Session Chair: Sofia P. Caldeira
Presentation 1
Breadwinner or breadmaker: Contradictions in tradwives' creator labor, religious vernacular, and aesthetics
Roxana Mika Muenster, Margaret E. Foster
Cornell University
In recent years, tradwife creators have received increased attention and notoriety on social media due to their subscription to “traditional” gender roles, rejection of modern feminism, and 1950s-inspired aesthetics. Less attention, however, has been paid to their role within the creator economy. In this in-progress, mixed-methods project, we aim to understand the tensions between, first, the traditional gender roles tradwives advocate for, and second, the entrepreneurial nature of their online presence and monetization of said lifestyle. Through a computational text analysis of the creators’ websites and the language they use to sell their products and services, we aim to uncover how tradwife creators reconcile their professional labor with the professed values on which they have built their audience. Next, we will examine the accounts’ Instagram Stories to understand how the themes that emerge from the textual analysis are expressed in their audiovisual content. In so doing, we intend to shed light on conservative creators’ engagement in the creator economy; the elusive concept of authenticity as it applies to “trad” influencers; and why some groups may seek to downplay the labor and professionalization of their online presence.
Presentation 2
Ambivalent Affective Labour, Datafication of Qing and Danmei Writers in the Cultural Industry
Liang Ge
King's College London, United Kingdom
Danmei 耽美 culture, which features male-male romance and/or erotica, emerged in mainland China in the late 1990s and has been flourishing since the 2010s across East and Southeast Asia. The dynamic Chinese danmei culture has received significant attention in academia in recent years, either by mapping out the resistant potential against the heteronormativity or by highlighting the escapist route for expressing the women participants’ desires. The danmei culture has evolved into a transmedia landscape, and at the same time, an ever-expanding cultural industry being exploited by the logic of capital. Danmei writers as affective labors living in such a cultural industry have been rarely considered in present danmei studies.
Through exploring the datafication of qing (情, affects and desires) via in-depth interviews with contracted danmei writers on Jinjiang, I examine the distinct feature of danmei writers as ambivalent affective labor. For danmei writers, the datafication and monetization of qing leads to increasingly formulaic writing. By selecting, appropriating and combing the elements in the database of qing, danmei writers are able to swiftly generate a male homoerotic love story that efficiently and effectively invoke the affects and desires of readers for better monetization. Pleasures and pains are both involved in doing the ambivalent affective labor, which further consolidates the precariousness of the affective labour. However, the affects and desires per se cannot be fully manipulated – transformative momentum is embedded in the water-like qing all the time.
Presentation 3
ERROR 404: SEX WORKER DIGITAL TACTICS RESISTING ENFORCED INVISIBILITY
Nicole Veronica Bush(1), Christianna Clark(2)
1: Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California, United States of America; 2: Graduate School of Education and Psychology, Pepperdine University, United States of America
On April 6, 2018, visitors to the classified advertising website Backpage were informed that U.S. law enforcement had seized backpage.com and its affiliated websites. Five days later, Donald Trump signed the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) and the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) (Romano, 2018). For sex workers, this marked the tragic end of an era of increased safety, where social media was used to mitigate potential risks of in-person sex work.
This co-authored autoethnographic study builds upon Are's (2021) research on Meta's "shadowbanning" practices on Instagram. According to Cottom (2020), social media platforms are sociopolitical systems that have "amplified and reworked existing social relations" (p.442). We explore how the sociopolitical aspects of social media platforms and digital sex work amplify and rework the sexist and racist hegemonic strategies employed by social media companies (Kelly, 1994).
In this study, we detail the experiences of Clark, an Afro-Latine sex worker, and the labor practices and tactics used to overcome digital erasure in a visual media economy that devalues all forms of sex work (Berg, 2022). Through narrative and thick description, we show that Black sex workers' digital practices are reshaping a sex work labor on a post backpage.com internet. Black femme digital social networks and tactics can strengthen the impact of Black femme activists' online labor and other digital practices. Sex work is labor, and we advocate for its decriminalization, urging equal protections and privileges for sex workers comparable to those in other industries in the United States.
Presentation 4
The Collective Individualism of YouTube Makeup Reviews
Blake Hallinan, Tommaso Trillò, Saki Mizoroki, Rebecca Scharlach, Pyung Hwa Park, Avishai Green, Limor Shifman
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Beauty is one of the most popular and lucrative segments on YouTube, with broad transnational appeal, making it an ideal site to investigate the relationship between commercialization, globalization, and digital platforms. We focus on makeup reviews to utilize established research on cross-cultural differences in reviewing and ask how cultural repertoires of evaluation compare across multiple languages. We collected popular makeup reviews using keyword searches in five languages—English, German, Italian, Japanese, and Korean—associated with diverse cultural contexts. The top 20 videos in each language (n=100) were selected for analysis, producing a group of successful channels that are well-established on the platform. We employed content analysis to compare the videos’ evaluative criteria, using a codebook of ten values. We found that creators across languages employ a shared cultural repertoire to evaluate beauty products, concerned with aesthetics, functionality, pleasure, and, to a lesser extent, distinctiveness and economy. While beauty creators appeal to a consistent set of values, they rarely elaborate on their meaning, focus on positivity, and emphasize the subjectivity of their evaluations. We argue that the approach to evaluation in YouTube makeup reviews challenges previously observed dichotomies between Eastern and Western countries, blending elements of both collectivist and individualist communication styles. Most creators make indirect recommendations even as they use reviews to build a distinctive personal brand. Although further research is necessary to investigate the reach of this practice, our analysis of multi-lingual makeup reviews demonstrates how the homogenization of social media entertainment need not be synonymous with Westernization.
