Digital Body Production of Underprivileged Females in Contemporary China: A Visual Ethnography on Kuaishou App

With the accelerating digitization of Chinese society, an astounding growing number of rural women have been dragged into a social experiment of digital survival in cyberspace. Kuaishou is one of the most important platforms in this context, as it is not only China's most widely used short video mobile social App but also has a predominantly small-town and rural-based user community. According to the latest statistics, Kuaishou has around 150 million female users, who spend on average 99.3 minutes per day on the platform. The sexualized and emotionalized body is the most important production resource underclass women possess. To cope with growing survival risks, many women have turned to producing videos of themselves and broadcasting live-streaming shows, through which they can earn an income from viewer likes and comments. These visual materials posted online can be divided into two categories. The first type is short videos that last for one to three minutes. The video clips typically come with specific hashtags such as #farming, #swing dancing, #crossdressing, #rural wives telling the truth, etc. The second type is live-streaming shows in separate chat rooms. These videos create a visual discourse of gendered digital bodies through special effects technologies such as video filters. Softcore pornography (ca bian qiu) is another major form of video content created by young female users, which is being consumed by millions of audiences, including the underage. The situation gets even more intricate when their digital bodies become targeted by the cyber police. Due to the extreme scarcity of survival resources for these women living in rural and peripheral China, digital body production has become a cheap, convenient, and almost destined way of labour and inevitably incites exploitation.

Will digital body production evolve into digital corvee? Is it true that grassroots women are forced into severe digital oppression and alienation rather than freed by digitalization? What a heavy price they have paid, or rather say, are still paying for? In the complex context of post-socialist China, the existing social science studies, media studies, and gender studies seem to have failed to rationalize the above-listed questions.

Building on studies of the gendered and racialized regimes and narratives of Chinese factory labour, my project combines a media and gender studies perspective with visual anthropologic methodologies to study women's labour in Kuaishou. This project seeks to move beyond the general understanding of digital female labour as "empowerment" to shed light on the contradictory role digital platforms play within the lives of rural women in China, and how old and new forms of gendered labour are (re-)emerging within the global digital economy.

This study positions female users as active agents in digital labour practices in daily media production. It thereby seeks to understand how digital technologies are reshaping our understandings of notions such as bodily sovereignty, gender, labour and digital capitalism.