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

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