Producing Dialogical Intimacy: An Investigation of Emotional Labour, Gender, and Live-Streaming Platforms

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FACULTY OF HUMANITIES

Media Studies

MA THESIS

Producing Dialogical Intimacy: An

Investigation of Emotional Labour, Gender, and

Live-Streaming Platforms

Zhen Ye

Media Studies (Research), University of Amsterdam 22nd_{June 2020}

Supervisor: prof. Thomas Poell Second Reader: prof. Misha Kavka

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Abstract

The hype of live-streaming in China starts from video-gaming related content and has gradually extents into a lucrative sector of entertainment. What one can find in the live-streaming entertainment landscape, is not only singing and dance performances, but also everyday life activities such as cooking and talking. The predominate content producers on the platforms are young female streamers, while the viewers are mostly men. This thesis aims to engage female streamers’ their emotional labour (Hochschild, [1983] 2003), into the investigation of China’s live-streaming industry, in particular, focused on three platforms: Douyin, Momo, and Bilibili. The data of this thesis comes from in-depth interviews with 8 female streamers, and 1 talent manager from a streamer guild to gain insights on the process of cultural production on live streaming platforms. Meanwhile, I have been followed a digital ethnographic approach, which means that I have done online observation on 20 female streamer accounts. I argue that China’s live streaming business model is male‐centered heteronormative and implicitly sexualised, instrumentalizing the affective interpersonal relationship between the streamers and the viewers. Platforms provide a virtual environment as hostess clubs, shaping female streamers’ performances with the interfaces and affordances, while the streamer guilds function like madams of the hostess club, aiming to standardize the bodily and emotional performances of female streamers under male gaze (Mulvey 1975). As a result, female streamers have to devote emotional effort to maintain intensive interaction and on-going communication with their viewers. Yet, the blurring boundaries between performativity and authenticity have led them to a position where they have to deal with surplus emotions, which cannot be monetised or at odds with the affective environment in the chat-rooms. Accordingly, they are subjugated as self-responsible entrepreneurs, who have to negotiate their own subjectivities at the nexus of sexuality, intimacy, and authenticity.

Key words:

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Content

1. Introduction 1

2. Mapping Labour and Gender in China’s Live-streaming Industry 8 A Face of Social Media Entertainment: Live-streaming in China 8

The Precariousness of Live-streaming Labour 12

Situating Live-streaming Labour in the Framework of Digital Labour 16

Re-considering Gender in Digital Labour 19

Live-streamers as Wanghong 25

3. Methodology 29

4. Affective Interactions Makes Live-streaming: Exploring the Socio-technological

Conditions 36

Live-streaming Chat-rooms: Gendered Interface Design 38 Professionalised Live-streaming: Working in Virtual Hostess Clubs 55 5. Surplus Emotions: The Strategies and Risks in Maintaining Dialogical Intimacy 64 Interpersonal Relationship with the Viewers: Dialogical Intimacy 66

Being Authentic and Losing Emotional Control 72

“I Am Not a Wanghong”: What Cost to Pay to Be a Top Streamer? 78

Alternative Understandings of Live-streaming 83

6. Conclusion 88

Bibliography 91

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1. Introduction

On the website of the documentary film People’s Republic of Desire, which explores the people behind China’s craze for live-streaming, it is asked: What will you find if you pin all your hopes online? Hao Wu, the director of the film, paints a dystopian picture of Chinas’ live-streaming industry, featuring ‘its performers’ desire for fame and fortune, and its viewers’ need to assuage feelings of loneliness’ (Walsh, 2019). The film states ‘with a computer, a webcam, a pair of earphones and a mic, you can live stream at home’. Subsequently, we see a scene where a young girl enters her tiny studio room offered by the agents, sitting down in front of her laptop and getting ready to sing, dance or chat with her viewers behind the screen. This is the work of the live-streamer.

In China today, thousands of women are trying to make a career out of seemingly simple live-streaming performances to gain fame and fans in the digital world. At the same time, mainstream media and commercial websites have started to notice their existence and cover their jobs as a novel yet inexplicable phenomenon. News headlines claim: ‘Chinese women are creating a billion-dollar live-streaming industry based on singing and slurping soup’ (Weller, 2017); ‘The “online goddess” who earns $450k a year’ (Zuo, 2018); ‘China’s love of live-streaming made this ex-journalist a billionaire’ (Feng, 2018). While these news titles portray a picture of these young women easily earning a huge amount of money through their live-streaming practices, what has been kept out of the spotlight is the precariousness of the

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live-- 2 live--

streaming careers of the majority women, which is the central topic of this research.

In recent years, we can observe a live-streaming hype, which started in video-gaming related content and gradually extends into the lucrative entertainment sector. What one can find in the live-streaming entertainment landscape is not only traditional media content, singing and dance performances, but also everyday life activities such as cooking and talking. No less than 100 live-streaming platforms have emerged across China.

While the live-streaming industry in China has grown explosively and has become a lucrative sector of entertainment, it also ‘[offers] opportunities for lower educated, more marginalised people to participate as producers in the Chinese creative economies’ (Lin & de Kloet, 2019, p. 2). In 2018, Momo, a live-streaming platform, published a report which reveals that over 78.8% of the live-streaming content producers, or say live-streamers, are women. It is also reported that the majority of these female streamers are born after 1990, coming from lower-tiers cities 1 seeking economic rewards. The wide diffusion of affordable mobile devices, along with the booming live streaming platforms, have offered them hopes to achieve upward socio-economic mobility. Instead of working in beauty salons or as domestic workers that were migrant women’s choices decades ago, these young women are more likely to choose to enter the live-streaming industry.

As live-streaming constitutes the socio-economic lifeworld of an increasing number of young women, it is vital to situate female streamers’

1_{The Chinese city tier system is a hierarchical categorisation of Chinese cities, based on the}

income level, population size, infrastructure, business opportunities and other factors in the cities. First-tier cities include Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen; while the lower-tier cities normally refer to third-tier cities like Shantou, Weifang, Taizhou and so on.

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labour practices within the complex socio-technological conditions of the Chinese live-streaming industry. Their working experiences reveal a gendered power relation, which is embedded in the technological and organizational levels of the industry and deeply influencing the social life of the streamers. This research aims to explore firstly how do live-streaming platforms (i.e. Momo, Douyin, Bilibili) set up an environment for female streamers to conduct bodily and emotional performances. To address this question, I will analyse the interfaces and affordances of the platforms. Secondly, how does the live-streaming industry modulate and complicate the streamer-viewer relation as well as have an impact on female streamer’s emotional labour? Lastly, by focusing on the lived experience of female streamers, this thesis is expected to bring insights into the ways in which female streamers negotiate their own subjectivities and produce value on the platforms.

The topic of digital labour have been addressed in academia with terms such as “hope labour” (Kuehn and Corrigan, 2013), “aspirational labour” (Duffy, 2016), and “relational labour” (Baym, 2015), or more generally, have been discussed under the framework of affective labour in digital culture production (e.g. Johnson and Woodcock, 2019). The topic will be discussed more thoroughly in next chapter as literature review. This thesis recognises the importance of engaging labourers’ voices and their lived experiences in the investigation of digital labour, it also aims to propose a holistic approach by incorporating the examination about the technological aspect and social dynamics, especially through the lens of gender, into the research. This thesis will explore live-streaming labour with the following dimensions.

Firstly, from a technological perspective, live-streamers’ performances are guided and shaped by the affordances and interfaces of the platforms,

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which enable them to conduct different strategies in real-time communication with their viewers. As Zou (2018, p. 817) suggested, ‘[w]ith built-in features of monetisation (e.g. red packets and virtual gifts) as well as means of commensuration and standardisation (e.g. ranking charts), live-streaming platforms set in motion a continuous cycle of value production’. Meanwhile, while top streamers (‘toubu zhubo’) are receiving an extreme amount of attention and viewings, the bottom streamers (‘dibu zhubo’), who constitutes 90% of the workforce, are nearly invisible on the platforms: LiWoer, a live-streamer working on the platform Momo, made it very clear in her streaming on 6th December that the number of viewers was ‘not real’: ‘You guys see from the screen that 10 people or so are in the chat-room, but in fact, maybe only 1 or 2 of them are the actual users. The rest are… the rest are all fake accounts.’ Some of these fake accounts are set up by their agencies, or in a Chinese term, ‘gonghui’ (guilds), but in some cases, these fake accounts could be assigned by the platforms for the purpose of ‘[making] the number look better’. The viewing numbers, the subscription numbers, the popularity ranking, the active streaming time, the virtual capital level...all these data together determine the visibility of one streamer on the platforms. Streamers attempt to figure out how the mysterious algorithms work based on their everyday life streaming practices, yet no one really understands.

Secondly, particularly important in this configuration are the streamer guilds, functioning as a third-party in the management of streamers. The guilds have an important role in the gradually institutionalised and professionalised live-streaming industry. They are normally working with platforms and brands for product endorsements and other advertising opportunities, as well as offering talent and technical training for streamers.

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For live-streamers, however, guilds are not like worker unions, which provide help and support to their works. The streamers who signed up with guilds usually face the pressure to meet monthly quotas of gifting, of which they only receive a small cut. There is no industry standard for the split of revenue between streamers and the guilds. This “grey zone” of negotiating split based on consent has put individual streamers at a contingent position. Their experience reveals and addresses various problems of the Chinese live-streaming industry, and these problems are urgently needed to be included in the discussion and debates on industrial regulation.

Lastly, in terms of social recognition, the work of live-streamers is facing misunderstandings or even stigmatization, from mainstream media’s reports to people around streamers — family members or partners who disregard live-streaming as a career path. In regards to physical and mental health issues, it is not rare to notice that streamers are suffering from irregular working hours, sometimes from the evening until early morning. During the streaming time, or even off the streaming, they constantly adjust themselves to be connected and responsive to their audience, mostly men, in order to maintain the viewership and subscription numbers. On the one hand, their emotional investment helps them to create and maintain an affective and authentic relationship with the viewers and fulfil their self-actualisation to some degree. On the other hand, female streamers often found themselves dealing with male viewers’ flirting messages or sexual harassment. Moreover, the experience of working as a live-streamer, which is a novel and unique career path, deeply connects to career uncertainty and anxieties towards one’s future. Interviewed by South China Morning Post, a 26-year-old female streamer, Fanfan, said that ‘age, face and figure are the top three key factors

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for the success of a female broadcaster [...] No matter how hard you try, you can only make a living by live-streaming for five years at tops’ (Meng, 2017) Behind the screen, where a glamorous way of living is demonstrated, hides the frustration of these young female streamers.

Live-streaming, as an emergent form of work in the realm of digital cultural production, is posing various challenges and pressures to the streamers. Confronted with the complexities of this industry, young streamers have to negotiate their own subjectivities with their encounters of different actors such as the platforms, the guilds, and their viewers. In the following chapters, I will firstly start with a review of the relevant literature, which reflects the state of live-streaming as a form of social media entertainment in China. In addition, the literature review discusses the relationship between gender and labour activities in digital economics, particularly relating to the studies of immaterial labour and emotional labour (Chapter 2). The methods used in the study, namely digital ethnography and in-depth interviews, will then be described in Chapter 3, after which the findings are presented and discussed. Chapter 4 (Affective Interactions Make Live-streaming) analyses how interfaces and affordances of different live-streaming platforms (i.e. Momo, Douyin, Bilibili) are designed to modulate, circulate, and commodify the affective interactions between female streamers and their viewers. Building upon this, the chapter explains the role of the streamer guilds in the gendered live-streaming business model, in terms of standardising the bodily and emotional performances of female streamers. Chapter 5 (Surplus Emotions: The Strategies and Risks in Maintaining Dialogical Intimacy) provides detailed observation and investigation on how female streamers make sense of and negotiate their subjectivities while conducting the

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emotional labour in their work in the gendered live-streaming industry. Finally, the final chapter outlines the main conclusions and identifies a recommendation of an approach for further research on digital labour.

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2. Mapping Labour and Gender in China’s

Live-streaming Industry

This chapter will discuss relevant literature that will help to understand the central topic investigated in the thesis: streamers, in particular, female streamers’ labour conditions. This chapter starts with a brief overview of the previous work on Chinese live-streaming platforms, drawing from the filed of platform studies. Then the literature review moves on to the discussion of digital labour, situating live-streaming labour in the framework. Lastly, it expands the theoretical framework of digital labour by bringing in the discussion of gender and formulating my research inquiries.

A Face of Social Media Entertainment: Live-streaming in China

Live-streaming, as a nascent form of social networking and entertainment in China, brings about a distinctive model of cultural production at the nexus of platforms, technology, and the socio-economic structure (X. Zhang, Xiang, & Hao, 2019). Even though it is argued that the development of the online video streaming platforms in China ‘is emergent, volatile and heavily influenced by various global actors’ like YouTube and Twitch (G. Zhang & Hjorth, 2019, p. 808), scholars also recognize that ‘live-streaming takes off in different societies with locally distinct manifestation’ (Zou, 2018, p. 807). Live-streaming industry in the Chinese context is seen as a highly commercialised social media sector that has been incubated and popularized in China through

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the interplay of technology, finance, retail, and entertainment (Cunningham, Craig, & Lv, 2019; X. Zhang et al., 2019; Zou, 2018).

A similar integration of content production, technology, and commerce can be found on other social media platforms such as YouTube. These platforms become the infrastructure of what Craig and Cunningham (2019) termed ‘social media entertainment’ (SME), which they summarise as ‘the emerging industry of native online cultural producers together with the platforms, intermediaries, and fan communities operating interdependently, and disruptively, alongside legacy media industries and across global media cultures’ (Cunningham & Craig, 2019, p. 1). Their analysis points out that the commercial features and affordances introduced by the platforms provide entrepreneurial content creators access to cultivate diverse business models and means for generating revenue (Cunningham & Craig, 2019, p. 5).

As for understanding how platforms are shaping live-streaming in China, particularly helpful is the work by Zou (2018), who has explored the socio-technical aspects of the live-streaming platforms including the built-in features of monetisation as well as various means of commensuration and standardisation. Whilst Xiaoxing Zhang et al. (2019) focus on the virtual gifting feature, through which the viewers use the in-app currency to purchase the virtual gifts on the platforms and donate them to the streamers, to unveil that the design of live-streaming platform’s infrastructure and algorithms nudges content monetization. They have provided useful insights for understanding the affordances and structures of the live-streaming platforms, which enables the content production of live-streaming to become a form of profit-driven practice in the realm of digital economies. The influence that

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live-streaming platforms has on the process of content production can be revealed by observing streamers’ practices.

Recent research addresses another peculiarity of China’s live-streaming industry — it has fostered the formation of corporatised streamer guilds, known as ‘gonghui’ in Chinese, which plays a big part in the diversified business models. The streamer guilds are similar to talent agencies: in one sense, they provide training to amateur users as well as the recruited full-time streamers to create professionalised and institutionalised streaming activities; in another sense, the guilds also normally work with platforms or brands for product endorsements and other advertising opportunities (X. Zhang et al., 2019; Wang, 2019; Cunningham, Craig, & Lv 2019). Regarding the functions and impact of the guilds in the live-streaming practices, Zhang et al. (2019, pp. 8–10) point out that streamer guilds foreground the profit-making capacity of virtual gifting at the expense of its potential for building communitarian and reciprocal streamer-audience relationships. By signing an exclusive contract with the guilds, ‘what was previously informal performative labour’ is transformed into economically recognized and corporately organized cultural production (Wang, 2019, p. 15). In sum, through the streamer guilds’ intervention, the content production on live-streaming the platforms are transformed into professionalised and standardised practices.

As is discussed above, various stakeholders including the streamer guilds and advertising companies in the industry organize and operate their practices based on the technical support and services provided by live-streaming platforms. This exemplifies what Nieborg and Poell (2018) termed ‘platformization’, a process of platforms transforming the market structure and curating content as well as transforming cultural producers into platform

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complementors. Producers of the cultural commodities are incentivized to adapt to ‘an iterative, data-driven process in which content is constantly altered to optimize for platform distribution and monetization’ (Nieborg & Poell, 2018, p. 4281).

Indeed, live-streaming practices are hugely shaped by the platforms. The current research conducted on the short video streaming and live-streaming platform Kuaishou demonstrates how platformization is affecting the operations of content production: data-based digital platform like Kuaishou has a high degree of connectivity that bring together various actors, including content producers, end-user and advertisers, while these actors are all incorporated under the Kuaishou-dominated network system (Lin & de Kloet, 2019, p. 2). Hence, the production and circulation of short-video or live-streaming content are highly platform-dependent and content producers normally have to develop different strategies to enhance the content visibility on the platforms and to monetise the content according to the principles of datafication.

The framework of platformization provides indications in how to draw a full picture of cultural production, which is centered around and hugely shaped by platforms. However, it is pointed out that ‘although a platform’s architecture affords a particular usage and users are often met with a finite set of possible options, they are not “puppet” of the techno-commercial dynamics inscribed in a platform’ (van Dijck, Poell, & Waal, 2018, p. 11, original emphasised). It is necessary to follow-up and ask the question of how content producers—live-streamers—actually use and make sense of the process of cultural. This question has not been fairly answered in the aforementioned research, which critically examine how the affordances and structures of the

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live-streaming platforms are designed to maximize content monetisation while simplify the live-streamers’ behaviours as merely profit-driven. Insofar as the research on Kuaishou included the individuals into the discussion of the relation between cultural production and platformization, the investigation is predominantly according to a walking-through method, which fails to understand the subjectivities of the labourers. The thesis aims to develop a holistic approach to investigate live-streaming labour in the process of platformized cultural production in order to fill the gap.

The Precariousness of Live-streaming Labour

The complex interplay of industrial, social, technological and economic vectors of China’s live-streaming industry reflected in the aforementioned research naturally brings the attention to the labourers. Live-streamers, who have become the central focal points in the process of platformization (Cunningham, Craig, & Lv, 2019), and their labour conditions are the main focus of this research. According to Cunningham, Craig & Lv (2019, p. 724), one of the major differences between the legacy media and SME lie in the agency and identity of content creators and their labour conditions. It is pointed out in various research that live-streaming in China constitutes an example of flexible yet precarious digital labour (Tan et al., 2020; X. Zhang et al., 2019; Zou, 2018). According to these scholars, the precariousness of live-streaming labour lies in three different dimensions: 1) their flexible income and their strictly regulated performances; 2) the inadequate control over their own data on the platforms; and 3) the limited acknowledgement of their emotional exploitation. These features problematise issues of labour in

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live-streaming platform economies, as articulated in the following dimensions.

Firstly, regarding the streamers’ economic rewards, it is essential to point out that there is still no industry standard on the revenue split between the platforms and the live-streamers. For instance, a streamer on Kuaishou splits his/her earnings with the platform fifty-fifty, while a streamer on YY has to give away up to 70% of the income to the platform (Tan et al., 2020, p. 9). There is also a difference in the receiving income between contracted streamers and amateurs. As for the professional streamers who sign an exclusive contract with Blued, it is said that the platform can claim a 10% to 50% share of the streamers’ income according to their popularity, while in contrary, the share that Blued takes from the non-contracted streamers are fixed at 35% (Wang, 2019, p. 15). Indeed, some corporatised streamers guilds provide base salaries plus commissions to their contracted streamers. However, by joining streamers guilds, one’s streaming performances or say their ability to attract virtual gifts are constantly under organizational assessment and regulation, which eventually determine the level of his/her salaries and commissions (X. Zhang et al., 2019, p. 9). Hence, the ranking function designed by the platforms along with the guilds’ hierarchical salary system encourages streamers to compete against each other in entrepreneurial and neoliberal ways, such as streaming for over 10 hours or displaying erotic performances in the streaming (Zou, 2018; X.Zhang et al., 2019; Wang, 2019).

The second dimension of the precariousness of live-streaming labour is streamers’ inability in controlling their own accounts and data. Streamers’ accounts can be shut down temporarily or permanently by the platforms for

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the reason of showing inappropriate content when there is little space for streamers to make an appeal against the platforms’ decision. In a research on the power position between platform and the content producers on Kuaishou, Lin and de Kloet (2019, p. 7) claim that ‘the ambiguous rhetoric of the regulations gives it ample leeway and power to control and manage the live-streaming service in accordance with its own interests and those of the state’. They continue their argument by revealing that Kuaishou never discloses any technical details of its algorithms to users, therefore, users have very limited access to interactive data on the content they produced as well as the demographic and behaviour information of their followers on the platform (Lin & de Kloet, 2019).

Live-streaming platforms are capable of conducting personal data collection and determining the purposes of data usage, putting streamers as well as other users at the margin. Zou (2018, p. 811) argues that the collection of users’ geographical data allows live-streaming platforms to group their users by location to increase streamers’ relevance to their viewers. Yet, there is no option for streamers to opt-out from the geographic categorisation conducted by the platforms. As Tan et al. (2020, p.13) claim, ‘[app companies] own the apps, servers and other basic technological infrastructure that critically undergirds the entire zhibo (meaning live-streaming) industry. A zhubo (meaning streamers) either accepts that exploitation is guaranteed, or she does not live-stream at all’. Accordingly, as Duffy et al. (2019, p. 4) emphasize, ‘contemporary cultural laborers are beholden to platform governance frameworks and must consequently adapt to their recurrent “tweaks,” including to their algorithmic systems’. Being heavily reliant on live-streaming platforms technical infrastructures, streamers encounter

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different challenges in terms of how to make their accounts and content ‘algorithmic visible’. Whilst the platform algorithms mostly remain to be a ‘black-box’ for the users, through their everyday life practices of live-streaming streamers might have their own sense-making or imaginaries towards the algorithms, which is worthwhile for exploring in this thesis.

Last but not least, another line of inquiry that can be found in recent research is the acknowledgement of the exploitation of live-streamers’ emotions and affects. Zou (2018, p.809) summarises live-streaming performance into three major categories: game streaming, live talent shows, and life-casting, which is ‘particularly intimate insofar as it entails the sharing or exhibition of mundane activities’. His research emphasises the self-presentation, intimate disclosure, and affective interactions that are embedded in the life-casting practices in order to analyse the subjugation of individual streamers’ libidos, affects and emotions to a kind of instrumental rationality for monetisation (Zou, 2018, p.813). Tan et al. (2020) build on Jarrett’s (2016) conceptualisation of ‘digital housewife’ and argues that streamers, or in their research, zhubo, exemplify the neoliberal exploitation of affective labour: streamers conceived of their live-streaming as ‘playing’ which make use of the service provided by the platforms, thus they fail to recognise their affective labour as non-work. These investigations produce the need for a critical and deeper re-examination of live-streaming labour, and connect it with a wider academic debate on digital labour.

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Situating Live-streaming Labour in the Framework of Digital Labour

The framework of studying digital labour has been built upon the notion of immaterial labour in Lazarrato’s ([1996] 2014) discussion. It refers to the labour that produces the information and cultural content of the commodity, which involves activities that are not recognised as work. Tiziana Terranova (2000) was among the first to introduce the framework in the digital economy where an intersection of cultural production and information industry complicates the labour practices that create value and raise the issue of ‘free labour’. As she stated, ‘[the] digital economy is an important area of experimentation with value and free cultural/affective labour. It is about specific forms of production (Web design, multimedia production, digital services, and so on), but is also about forms of labor we do not immediately recognize as such: chat, real-life stories, mailing lists, amateur newsletter, and so on’ (Terranova, 2000, p. 38). The voluntary online activities of chatting, mailing, and building communities in virtual spaces blur the boundaries between work and life, as well as complicate the relation between production and consumption.

The labour practices involved in these activities sometimes overlap with Tan et al.’s (2020) analysis that streamers understand their live-streaming more as innocuous ‘play’ rather than serious, money-making work. Nonetheless, live-streaming has developed into a new industrial formation, where the affective engagement between streamers and viewers becomes a kind of paid work (Zou 2018; Wang 2019). The fact that most streamers receive economic rewards including virtual gifts and base salaries from their streaming practices, the ‘free labour’ discourse (Terranova 2000) might not be sufficient enough to understand the complexities of live-streaming labour.

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To compensate the limitations, the concept of ‘affective labour’, which is based on human contact as well as the creation and manipulations of affects (Hardt, 1999, p. 96), has been engaged into the discussion. As Hardt (1999) commented, ‘a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, passion— even a sense of connectedness or community’, are all products of the affective labour (p. 96). This concept has proved to be relevant and useful in recent research on creative workers across different media industries (e.g. Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2013). For instance, Nancy Baym (2015) develops a term called ‘relational labour’ to refer to ‘the regular, ongoing communication with audiences over time to build social relationships that foster paid work’ by investigating musicians’ online interaction with their audiences. Her research reveals a complex flux where personal relationships, professional labour, and economic rewards play out quite differently than Marxist traditions of understanding labour and alienation, while also emphasizing the role that social media and the community culture online played in the process. This research enriches the understanding of labour with its focus on the labourers’ engagement of social media usages, which gives direction to this thesis.

Certainly, temporality is another important vector in researching digital labour. Kuehn and Corrigan (2013) approach the phenomenon of voluntary online social production with another lens, ‘hope labour’. It emphasizes the temporal relationship between present and future which ‘the costs and risks of digital information production away from web firms and onto the hope labourer’ (Kuehn & Corrigan, 2013, p. 19). In their research, freelancers regard their free labour practices on websites like Yelp as ‘potential stepping-stones towards paid writing, photography jobs or other opportunities’ (Kuehn

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& Corrigan, 2013, p.14). Similarly, Duffy’s (2016) research on women who are involved in digital or social media production in the fields of fashion, beauty, style or retails also reveals ‘a forward-looking, carefully orchestrated, and entrepreneurial form of creative cultural production’, namely ‘aspirational labour’. Notwithstanding, her research fills in the gap of investigating female subjectivities in the realm of digital labour, which will be discussed in later writing.

As the aforementioned investigations shed light on the complex transformation of labour practices in the digital realm, it is important to notice that the stories of digital labourers are not necessarily only about exploitation. The online cultural production has been taken up voluntarily, as can be seen in ‘relational labour’ (Baym, 2015), ‘hope labour’ (Kuehn & Corrigan, 2013) or ‘aspirational labour’ (Duffy, 2016), with the motivations ranging from gaining self-realisation, cultivating human capital (see van Doorn, 2014) to reaching a sense of social attachment to certain communities. As Zou (2018, p.809) commented, ‘[streamers’] needs for self-actualisation, sociality and pleasure are intricately intertwined with materialistic desire’.

While researching labour in cultural production, one needs to take into consideration the social rewards that streamers received as well as their emotions alienation. Hesmondhalgh and Baker (2013) tackle this complexity by looking at the junior employees working on talent shows in the television industry. They keep an emotional distance from the talent show participants whilst simultaneously managing their emotional response to maintain good working relations in the highly competitive and stressful production environment. Their investigation goes beyond the generalisation of the labour conditions of creative workers, and how the specific ways in which

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precariousness is registered and negotiated in the lives of young workers in the reality television industry (Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2013, p. 166), It draws attention to the special nature of the end product in the cultural industries as well as the particular forms of precariousness and insecurity that are articulated on the emotional level of workers, which might differ from one industry to another. Inspired by their approach, this thesis aims to investigate the specificity of live-streaming labour in China. It invites the readers to reflect on the topic of digital labour not merely within the models of exploitation but also links to understanding the labourers’ emotional states figurate by different actors: platforms, streamer guilds, and viewers.

Re-considering Gender in Digital Labour

Despite the contribution of the aforementioned research in theorizing and mapping live-streaming labour as a form of cultural production in the platform economies, very few of them put forward the dynamic of gender in China’s live-streaming industry and give enough importance to the issue of gender. However, as a matter of fact, female streamers and their performances have always been at the core of the industry. It is pointed out that China’s streaming industry is highly gender-ordered, while video games live-streamers are predominantly men, female live-live-streamers ‘engage in gendered performativity across platforms that see “pretty girls” appealing to the emotional needs of “lonely leftover men”’ (Cunningham et al., 2019, p. 725). Female streamers are the major content producers for genres such as talent shows (singing and dancing) and life-casting, which contains mundane everyday life activities. Indeed, nearly every live-streaming platform in China

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has a section called ‘yanzhi’, which translates to ‘face value’ and indicates the attractiveness of the streamers, while the overwhelming majority content creators for ‘yanzhi’ section are women (G. Zhang & Hjorth, 2019; Zou, 2018). As Brooke Erin Duffy (2006) pointed out, ‘it is rather curious that much of the recent research on digital cultural industries ignore subjectivities of gender and femininity’ (p. 445) and presumes the subject of digital labour is male. Given the circumstances, there is an urgent need to systematically explore the role of gender in China’s live-streaming industry and the politics of labour and cultural production by researching female streamers.

To fill the gap of research on gender and digital labour, it is necessary to bring female subjectivities into the discussion. Jacquelyn Arcy (2016) argues that the expression and management of emotions are intensified in digital interactions: on the one hand, the design of social media platforms invite users to express their emotions through the act of ‘liking’—‘clicking on a small thumbs-up or heart icon’; On the other hand, patterns of social media use reflects the traditional sexual division of labour, where women are expected to devote their emotions to maintaining social networking or generating content that adds value to branded platforms. Duffy’s (2016) research on ‘aspirational labour' specifically focuses on the second issue. By working voluntarily with beauty and fashion brands, women workers in her research show similarities with the ‘hope labourer’: they work not for money, but for potential ‘exposure’. But the aspirational activities thus reify gendered social hierarchies, leaving their work unrecognized and/or under-compensated, as well as construct women as social sharers, who invest their time and emotion in community and relationship building (Duffy, 2016, pp. 453–454). The discussion of the widespread “feminization” of the

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Fordist workforce, marking by employment that is ever more “insecure, flexible, invisible, and/or poorly paid’ (Duffy, 2016, p.444) resonates with an important strand of literature, which conceptualises and problematizes women’s work.

For instance, caring labour, which has been designated traditionally as women’s work, has evoked feminist critiques on the problematic division in conventional economic theory that segregates private (unpaid) and public (paid) sphere (Gregg, 2009; Weeks, 2007). One of the most important theories that challenge the simple division is Arlie Hochschild’s ([1983] 2003) conceptualisation of ‘emotional labour’ involved in care and service jobs that are stereotypically associated with femininity. She defines ‘emotional labour’ as ‘the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display’, which could be sold for a wage (p. 7). Hochschild’s research addresses the issue that the emotions produced by surface or deep acting in a commercial setting have become a resource to be used to make money. In this process, feeling rules, which are ‘what guide emotion work by establishing the sense of entitlement or obligation that governs emotional exchanges’ (Hochschild, [1983]2003, p. 56) has been re-negotiated into rules that bring values to public commercial relations.

Emotional management as part of the labour practices described by Hochschild can be found not only in traditional service-oriented industries such as airline and retails, but also in various creative cultural industries, for the reason that ‘the entertainment industry and the various culture industries are likewise focused on the creation and manipulation of affects’(Hardt, 1999, p. 95). Payal Arora (2019) studies the ‘gold farmers’ in gaming platforms and argues that ‘while the products are digital and coded, the labour is very much

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embodied and visceral, and hardly different from factory work’ (p. 21). As Zhang and Hjorth (2019) argued, female streamers’ work ‘often involves applying make-up before livestream, adjusting other paraphernalia, twisting the programmes, being social during the stream itself, interacting with fans off-stream and so forth. The labour is intensive, whether physical, technical or emotional’ (p. 814). The embodied experience of streamers can be revealed by analysing their streaming practices, which contain complex ways of emotion management. Emotional labour is indeed an important framework to explain female streamers’ bodily and emotional experiences and understand the emotional alienation caused by the live-streaming industry.

The issue of emotional labour in the realm of digital cultural production cannot be isolated from the socio-technological conditions. In this respect, focusing on ‘a specific dimension of gendered labour—women’s assumed expertise in emotion management—and how that expectation is intensified in the digital realm’ (Arcy, 2016, p. 365) may be useful. If taken into consideration of how social media is inherently designed to emphasise and facilitate practices and connections in online spaces where a dense proliferation of intimacies with others are favoured (Andreassen, Petersen, Harrison, & Raun, 2017), it seems that social media platforms have a strong capacity in triggering and channelling affect and directing the users to conduct emotional management. The digitally mediated sex work—adult webcam industry—offers another relevant preceptive on understanding how the socio-technical construction of the platforms and the production of value are entangled in intimate and situated ways (Hernández, 2019; van Doorn & Velthuis, 2018). Critical analysis of sex work in the digital era has identified the ways in which webcam technologies and platforms like Chaturbate extract

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value from qualities such as intimacy and authenticity. ‘By promoting circulation through online sexual performances, personal interactions, and monetary exchanges, sexcam platforms are […] machines for “the labouring of affect”’(Hernández 2019, p. 1, original emphasised).

Similarly, live-streaming’s characteristics of temporalities and dense interactivity, enables itself to become a new form of social media practice that generates intensive affect and intimacy for monetary flows. A research (Wang, 2019) on Chinese gay live-streamers on Blued suggests that gay men’s performative labour is treated as corporate assets, which are used by Blued to expand sexually affective data production. Gay live-streamers often perform in ‘personal, sexually imaginative, and emotionally affective’ (Wang, 2019, p.3) ways to gain monetary and social rewards. Their sexual, intimate, emotional investments and viewers’ sexual affective responses together constitute as the sexually affective data (Wang, 2019, p.14). Blued, as a gay dating app, serves as a special example in understanding the sexually affective data production in live-streaming industry. As a matter of fact, mainstream live-streaming platforms all underpin young women’s gender performative labour to produce sexually affective data.

When it comes to the subjectivities and agencies of the labourers, sex workers’ experiences in the adult webcam industry are useful in understanding the role of gender and sexuality at the nexus of labour and cultural production. Jones (2016) argues that the online environment fosters a space in which webcam models have greater potential to experience sexual and affectual pleasures, mutually with their clients, which accounts for reasons that keep camgirls in the business. At the same time, webcam models experience is shaped by the dangers involved, such as capping, doxxing, and

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harassment (Jones, 2016). Negotiating between the pleasures and dangers, they adapt to the online workplace and become a neoliberal subject in sex work (Jones, 2016; Nayar, 2017b). The blurring distinction between professional/amateur, work/leisure, public/private has put adult webcam models at a position where they utilise the technical skills and institutionalised knowledge to respond to viewers’ need, but highlight their amateurism by performing authenticity and developing ongoing friendships with the viewers (Nayar, 2017b, p. 474). What’s more, the phenomenon of ‘sugar dating’ implicates that sex workers embrace the economic underpinnings of their instrumental uses of intimacy while refuse to see their relations as defined by the market logic, in order to shed the moral and legal baggage of providing and soliciting sex work (Nayar, 2017a). Their approach to understanding the complexity and the process of negotiation in digitally mediated sex work points at a direction which this thesis will take.

It is worth noting that at the moment the discussion of the gendered culture of live-streaming in China hasn’t drawn on the relevant studies on sex workers, while one can surely see the similarities between China’s live-streaming platforms and adult webcam platforms. The performance of female streamers is hugely determined by institutional power such as economic relations, platform regulations and the gendered and sexualised spectatorship (G. Zhang & Hjorth, 2019, p. 811). There are sections in Douyu handbook for streamers that are specifically dedicated to regulating female streamers’ behaviours and dress code, while the male body is not even mentioned once (G. Zhang & Hjorth, 2019, p. 813). Nonetheless, platforms often provide them with a beautifying tool (mei yan) and promote those who have ‘attractive faces and bodies’ (G. Zhang & Hjorth, 2019, 809). In this way, live-streaming

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alienates and reifies female bodies under the male gaze (see Mulvey 1975) and constructs female streamers as objects that can be desired and consumed on the platforms (X. Zhang et al., 2019; Zou, 2018). For female live-streamers in China, although they are not permitted to demonstrate nudity or perform sexually explicit content based on strict regulations, they ‘are often allowed to perform their sexuality in more subtle and implicit ways to lure viewers’ (Zou, 2018, p. 813). How do they make sense of the interpersonal relationship with their viewers? To what extent do female streamers recognize their performance as instrumentalization of affect and intimacy? Only by listening to the lived experiences of female streamers can these questions be answered.

Live-streamers as Wanghong

By incorporating female streamers’ subjective experiences, the investigation is expected to deepen and boarden the inquiry of digital labour, adding the perspective on gender. The discussion of gender is highly relevant to yet again somehow missing from another stream of research that focuses on Chinese live-streamers, which situates them within the discourse of micro-celebrities or its Chinese counterpart—wanghong (Cunningham et al., 2019; Lin & de Kloet, 2019; Tan et al., 2020; Wang, 2019). Wanghong refers to Internet celebrities, in particular, social media influencers with large followings (Wang, 2019, p.16). According to Cunningham, Craig, and Lv (2019, p.724), live-streamers as wanghong operate ultra-low-budget production and devote the creator labour to ‘online community management through the interactive, curatorial, and networking affordances of social media platforms’. Their practices featuring the construction of an online persona and the maintenance

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of interpersonal relationships with their viewers share similarities with the ways in which micro-celebrities in the Western context present themselves online.

The term ‘micro-celebrity’ was first used by Theresa Senft (2008) in her studies of the camgirls phenomenon that appeared in early 2000. According to Senft, homecamming was an essential technique conducted by camgirls to generate a sense of ‘theatrical authenticity’, through which camgirls presented themselves as brands (2008, p.16). Following Senft, Marwick (2015, p. 140) states that micro-celebrity is connected to the increasingly pervasive notion of ‘self-branding’—a self-presentation strategy that requires viewing oneself as a consumer product and selling self-images to others—in her research on Instagram microcelebrities. Their selfies that are circulated on Instagram reflect the admiration of the celebrity culture in American society. As a result, those successful at gaining attention tend to be ‘conventionally good-looking, work in “cool” industries, [...] and emulate the tropes and symbols of traditional celebrity culture’ (Marwick, 2015, p.139).

Unlike the celebrity culture in the United State, wanghong is less oriented towards a glamorous and cool lifestyle, which is attributed to the feature of middle-class status. Instead, it is rooted in the ground of ordinary everyday life. Lin and de Kloet (2019) use the term ‘unlikely creative class’ to describe live-streamers who are actively performing their vernacular creativity because ‘the platform embraces an aesthetics of the vernacular, which can be described as foregrounding the un-hip, the un-cool and possibly the downright square, [it] embraces those marginal and non-glamorous creative practices excluded from arts- and culture-based regeneration’ (Lin & de Kloet, 2019). There are differences in terms of nuance between the

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conceptualisation of micro-celebrities and wanghong, which need to be carefully unfolded when studying live-streaming labour.

Authenticity is another important characteristic of micro-celebrities (Senft, 2008). Micro-celebrities signal their accessibility, availability, and connectedness to their audience through intimate details of their everyday life (Raun, 2018). Yet, ‘authenticity is not only understood and experienced as the pure, inner self of the individual, it is also a relationship between individuals and commodity culture that is constructed as “authentic”’(Banet-Weiser, 2012, p. 14). Regarding the relation between authenticity and the branding culture, Sarah Banet-Weiser (2012, p.8) argues that ‘building a brand is about building an affective, authentic relationship with a consumer, one based—just like a relationship between two people—on the accumulation of memories, emotions, personal narratives, and expectations’. Such findings suggest the importance of cognitive and affective efforts, which are often seen in feminized activities, in digital cultural production for creating both cultural and economic values (Jarrett, 2015). Duffy (2016) points out that the narratives of self-branding as a form of value-generating affective labour in digital cultural production should be understood as gendered praxis echoing with post-feminist ideas of individual choice, independence and modes of self-expression in the consumer marketplace.

It should not be neglected that the subjects of Senft (2008), Banet-Weise (2012), and Duffy’s (2016) research are all women. These research complexifies the social and cultural constructions of gender while tapping into questions of representation and objectification of women in digital culture. However, the dynamic of gender remains missing in the context wanghong. Despite the observation of the ‘unlikely creative class’ addresses the

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contribution of grassroots entrepreneurship to the production of a digital culture permeated with contingency and negotiation, it fails to account for gender differences. Gender relation articulates the tension between emotional alienation and authenticity that animates the politics of live-streaming in China. Therefore, it is crucial to conduct a closer examination on the lived experiences of female streamers, which help us to gain insights into their subjectivities as well as their agencies emerged in the complex and negotiable process of live-streaming production.

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3. Methodology

At the very beginning of her book, Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in the Age of Social Networks, Therasa Senft (2008, p. 1) writes: ‘In late 1999, I set up a webcam in my bedroom. I had told my friend Jennifer Fink that I was writing about camgirls [...] and she suggested I ought to run a “homecam” of my own for a while. At the very least, she reasoned, the gesture would allow me to introduce myself to my subjects as someone sympathetically allied with their subculture’. To conduct an ethnographic and critical study of the camgirl phenomenon, she has become the “camgirl writing about camgirl”. Apart from her own personal experience, she foregrounded her research in interviews and performance analysis between camgirls and their viewers. When I was reading her book, I started to reflect on my own research — given that this thesis specifically focused on female live-streamers in China, what approach should I take to investigate their labour conditions? Do I need to be a live-streamer myself to get into the live-streaming community?

Recent interventions into the issues of labour in platform-based cultural production, including the work of Kuehn and Corrigan (2013), Baym (2015), Duffy (2016), as well as Johnson and Woodcock (2019), show that conducting in-depth interviews is a productive way of answering questions about the experiences of content producers, and understanding the platformization of cultural production. As Duffy et al. (2019) pointed out, the lived social experiences of the content producers are formulated through the institutional structures of the platforms as well as shaping the dynamics around modes of production, content formats, and revenue opportunities. For that reason,

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interviewing content producers allows researchers not only to gain insights into the social experiences of individual workers but also their relations to the overall institutional environment and its key actors. Studies on China’s live-streaming platforms published by Wang (2019) and Tan et al. (2020) also incorporate interviews into their research design to gain insights into streamers’ actions and meaning-making processes. Nonetheless, this thesis aims to develop an approach that allows it to include female streamers’ lived experiences and voices into the academic discussion without losing sight of the socio-technological structure of the live-streaming platforms. Indeed, interviews offer important materials for this thesis to understand the subjectivities of female streamers. Yet, this thesis also aims to situate those materials in a socio-technological framework, which requires the researcher to combine a digital ethnographic approach into the research design. I will explain the research design, namely in-depth interviews and the digital ethnography, respectively in this section.

Firstly, this thesis draws on a sample of semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted in March 2020. A total of nine Chinese female informants who participated in this research are mainly those who have been working in the live-streaming industry as professional or part-time streamers, although some of them have already quit their career. One of the informants is currently working as live-streaming talent manager. I decided to include her as the informant because she provided an insightful reflection on both the general relation between streamers, guilds, and platforms, as well as the issue of emotional labour since a huge part of her job is to give instructions to live-streamers to better maintain the relation with the audience.

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The data gathered from the in-depth interviews present a spectrum of cases that shows the bodily and emotional experiences of these women, and values they might derive through live-streaming practices. The informants were between 19 to 31 years old and most of them lived in different cities in China, ranging from top-tier cities like Beijing to third-tier cities like Jiaxing2_.

One participant is currently living in the United Kingdom as a master student, while she was a part-time streamer when she studied her Bachelor in Beijing. Five of the informants contacted the researcher after reading the recruitment posts on social media platforms—WeChat and Douban. At the same time, the research used Weibo and Douban to search for public posts that talk about streaming experience, by using combinations of key-words such as ‘zhibo’ and names of live-streaming platforms (i.e. Momo, Douyin, Bilibili). These queries led me to the social media accounts of some female streamers and allowed me to send them interview invitations through direct messages. In this way, the other three informants were recruited.

Adopting a semi-structured format, the interviews covered a range of topics, including: entrance into the live-streaming industry; streaming routines and their social life; career interests and future aspirations; live-streaming and off-stream interaction with the audience; and their relation to the platforms and streamer guilds if it is applicable. The semi-structured format of qualitative interviews enables the researcher to receive rich and detailed answers and guarantees some degrees of flexibility in the process of investigation (Bryman, 2008, p. 437–439).

2_{The Chinese city tier system is a hierarchical categorisation of Chinese cities, based on the}

income level, population size, infrastructure, business opportunities and other factors in the cities. First-tier cities include Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen; while the lower-tier cities normally refer to third-tier cities like Shantou, Weifang, Taizhou and so on.

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Due to the limited time and financial restriction, I conducted interviews in Amsterdam while most of the informants were geographically dispersed, using forms of WeChat video-call and audio-call rather than traditional face-to-face interviews. Traditional face-face-to-face interviewing allows the researcher to observe body language to see how interviewees respond in a physical sense, which might reveal their discomfort or confusion (Bryman, 2008, p. 457), while in video-call or audio-call, this kind of observation could be less effective or not applicable. However, the growing application of video-conferencing technologies has compensated the drawback. Meanwhile, it is said that online interviews are beneficial for both the researcher and the participant in terms of time-scheduling and location-choosing, which provide comfortability to both sides and lend to an increased willingness to talk openly and honestly (Nehls, Smith, & Schneider, 2015, p. 148). With this in mind, WeChat video-call and audio-call were used to conduct the interviews in this research. The interviews lasted between 30 minutes to more than one hour. WeChat, as the major communication tool in China, is accessible and convenient for the informants. Moreover, by giving the choice of the informants to opt-out from video-call to audio-call, the participants’ privacy, anonymity, and comfortability are increased. In order to provide the informants with a familiar language environment to express themselves better, the interviews were conducted in Mandarin, since it is the native language for all the informants. The transcription and English translation of the interview materials were conducted by the researcher herself. Finally, to protect the participants’ personal information, names of participants of this research were all changed into pseudonyms.

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The interview materials were then analysed based on thematic analysis: the researcher constructed an index of central themes and subthemes using the interview questions as a guideline and applied them to the transcription. While going through the transcription, I searched for repetitions (topics that re-occurred), metaphors and analogies, as well as similarities and differences in how interviewees discussed certain topics (Bryman, 2008, p. 555). The central themes and subthemes developed in the process include: 1) platform-related content: under this central themes, topics like cross-platforms practices, streamers’ sense-making of the affordances and algorithms are highlighted; 2) guilds-related content: it covers the advantages and disadvantages of working with the guilds; 3) streaming behaviours, including streamers’ interactions with the viewers, their labour intensity, their negative experiences and feelings, and their strategies for maintaining interpersonal relationship with the viewers; and 4) authenticity: this central theme contains streamers’ understanding of their relationship with the viewers, their understandings of wanghong, and so on. These themes are tied to the research questions about the bodily and emotional experiences of the female streamers.

Secondly, this thesis adopted a digital ethnographic approach, which is conducting an online observation and performance analysis, as Senft has done in the webcam research, on a total of 20 live-streaming accounts on three platforms (ie. Momo, Douyin, Bilibili) in order to understand the general patterns of interactions between streamers and their viewers. These accounts were collected by browsing a secondary site devoted to Chinese streaming platforms as well as using the app’s “recommendation” feature. According to the profile information on the platforms, these 20 female streamers come from different areas in China. Although they do not match identically with the

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informants’ locations, their performances and self-presentations represent a whole picture of live-streaming practices in China.

The online observation is not traditional ethnographic fieldwork. However, as Andreas Wittel (2000) stated, ‘[e]thnographic practice is attendance, is a co-presence of ethnographer and the observed social situation. Whether this co-presence requires one single shared space, is a problem worth discussing, particularly in the context of online-ethnographies. [...] Ethnography is about revealing context and thus complexity.’ From November 2019, I have regularly attended live-streaming chat-rooms and taken notes on details that interest me as a researcher as well as a viewer. In this way, I have realised the co-presence in the observed socio-technical situation—the live-streaming chat-rooms—with these female streamers. This experience enables me to understand the context of live-streaming and helps me better communicate with my informants in the interviews. The informants recognised me as part of their subculture because of me being familiar with the socio-technological context of live-streaming and being able to use their indigenous expressions. Even though I was not conducting live-streaming myself, the online observation provides me with rich information on both the social context as mentioned as well as the technological specificities in live-streaming, which becomes the foundation of my analysis. Although the information is not presented in a systematic way, it is explored with the in-depth interviews, helping to inform a deeper analysis.

Despite that the combined methods of this thesis foreground the foundation for me to access to live-streaming community, it is not without its limitations as feminist research concerns the politics of doing research itself, namely, the power relations a researcher herself is immersed in while

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conducting the research (van Zoonen, 1994, p. 129). Although I remain sensitive to my position as a research master student studying outside of China and rely on the informants to gain the information and experiences on live-streaming industry for this thesis, I value their voices and offer them the accessibility to the final academic output in order to integrate a reciprocated understanding into my relationship with the informants. I am also aware that the experiences shared by these female streamers could not represent China’s live-streaming as a whole. Instead, the data here is a starting point for the researcher to glimpse into the diverse experiences of female streamers on different platforms and allows the researcher to interpretatively arrive at empirically grounded understandings and explanations of the gendered live-streaming industry.

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4. Affective Interactions Makes Live-streaming:

Exploring the Socio-technological Conditions

‘If you like me as a streamer, click at the left top corner to follow me! If you really like me, join my fans group!’, said Shelly, a Douyin streamer. Every time I was in her chat-room, I could hear Shelly saying the same line, always with an uprising tone now and then: in-between moments when she was reading comments and replying those comments or moments when she was singing. Although the types of live-streaming performance have been roughly categorised into game streaming, talents shows, and life-casting (Zou, 2018), during the online observation conducted throughout months, I realised that in fact, there is no distinctive difference in terms of how female streamers performed in the chat-rooms. No matter what types of content, at the core of the live-streaming performance lies the real-time interactions with the viewers.

The physically situated bodies of female streamers and their viewers are bound together by the screens of mobile phones. Misha Kavka (2014, p. 462) points out in her research on reality television that the affective flows cannot be detached from physically situated bodies on both sides of the screen precisely because the space-time locations enable the bodies to occupy a material environment that stages the possibility of their present and future affective encounters. Similarly, this relation can be applied to live-streaming. The real-time interactions and affective encounters are enabled and

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determined by various collaborative affordances on the platforms’ interfaces. These affordances should not be regarded as merely virtual artifacts, but as affective materials that have an impact on the physical world and bodies.

This chapter will first focus on analysing how interfaces and affordances of different live-streaming platforms (i.e. Momo, Douyin, Bilibili) are designed to modulate, circulate, and commodify the affective interactions between female streamers and their viewers. The affordances, namely, real-time comments and virtual gifting, and competitions (pk), rankings, and fans badges, will be examined with the analysis of the data collected through interviews and online observation, to articulate the patterns of how these affordances are used and how do they guide and shape female streamers’ bodily and emotional performance. Apart from the technological specificities, it is necessary to include the social conditions into the discussion——how is the streamer-viewer relation modulated and complicated by the live-streaming industry. The remaining part of this chapter proceeds to investigate the roles of streamer guilds in China’s live-streaming industry. The streamer guilds are in a reciprocal relationship with the platforms, aiming to standardise the bodily and emotional performances of live-streamers. The configuration of the socio-technological conditions of live-streaming in China will provide a solid foundation for understanding under what conditions are female live-streamers practicing their emotional labour.