Desire for sale: Live-streaming and commercial DIY porn among Chinese gay microcelebrities

Abstract

This paper examines a nascent network of commercial DIY gay porn production by microcelebrities in China against the background of platformization, commodification, and illiberal cultural landscapes. Informed by queer Marxist theories, the paper looks at how the career trajectories of live-streamer-turned DIY gay porn actors/producers are shaped by the intertwining forces of platform capitalism, technological affordances, and state internet governance. Reflecting on the critical potential of these DIY porn production practices, it suggests that they paradoxically showcase both a willing submission to the ever-expanding logics of capitalism and means of creative negotiation with commodification and state censorship.

Keywords

live-streaming Chinese microcelebrities DIY porn gay porn internet censorship platformization

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Ashley

(2019) Tumblr porn eulogy. Porn Studies 6(3): 359–362. DOI: 10.1080/23268743.2019.1631560.

Bao

(2018) Queer comrades: gay identity and tongzhi activism in postsocialist China. Copenhagen: NIAS Press.

Baudinette

(2020) Aspirations for ‘Japanese gay masculinity’: comparing Chinese and Japanese men’s consumption of porn star Koh Masaki. Porn Studies 7(3): 258–268. DOI: 10.1080/23268743.2020.1715239.

Beach

(2016) New Rules Limit User-Generated Content. China Digital Times. Available at: https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2016/12/new-rules-limit-user-generated-content/ (accessed 5 April 2020).

Burger

(1995) One Handed Histories: The Erato-Politics of Gay Male VideoPornography. Binghamton: The Haworth Press.

Cadell

(2016) China Internet Authority Formalizes Regulations for Live-Streaming Industry. Reuter’s. Available at: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-internet-regulations/china-internet-authority-formalizes-regulations-for-live-streaming-industry-idUSKBN12Z0SC (accessed 6 April 2020).

CGTN (2018) China Tightens Scrutiny of Inappropriate Content for Clean Cyberspace. Available at: https://news.cgtn.com/news/3163544d30677a6333566d54/share_p.html (accessed 5 April 2020).

Chernavina

(2017) The Rise of Livestreaming in China: How to Make the Most of it. Hi-com. Available at: https://www.hicom-asia.com/the-rise-of-livestreaming-in-china-2017/ (accessed 5 April 2020).

Cunningham

Craig

(2019) China’s livestreaming industry: platforms, politics, and precarity. International Journal of Cultural Studies 22(6): 719–736. DOI: 10.1177/1367877919834942.

10.

De Kloet

Poell

Guohua

, et al. (2019) The platformization of Chinese Society: infrastructure, governance, and practice. Chinese Journal of Communication 12(3): 249–256. DOI: 10.1080/17544750.2019.1644008.

11.

Ding

(2020) ‘Good hard fuck’ made in China: a case study of Chinese semi-professionally produced gay porn. Porn Studies 7(3): 327–336. DOI: 10.1080/23268743.2020.1776150.

12.

Duggan

(2002) The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism. In: R

Castronovo

, et al. (ed) Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 175–194.

13.

Dyer

(1985) Male gay porn: coming to terms. Jump Cut 30: 27–29.

14.

Endeshaw

(2004) Internet regulation in China: the never‐ending cat and mouse game1. Information & Communications Technology Law 13(1): 41–57. DOI: 10.1080/1360083042000190634.

15.

Escoffier

(2003) Gay-for-pay: straight men and the making of gay pornography. Qualitative Sociology 26(4): 531–555. DOI: 10.1023/b:quas.0000005056.46990.c0.

16.

Floyd

(2009) The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

17.

Griffiths

(2019) The Great Firewall of China: How to Build and Control an Alternative Version of the Internet. London: Zed Books.

18.

Grimes

Feenberg

(2013) Critical theory of technology. In: S

Price

Jewitt

Brown

(eds) The SAGE Handbook of Digital Technology Research. Thousand Oaks: Sage, pp. 121–129.

19.

Hakim

(2010) Erotic Capital. European Sociological Review 26(5): 499–518. DOI: 10.1093/esr/jcq014.

20.

Hambleton

(2015) When women watch: the subversive potential of female-friendly pornography in Japan. Porn Studies 3(4): 427–442. DOI: 10.1080/23268743.2015.1065203.

21.

Havens

Lotz

Tinic

(2009) Critical media industry studies: a research approach. Communication, Culture & Critique 2(2): 234–253. DOI: 10.1111/j.1753-9137.2009.01037.x.

22.

Hofer

(2014) Pornographic domesticity: amateur couple porn, straight subjectivities, and sexual labour. Porn Studies 1(4): 334–345. DOI: 10.1080/23268743.2014.947735.

23.

Jacobs

(2012) People’s Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese Internet. Bristol: Intellect Books.

24.

Jacobs

(2014) Internationalizing porn studies. Porn Studies 1(1–2): 114–119. DOI: 10.1080/23268743.2014.882178.

25.

Jacobs

(2015) The Afterglow of Women’s Pornography in Post-Digital China. Basingstoke: Springer.

26.

Jenkins

(2006) Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: NYU Press.

27.

Jiang

(2019) WeChat - A super app from China. Diggit magazine. Available at: https://www.diggitmagazine.com/articles/wechat-super-app-china (accessed 11 April 2020).

28.

Lamarre

(2017) Platformativity: media studies, area studies. Asiascape: Digital Asia 4(3): 285–305. DOI: 10.1163/22142312-12340081.

29.

Langlois

Elmer

(2013) The research politics of social media platforms. Culture Machine 14: 1–17.

30.

Laurin

(2019) Subscription intimacy: amateurism, authenticity and emotional labour in direct-to-consumer gay pornography. AG AboutGender: International Journal of Gender Studies 8(16). DOI: 10.15167/2279-5057/AG2019.8.16.1114.

31.

Lazzarato

(1996) Immaterial labor. In: P

Virno

Hardt

(eds) Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 133–146.

32.

(2020) How powerful is the female gaze? The implication of using male celebrities for promoting female cosmetics in China. Global Media and China 5(1): 55–68. DOI: 10.1177/2059436419899166.

33.

Liu

(2015) Queer Marxism in Two Chinas. Durham: Duke University Press.

34.

Xia

Heo

, et al. (2018) You watch, you give, and you engage. Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: 1–13. DOI: 10.1145/3173574.3174040.

35.

Maddison

(2017) Comradeship of cock? Gay porn and the entrepreneurial voyeur. Porn Studies 4(2): 139–156. DOI: 10.1080/23268743.2017.1304235.

36.

Marwick

(2016) You may know me from YouTube: (Micro-)celebrity in social media. In: PD

Marshall

Redmond

(eds) A Companion to Celebrity. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 333–350.

37.

Mercer

(2012) Power bottom: performativity in commercial gay pornographic video. In: C

Hines

Kerr

(eds) Hard to Swallow: Hard-Core Pornography on Screen. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 215–228.

38.

Mountford

(2009) The legal status and position of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in the People’s Republic of China. International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission. Available at: https://outrightinternational.org/sites/default/files/395-1.pdf (accessed 5 April 2020).

39.

People.com.cn (2016) Over 1.5 Million Watched Huang Jingyu and Xu Weizhou's Live-Streaming on Xiandanjia. Available at: https://ent.people.com.cn/n1/2016/0311/c1012-28192653.html (accessed 1 April 2020).

40.

Qiang

(2011) Liberation technology: the battle for the Chinese internet. Journal of Democracy 22(2): 47–61. DOI: 10.1353/jod.2011.0020.

41.

Roberts

(2018) Censored: Distraction and Diversion inside China's Great Firewall. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

42.

Rofel

(2007) Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture. Durham: Duke University Press.

43.

Rofel

(2012) Queer positions, Queering Asian studies. Positions: Asia Critique 20(1): 183–193. DOI: 10.1215/10679847-1471438.

44.

Ryan

(2019) Male Sex Work in the Digital Age: Curated Lives. Basingstoke: Springer.

45.

Scholz

(2013) Introduction: why does digital labor matter now? In: T

Scholz

(ed) Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory. New York: Routledge, pp. 1–13.

46.

Senft

(2013) Microcelebrity and the branded self. In: J

Hartley

Burgess

Bruns

(eds) A Companion to New Media Dynamics. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 346–354.

47.

Shaw

Zhang

(2017) Cyberspace and gay rights in a digital China: queer documentary filmmaking under state censorship. China Information 32(2): 270–292. DOI: 10.1177/0920203x17734134.

48.

Song

(2021) Entertainingly queer: illiberal homonormativity and transcultural queer politics in a Chinese Broadway musical. Feminist Media Studies 21(1): 18–34. DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2019.1690019.

49.

Srnicek

(2017) Platform Capitalism. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.

50.

Tan

Wang

Wangzhu

, et al. (2020) The real digital housewives of China’s Kuaishou video-sharing and live-streaming app. Media, Culture & Society 42: 1243–1259. DOI: 10.1177/0163443719899802.

51.

Terranova

(2000) Free labor: Producing culture for the digital economy. Social Text 18(2): 33–58.

52.

Tziallas

(2015) Gamified eroticism: gay male “Social Networking” applications and self-pornography. Sexuality & Culture 19(4): 759–775. DOI: 10.1007/s12119-015-9288-z.

53.

Van Dijck

(2013) The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

54.

Van Dijck

Poell

Waal

(2018) The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

55.

Van Doorn

(2010) Keeping it real: User-generated pornography, gender reification, and visual pleasure. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 16(4): 411–430. DOI: 10.1177/1354856510375144.

56.

Wang

(2020a) Calculating dating goals: data gaming and algorithmic sociality on Blued, a Chinese gay dating app. Information, Communication & Society 23(2): 181–197. DOI: 10.1080/1369118x.2018.1490796.

57.

Wang

(2020b) Chinese affective platform economies: dating, live streaming, and performative labor on Blued. Media, Culture & Society 42(4): 502–520. DOI: 10.1177/0163443719867283.

58.

Wignall

(2017) The sexual use of a social networking site: the case of pup twitter. Sociological Research Online 22(3): 21–37. DOI: 10.1177/1360780417724066.

59.

(2017) Interview with Liu Xiaoguang from XianDanJia: Focusing on the Niche Market. sohu.com. Available at: https://www.sohu.com/a/133460661_545070 (accessed 31 March 2020).

60.

Yan

(2014) Regulating online pornography in mainland China and Hong Kong. In: M

McLelland M

Mackie

(eds) Routledge Handbook of Sexuality Studies in East Asia. New York: Routledge, pp. 387–401.

61.

Zhang

De seta

(2018) Being “Red” on the internet: the craft of popularity on Chinese social media platforms. In: C

Abidin

Brown

(eds) Microcelebrity Around the Globe: Approaches to Cultures of Internet Fame. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing, pp. 57–67.

62.

Zhang

Hjorth

(2017) Live-streaming, games and politics of gender performance: the case of Nüzhubo in China. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 25(5–6): 807–825. DOI: 10.1177/1354856517738160.

63.

Zhang

Ong

(2008) Privatizing China: Socialism from Afar. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

64.

Zhang

(2017). Xiandanjia Failed to Pay Streamers. Small Live-Streaming Platforms Are Going Bankrupt. qq.com. Available at: https://tech.qq.com/a/20170110/003692.htm (accessed 5 April 2020).

65.

Zhang

Xiang

Hao

(2019) Virtual gifting on China’s live streaming platforms: hijacking the online gift economy. Chinese Journal of Communication 12(3): 340–355. DOI: 10.1080/17544750.2019.1583260.

66.

Zou

(2018) Producing value out of the invaluable: a critical/cultural perspective on the live streaming industry in China. TripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 16(2): 805–819. DOI: 10.31269/triplec.v16i2.969.