Navigating the economy of ambivalent intimacy: gender and relational labour in China’s livestreaming industry

Abstract

By examining female streamers’ everyday interactions with their viewers and their experiences as showroom livestreamers (xiuchang zhubo) in China’s livestreaming industry, this article adopts—but also re-examines—the premises of relational labour in order to investigate the gendered power relations involved in the showroom livestreaming sector. Based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with female livestreamers, we argue that showroom livestreaming work is contingent on relational labour and constitutes a precarious balancing act. One the one hand, female streamers are positioned in a gendered economy, searching to monetize their production of sexually ambivalent intimacy. On the other hand, through constant negotiation, they try to maintain the correct degree of intimacy in order to avoid violating both platform regulations and the social moral standard. Therefore, the implicitly sexualised and intimate performances undertaken by female streamers are the result of negotiating livestreaming platforms’ technological and economic affordances, the male viewers’ needs for intimate personal interactions, and their own subjectivities. We claim that the economy of aimei, or ambivalent intimacy, represents a deeper form of exploitation, whereby female streamers themselves bear the responsibility to navigate tensions and emotional alienation at the nexus of financial security, sexual desire, and morality.