Desire for Sale: Chinese Gay Microcelebrities Negotiating Pleasure through DIY Porn Production
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Launching the First of Queer Pleasures Speakers Series! Stay Tuned for more exciting talks in the coming months.
Desire for Sale: Chinese Gay Microcelebrities Negotiating Pleasure through DIY Porn Production
This talk discusses a nascent network of commercial DIY gay porn production by microcelebrities in China against the background of platformization. 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.''
Speaker: Lin Song is an Assistant Professor in School of Journalism and Communication at Jinan University in Guangzhou, China. He received his PhD in gender studies from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He researches Chinese media and digital cultures, particularly in relation to genders and sexualities. He is the author of Queering Chinese Kinship: Queer Public Culture in Contemporary China (2022, Hong Kong University Press). His other works have appeared in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, Convergence, and Continuum, and edited volumes including The Cosmopolitan Dream, Queering Paradigms VII, and Contesting Chineseness.