Reading and Writing Alone Together: Women’s Affective Labor, Media Capital, and Governmentality in Postsocalist China

Yi Zhou
Anthropology
UC Davis

Philosopher Michael Hardt emphasizes how affective labor, labor that creates affects and shapes human interactions, challenges “biopower from above” and contributes to social transformations is fundamental. The ethnographic research of this study focuses on the 52 million Chinese women who actively write and read amateur fiction online in dialogue with Hardt’s approach to biopower, subjectivity, and the flux of social fields. The project examines how media capital turns women’s online stories into commodities and garnish profits through women’s affective labor on writing, reading, and interacting with each other. The analysis also explores how the government regulates women’s affective labor in order to channel the social and moral tensions into a gendered harbor and foster the “appropriate” subjects for the “harmonious society.” Although women’s affective labor has become productive of capital and the target of governance, I argue that this form of labor is a “biopower from below” which opens up space for social change.