Commentary | Runchao Liu, Digital Mediation and Transnational Flows of Queer Fandom: Ambiguous Queer Performance on Chinese Social Media
Douyin, a Chinese social media app similar to TikTok, provides a versatile platform for disseminating grassroots content and user-generated videos by the Chinese gender-nonconforming and queer communities that often struggle to find effective means of public communication on Chinese social media. As with other mainstream social media platforms, such as Bilibili and Sina Weibo, Douyin is not a privileged site safe from China’s tight digital censorship. As a result, cases of forcefully closed accounts and censored content about geoculturally sensitive topics are common. One notable example is the 2018 permanent shutdown of the Weibo and WeChat accounts of Feminist Voices (nv quan zhi sheng), an influential feminist grassroots collective promoting women’s rights in China since 2011. Popular homoerotic web series, such as Addicted (shang yin; 2016) and Guardian (zhen hun; 2018), have also been subject to rigid scrutiny and government censorship. Yet rather than be silenced by this unfavorable digital environment for queer representation and alternative gender and sexual expression, queer-passing and queer-identified influencers have transformed the Chinese digital public sphere into a queerly ambiguous space, strategically expressing their queerness and engaging with queer fandom. By learning to navigate this online environment, queer influencers, micro-celebrities, and fans have made the versatile and highly visual platform Douyin the digital home for popularizing queer sensibilities in China.
Censorship and negotiation of queer visibility on Chinese social media
To understand why queer users and queer-passing or -identified influencers on Douyin have to downplay the homoerotic overtones of their short videos and online conversations, we need to understand why and how popular accounts and web series touching on queer expression are subject to strict party-state censorship. In current times, this censorship derives from the party-state’s renewed emphasis on traditional Chinese culture as the base of 12 “Core Socialist Values” propagated under the leadership of President Xi Jinping since 2012. Within the “Core Socialist Values,” individual-oriented values, such as (sexual and gender) freedom and equality, are guaranteed insofar as social order on the collective level is maintained. These principle values are most recently reflected in the highly controversial effort of China’s education ministry to prevent the feminization of male teenagers in education, in part due to the growing appeal of androgynous-looking male idols and celebrities. Meanwhile, alternative gender and sexual expression in China, such as queer and feminist practices, are sometimes accused of being imported and unpatriotic behaviors under Western influence. Therefore, LGBT activism and nonconventional sexual discourses on Chinese social media face the double challenges of censorship from both nation-state and peer-scrutiny.
While China’s queer history of both female and male non-heterosexuality has long been documented since ancient times, in the modern People’s Republic of China, homosexual practices were heavily persecuted during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. It was not until 1997 that homosexuality was decriminalized and partially depathologized in 2001. However, this does not equal free expression, social acceptance, or legal recognition of LGBT rights. In 2015, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television – the state agency responsible for media content regulation – banned media representation of same-sex relationships and classified them as “abnormal.” The removal of the web series Addicted followed this regulation. In 2017 and 2018, the state further tightened the regulation of online audio-visual content, including on user-generated social networking site Sina Weibo, classifying the portrayal of homosexuality as promoting “obscene and vulgar interests.” In sum, the state censorship of homosexual content reaches both digital and traditional media realms and both professional and grassroots content.
Given such an unfavorable environment, however, LGBTQ social media users and influencers have continued to claim space in digital spheres, negotiating the politics of queer visibility by practicing strategic ambiguity and self-censorship. The government censorship of homosexuality has been stringent but also inconsistent, transforming the Chinese digital public sphere into what I call a “queerly ambiguous space.” A queerly ambiguous space, slightly different from an ambiguous queer space, is a hetero-nationalist ambiguous space formulated under the party-state’s socialist framework of Chinese characteristics. From this perspective, the Chinese digital public sphere is forbidden to be queer by nature but allows ambiguous queer visibility insofar as it serves the nationalist agenda of sexual freedom. This hetero-nationalist positionality reveals and thus debunks the seemingly neutral attitude of the Chinese government and many Chinese netizens about homosexuality, which is, “no approval, no disapproval, and no promotion.” The politics of queerly ambiguous Chinese social media explains why popular web series of far-reaching societal influence with explicit homoerotic themes or queer fandom are completely removed from streaming sites, even while we can still find many grassroots queer-passing influencers (such as Chang Jie and Rourou), queer-identified influencers (such as Vespa Miller, one of the protagonists in the 2016 Chinese lesbian film Girls Love), and LGBTQ knowledge-sharing non-profit accounts (such as Beijing LGBT Center’s account) that attract LGBTQ or ally audiences on Douyin. These accounts have survived because they adopt a strategic ambiguity that poses no critical challenges to the fundamental nature and structure of the Chinese digital public sphere. In fact, some of these LGBTQ influencers have hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers. Turning to grassroots queer discourses disrupts the assumption that explicit queerness is difficult to find on Chinese social media and reorients our focus on the ways how various queer visibilities take shape and make space in an unfavorable digital environment.
Strategic ambiguity is a common strategy that queer content producers adopt to negotiate the contemporary politics of queer visibility in China in film, music, video games, and online fandom. Douyin is another example of queer worldmaking in an ambiguous digital space. How exactly queer Douyin users are censored is not transparent. Douyin hires individual censors to scrutinize videos and livestreams for sensitive content. Although everyday vlogs and comedic or romantic videos of same-sex couples usually will not be censored, same-sex couple influencers often avoid posting videos involving kissing or self-censor the kisses with stickers or blurring effects to evade censorship. Avoiding kissing or directly answering fans’ questions regarding their sexual orientation is also a common strategy to avoid being forcefully shut down during livestreaming. Another tactical response to circumvent censors that is common to Chinese digital activism is to replace sensitive vocabulary with homophones or coded language, such as replacing #MeToo with #ricebunny and using the hashtag “socialist brotherhood” when discussing the homoerotic subtext of the web series Guardian. Likewise, lesbian Douyin users use the hashtag “le” in replacement of “les” and sometimes refer to their partner as “bestie” or “boyfriend” to confuse censors. Whether or not something is removed also depends on how many anti-LGBTQ netizens report these videos. Therefore, while removing videos and comments involving explicit homoerotic content is most common, the actual regulation of queer visibility on Douyin is often mechanical and inconsistent.
Douyin, dance cover, and queer sensibilities
Within such a queerly ambiguous digital context, I gesture towards two examples of ambiguous queer performance on Douyin: Chang Jie (Douyin ID: mylove123lcc) and Rourou (Douyin ID: wangharu), two female dancers who have earned over 3 million and 1 million Douyin followers, respectively, for regularly posting a variety of popular dance covers. The two dancers also frequently interact with each other by making collaborative Douyin dance videos, commenting under each other’s posts, livestreaming together, and performing together in offline fan meetings and performances.
What makes both performers such popular queer influencers is how they strategically adopt ambiguity in their androgynous personas to evade censorship of provocative dance moves and to appeal to queer fans. For example, Chang Jie always conceals her identity with a mask and a hat in her Douyin videos, except while livestreaming casual conversations with fans and other Douyin influencers. One of her signature dance moves is what many fans refer to as “crotch ramming” (ding kua). This move involves Chang Jie quickly ramming her crotch area forward two to three times to the beat, sometimes accompanied by crotch grabbing. Viewers in the comment section often mention this sexually suggestive move, which is more commonly adopted by male dancers to cater to the heterosexual female gaze or the homoerotic male gaze, as one way Chang Jie “turns” them queer. Viewers asking for clarification about her gender identity or mistaking her as a male dancer are also common to find under her videos.
Chang Jie’s slim figure clad in unisex clothes, sexually ambiguous and provocative style of dance, and her frequent collaborations and interactions with Rourou have all contributed to her popularity as an ambiguous queer influencer. Many fans even often imagine Chang Jie and Rourou as a couple (“shipping” them). It is likely that the two dancers are simply close friends. They refer to each other as besties even though they have collaborated in many intimate dance videos. Both dancers often joke about how people cannot tell their gender by emphasizing their gender as women in Douyin videos and comments while interacting with fans. However, queer fans also understand that it is best for them not to openly discuss homosexual topics to circumvent censorship and maintain an active Douyin presence. Calling each other “bestie,” intentionally or not, not only confuses censors, but also empowers queer fandom because this ambiguity is a strategy commonly adopted by grassroots Douyin queer users.
Digitally mediated queer fandom beyond the informational great firewall
Mainland China’s “great firewall” isolates the Chinese online community and poses communicative barriers that make the inter-Asian and transnational flow of Chinese grassroots Internet popular culture difficult. This is further complicated by the fact that Douyin and TikTok are two completely separate apps and their content is mutually exclusive, with Douyin only accessible by mainland Chinese users or the overseas users who have a Chinese app store account. The rather insulated digital space of Douyin highly mediates the content of grassroots users who do not have professional teams to engage the global market. As a result, the popularity and presence of influencers, like Chang Jie, outside mainland China on YouTube, fan pages on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, or fake accounts on these platforms, are a result of the unprofessional, part-time efforts of fans who have limited access to the Douyin community, having to navigate the great firewall. For example, Chang Jie has achieved a global fandom, with the creation of region-focused fan communities outside of mainland China, such as the Vietnam Fanclub (Xướng Thư VNFP) active on multiple social media platforms, including YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook. Conversely, it should also be noted that some of these social media accounts are made as queerbaiting accounts, reposting a variety of Douyin dance cover videos featuring androgynous-looking dancers. The beginning of Chang Jie’s global fandom is hard to trace. Besides fans’ voluntary efforts expanding Chang Jie’s fan base, the monetization of reposting popular short video compilations on YouTube is likely an early and continued reason behind her global visibility. To consider the global queer fandom of a grassroots influencer like Chang Jie, we thus need to attend to how the communicative barriers may both mediate and stimulate the growth of a global fan community.
While it is common to assume that technological and communicative barriers limit the development of transnational and trans-geocultural fandoms, with the case of Chang Jie, I suggest that a lack of informational transparency and accessibility may in fact facilitate the circulation of queer sensibilities and the development of digitally mediated global queer fandoms. That is, the same ambiguity adopted by queer influencers to evade Chinese censorship and the informational great firewall can in fact facilitate the international dispersion of Chang Jie’s queer fandom. As suggested earlier, the popularity of Chang Jie in the home platform Douyin has benefited from a queerly ambiguous digital context and her ambiguous queer persona. Due to the strict surveillance of explicit queer-identifying content, the value of Chang Jie’s queer fandom lies not in whether or not she explicitly identifies as queer but in the queer sensibilities enacted through her bodily performance and imagined by her queer fans. The expansion of her domestic fan community lies exactly in this queer ambiguity, which is adopted by many queer-identified Douyin influencers to strategically avoid censorship.
This strategic ambiguity is only heightened in global contexts. There are more than 20 fake accounts or fan accounts on TikTok and some of them have tens of thousands of followers. We can glimpse at the diversity of Chang Jie’s global fan community through the languages used in the comments, such as Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Arabic, Turkish, Russian, French, and English. Within the more flexible online environment of TikTok, some fans mobilize queer-identifying hashtags such as #LGBT and the rainbow emoji to more directly establish Chang Jie as a queer influencer. Questions about Chang Jie’s gender identity are still common across platforms, but unlike the domestic context where fans have direct interactions with Chang Jie, not every question in this regard gets answered or answered correctly. The misuse of her gender pronouns is not always corrected, either. The communicative barriers between Douyin’s Chang Jie and the reposted content globally accessible on the digital platforms that are banned in mainland China (notably, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, as well as Douyin’s global twin TikTok) to a great extent strengthens the ambiguity around Chang Jie’s identity and sexuality. This ambiguity in turn strengthens her androgynous queer persona within global contexts, which is essential to the formation of her queer fandom. The lack of direct engagement between Chang Jie and her global fan community, although not an ideal complication brought by the informational digital barriers, empowers her global fans to construct a more homosocial-friendly, less ambiguous queer fandom.
Conclusion
This commentary ruminates on the queer fandom of Chinese grassroots, ambiguous queer influencers through a comparative lens of digital mediation posed by the online content regulation and the twin-platforms of Douyin and TikTok. Furthermore, through comparing the contextual differences of Chang Jie’s domestic and global queer fandoms, I propose to consider some of the uncanny ways that communicative and media technological barriers may bear a positive influence on the flourishing of global queer Asian media cultures. Like many young Chinese queer adults, I grew up in a digital age where queer media were mostly illegally shared on the Chinese social networking websites, just like how the majority of Chang Jie’s global fans outside mainland China are accessing her content these days. In an environment of limited information, imagining a queer relationship to a queer-passing or -identified figure is as important as knowing the actuality of this queerness. Today, looking at Chang Jie’s transnational queer fandoms and digital mediation, I maintain this view and call for more discussions to explore the contradictory effects of digital mediation for queer performances and communities.
Runchao Liu is currently a PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication Studies from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, specializing in Asian/Asian American sound, media, and popular culture. Her academic writing has appeared in Cinéma & Cie: International Film Studies Journal, Current Musicology, M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture and the forthcoming collections Critical Race Media Literacy (Routledge) and The Cultural Politics of Femvertising (Palgrave Macmillan).
To cite this Commentary, please use the following entry:
Runchao Liu, “Digital Mediation and Transnational Flows of Queer Fandom: Ambiguous Queer Performance on Chinese Social Media,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, May 26, 2021; https://doi.org/10.52698/ROFP3956.