Date : 2024-02-19
Time : 2024-02-28
Venue : LT2, UG/F, Sino Building
When Digital Platforms Become Migrant Destinations: A Case Study of Rural Women’s Creative Entrepreneurship in the Digital China
Date: Feb 28 2024
Time: 12:30 - 14:00
Location: in-person at LT2, UG/F, Sino Building
Language: in English
Speaker: Ms. Danchen LIU (Mphil. Student, Gender Studies Programme and Department of Sociology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Moderator: Prof. Ling HAN (Assistant Professor, Gender Studies Programme, The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Abstract:
With the technological changes, deskilling and feminization of creative and cultural industries (CCIs), a growing number of marginalized groups flow into this “middle-class” industry. Especially in post-pandemic China, platformed creative entrepreneurship serves as one critical informal work encouraged by the state and narrated as an egalitarian path. However, existing studies largely concentrate on middle-class and educated creative professionals in urban areas. Some capture the “class difference,” but gender is missed.
Adopted in-depth interviews and digital ethnography, this study investigates how Chinese rural women creators (wanghong) foster their platformed creative entrepreneurship and reinvent their subjectivities. Data was collected by life story interviews with 17 rural women creators, one-year participant observation in their showrooms on Kuaishou, a short-video platform popularized among underclass groups, and two paid training courses targeted at rural women who have platformed creative entrepreneurship dreams.
This research identifies mechanisms shaping their cultural production. Interpersonal networks and patriarchal families cooperate with platforms and the state to empower rural women and paradoxically generate governance. Rather than being passive, rural women creators wield agency to negotiate with various actors in multi-level governance. They develop unique strategies to keep the right to work and reorganize platformed creative entrepreneurship and life. Their practices and narratives emerge from the intersection of platform entrepreneurialism, the growing rural-urban divide, gender, and rural class in China. Moving beyond urban contexts, this study expands the gender politics debates around platformed creative entrepreneurship by providing an alternative perspective from the Global South and embodied experiences of rural women creators.
Speaker's Bio:
LIU Danchen is an MPhil student in Gender Studies affiliated with Sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests focus on platform labor intersecting with gender and class, digital technologies and inequalities, and gender under algorithms.