This dissertation examines how “queer” symbols are consumed as pop-cultural products on Chinese social media and why these representations take the forms they do. It asks how platform mechanisms—including algorithms, recommendation systems, interface affordances, and engagement metrics—interact with state–market governance and audience practices to shape the visibility, framing, and political meanings of gender and sexual nonconformity online.
Drawing on political economy, platform studies, actor-network theory, affordance theory, and gender and queer studies, the dissertation analyses three case studies. The first examines Weibo fan labour and the circulation of danmei, idol pairings, and idealised masculinity surrounding the 2020 “227 Incident”. The second analyses the popular circulation of baihe and lesbian-themed content on Bilibili, including the role of interactive affordances such as bullet comments and linguistic memes. The third investigates...
Show moreThis dissertation examines how “queer” symbols are consumed as pop-cultural products on Chinese social media and why these representations take the forms they do. It asks how platform mechanisms—including algorithms, recommendation systems, interface affordances, and engagement metrics—interact with state–market governance and audience practices to shape the visibility, framing, and political meanings of gender and sexual nonconformity online.
Drawing on political economy, platform studies, actor-network theory, affordance theory, and gender and queer studies, the dissertation analyses three case studies. The first examines Weibo fan labour and the circulation of danmei, idol pairings, and idealised masculinity surrounding the 2020 “227 Incident”. The second analyses the popular circulation of baihe and lesbian-themed content on Bilibili, including the role of interactive affordances such as bullet comments and linguistic memes. The third investigates performances commonly framed as “male cross-dressing” on Douyin, showing how gender nonconformity is transformed into attention-optimised spectacle.
Together, the cases reveal that the wider platform circulation of representations of “queerness” may substantially decouple them from queer identities, lived experiences, and political struggles, while frequently coinciding with their depoliticisation. Algorithmic curation, platform affordances, regulatory pressures, and market incentives favour forms of nonconformity that are legible, aesthetically appealing, and commercially viable, even when they appear to challenge heteronormative and cisnormative conventions. This process, however, cannot be understood solely in terms of depoliticisation or co-optation. These subcultural spaces can also afford women meaningful possibilities for cultural agency, affective expression, and experimentation with desire and intimacy, while simultaneously reproducing idealised beauty standards, gender essentialism, and other dominant gender norms.
Conceptually, the dissertation develops the notion of “managed utopianism” to describe how state discourse, including the demand for “positive energy”, and platform capitalism jointly enable fantasy, desire, and experimentation while containing them within calibrated political and commercial boundaries. It contributes to platform and queer studies by theorising a form of simulated transgression that offers the pleasures of difference without articulating the political stakes of queer visibility in contemporary China.
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