Becoming a career girl on platforms in China

The figure of female influencers constantly soared over the past decade across the major platforms in China. This study focuses on female influencers on Chinese platforms who are in a purported transformation from traditional women to creative subjects. The paradoxical nature of exploitation and self-empowerment of platform labour has been debated extensively by academia. Yet, the subjectivity of labourers in value creation has not been given much attention. This study will interrogate the non-linear relationship between precarious labour performance conditioned by the algorithm and the improvised, informal experiments for autonomy seeking by female subjects.
Banet-Weiser’s insights on ‘the economy of visibility’ will be borrowed. On the one hand, female content creators muddle through the individualist image production of independent girls and community-making for a high luminosity of their own. On the other hand, algorithmic management, as a form of soft control, sorts the visibility of digital labourers, shaping their behaviours and trapping them in a constant self-regulating. Still, a variety of tactics to "pacify" algorithm control have been observed, but less examined.
The study will then delve into the paradoxical process of luminosity-making, with particular attention to improvised autonomy seeking, by focusing on mainland Chinese female influencers on Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and Bilibili. This study aims to understand how platform female influencers use tactical resistance to algorithms while internalizing the legitimacy of algorithmic power, thereby re-constructing imbalances of their power relations with platforms, and how they develop and adjust their socio-material practices over time and reconfiguring algorithmic management.