Digital Body Production of Underprivileged Females in Contemporary China: A Visual Ethnography on Kuaishou App

随着中国社会数字化的加速，越来越多的农村妇女被拖入了网络空间数字生存的社会实验。快手是这一背景下最重要的平台之一，因为它不仅是中国使用最广泛的短视频移动社交App，而且拥有以小城镇和农村为主的用户社区。根据最新统计，快手约有1.5亿女性用户，她们平均每天在该平台上花费99.3分钟。性感化和情感化的身体是下层女性拥有的最重要的生产资源。为了应对日益增长的生存风险，许多女性转向制作自己的视频和直播节目，通过这些节目，她们可以从观众点赞和评论中赚取收入。这些发布在网上的视觉材料可以分为两类。第一种类型是时长一到三分钟的短视频。这些视频片段通常带有特定的标签，如#务农、#摇摆舞、#变装、#农村妻子说实话等。第二种类型是在不同聊天室的直播节目。这些视频通过视频滤镜等特效技术创造了一种性别数字身体的视觉话语。软核色情是年轻女性用户创作的另一种主要视频内容形式，正在被包括未成年人在内的数百万观众消费。当他们的数字身体成为网络警察的目标时，情况变得更加复杂。由于这些生活在农村和外围的中国妇女的生存资源极其稀缺，数字化身体制作已经成为一种廉价、方便、几乎注定的劳动力方式，不可避免地会煽动剥削。数字车身制作是否会演变为数字护卫舰？草根女性不是被数字化解放，而是被迫陷入严重的数字压迫和疏离，这是真的吗？他们已经付出，或者更确切地说，仍在为之付出多么沉重的代价？在后社会主义中国的复杂语境下，现有的社会科学研究、媒介研究和性别研究似乎未能使上述问题合理化。基于对中国工厂工人的性别和种族主义制度和叙事的研究，我的项目将媒体和性别研究的视角与视觉人类学方法结合起来，研究快手的妇女劳动。该项目试图超越对数字女性劳动的普遍理解，将其视为“赋权”，以揭示数字平台在中国农村妇女生活中所扮演的相互矛盾的角色，以及全球数字经济中新旧形式的性别劳动是如何(重新)出现的。本研究将女性用户定位为日常媒体生产中数字劳动实践的积极代理人。因此，它试图理解数字技术如何重塑我们对身体主权、性别、劳动力和数字资本主义等概念的理解。

With the accelerating digitization of Chinese society, an astounding growing number of rural women have been dragged into a social experiment of digital survival in cyberspace. Kuaishou is one of the most important platforms in this context, as it is not only China's most widely used short video mobile social App but also has a predominantly small-town and rural-based user community. According to the latest statistics, Kuaishou has around 150 million female users, who spend on average 99.3 minutes per day on the platform. The sexualized and emotionalized body is the most important production resource underclass women possess. To cope with growing survival risks, many women have turned to producing videos of themselves and broadcasting live-streaming shows, through which they can earn an income from viewer likes and comments. These visual materials posted online can be divided into two categories. The first type is short videos that last for one to three minutes. The video clips typically come with specific hashtags such as #farming, #swing dancing, #crossdressing, #rural wives telling the truth, etc. The second type is live-streaming shows in separate chat rooms. These videos create a visual discourse of gendered digital bodies through special effects technologies such as video filters. Softcore pornography (ca bian qiu) is another major form of video content created by young female users, which is being consumed by millions of audiences, including the underage. The situation gets even more intricate when their digital bodies become targeted by the cyber police. Due to the extreme scarcity of survival resources for these women living in rural and peripheral China, digital body production has become a cheap, convenient, and almost destined way of labour and inevitably incites exploitation. Will digital body production evolve into digital corvee? Is it true that grassroots women are forced into severe digital oppression and alienation rather than freed by digitalization? What a heavy price they have paid, or rather say, are still paying for? In the complex context of post-socialist China, the existing social science studies, media studies, and gender studies seem to have failed to rationalize the above-listed questions. Building on studies of the gendered and racialized regimes and narratives of Chinese factory labour, my project combines a media and gender studies perspective with visual anthropologic methodologies to study women's labour in Kuaishou. This project seeks to move beyond the general understanding of digital female labour as "empowerment" to shed light on the contradictory role digital platforms play within the lives of rural women in China, and how old and new forms of gendered labour are (re-)emerging within the global digital economy.This study positions female users as active agents in digital labour practices in daily media production. It thereby seeks to understand how digital technologies are reshaping our understandings of notions such as bodily sovereignty, gender, labour and digital capitalism.