Each year a small portion of AoIR conference fees go toward several Kelly Quinn Travel Scholarships for junior scholars to attend the conference. We want to recognize our scholarship recipients and share with you a little bit about them and their research interests.
Who are you?
I am Liang Ge, now a research associate in Digital Futures, King’s College London, and a visiting lecturer in Media, Culture and Creative Industries at City, University of London.
Where are you from?
I am originally from Chengdu, China, and I am from Tujia ethnic minority group.
What is your current area of study?
Digital media, gender, sexuality and East and Southeast Asian popular culture and creative industries.
Describe the research you will present at AoIR2024.
Title: Ambivalent affective labor: The datafication of qing (affects and desires) and danmei writers in the cultural industry
Danmei culture, a Chinese literary genre that features male–male romances and/or erotica, has received significant attention in academia. Studies to date have investigated how it enables women to resist heteronormativity or forms the escapist route for women to express their desires. Danmei culture has evolved into a transmedia landscape and cultural industry, exploited by the logic of capital. However, danmei writers have not been considered as affective laborers living with precariousness in the ever-expanding Chinese cultural industry. Drawing on data from multi-round interviews with danmei writers foregrounding the datafication of qing (affects and desires), this article examines these writers’ ambivalent affective labor. The findings illustrate the emergence of an increasingly formulaic writing: by searching, selecting, appropriating, and combining elements from the qing database, danmei writers generate a male homoerotic love story that invokes readers’ affects and desires for better monetization. Pleasure and pain mingle, consolidating the precariousness of the labor. However, affects and desires cannot be fully manipulated, for qing embodies transformative momentum.
This research contributes to explore the ambivalence of affective labor via illuminating the (un)governed affects and creativities, and proposes the novel concept “the database of qing”: By selecting, appropriating and combining elements from the qing database, danmei writers are able to swiftly generate a male homoerotic love story that efficiently and effectively invokes readers’ affects and desires for better monetization. However, the ambivalence emerges as these affective laborers constantly present their own creativity and subjectivity in their efforts to transgress the logic of capital. The transformative potential of these devoted affective laborers is tightly linked with multiple ambivalences in the danmei cultural ecology, where scenes of possibility are constantly generated and intensified in male-male romances and erotica. Rather than unilaterally mapping out how danmei writers are exploited, managed, and disciplined by capitalist logic in their affective production, I also attend to the transformative potential of affective labor: the unalienated affective agency of danmei writers, which exceeds capitalist control and regulation.
Have you presented at AoIR in the past? If so, what was your experience? If #AoIR2024 in Sheffield is your first AoIR conference, what made you choose this conference? What do you expect from it?
It is my first AoIR conference. I chose to attend #AoIR2024 in Sheffield because of its reputation as a leading forum for interdisciplinary discussions on the evolving role of the internet in society. As an early career researcher, I am particularly drawn to the conference’s focus on critical issues like digital labor, affective labor, and digital capitalism—areas that are central to my own research. AoIR’s annual conferences are known for fostering an inclusive and collaborative environment where scholars from various disciplines can engage in rich dialogues about the internet’s transformative impact on work, culture, and social relations.
I expect AoIR2024 to provide me with invaluable opportunities to present my ideas, receive constructive feedback from other scholars, and engage in thought-provoking discussions with peers who are also navigating the complexities of digital life. The chance to network with experts working on similar themes will allow me to expand my intellectual horizons and establish meaningful professional connections that could lead to future collaborations.
In particular, I see AoIR as a space where critical research on digital labor and capitalism is elevated, especially as these issues become more urgent in an era of platform economies and algorithmic management. The conference’s history of engaging deeply with how digital technologies shape labor practices, emotional economies, and power relations positions it as an essential platform for scholars like myself who are eager to contribute to these conversations and interventions.
