexuality become central to digitally-mediated and commercially-conditioned communications, and what live streaming’s prevalence in contemporary China informs us about its politics of technology, labor, gender, and sexuality. Throughout the dissertation, I analyze the interaction between live/life streaming participants, the technological design and the mode of production of the platforms, and the mediation between the market economy and state regulation. I illustrate the power relations within live/life streaming at both micro and macro levels and show how these power relations collectively gave emergence to a form of mediated intimacy. I also contextualize the prominence of live/life streaming as a case of the globally significant platform economies and an exemplification of the intersection of technology and culture in modern China. With this interdisciplinary inquiry, this dissertation proposes scalable intimacy as a conceptual tool for understanding personal relationships that are mediated by emerging technologies and shaped by the political economy of digital platforms. Building upon critical frameworks that respectively problematize “intimacy” and “scale,” I consider them contradictory properties of the social interactions mediated by digital platforms such as live streaming. Moving beyond a technological-determinism approach, I interrogate the idealization of scalability in technological developments, in the capitalist mode of production, and in state-initiated modernization projects. For intimacy, I consider both its privateness and publicness, as a type of personal relationship, a social institution through which gender, sexuality, and everyday life are governed, as well as a commodity that has market value and is produced with labor, especially within the digitally networked societies dominated by neoliberal culture and late-capitalist production. Drawing from the examination of live/life streaming, the theorization of scalable intimacy bridges the affective and the material, the everyday and the institutional dimensions of digitally-mediated and commercially-conditioned personal relationships.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Communications and Media

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2023

Author dc:creator

• Gu, Jingyi

Contributors dc:contributor

• Hay, James
• Chan, Anita
• Valdivia, Angharad
• Martin, Jeffrey

• Live Streaming
• Intimacy
• Digital Platform
• Gender And Sexuality

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2023 Jingyi Gu

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/121271

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F121271