This paper considers the growing user accounts and community on the Chinese lifestyle social media platform Xiaohongshu of women who work as English-language TikTok live shopping streamers. Among these live streamers, many were previously English teachers who experienced a significant decrease in their streams of income due to China’s government-led crackdown of the education industry in 2021. As TikTok wishes to globalize the success of integrating e-commerce with entertainment media, it launched live shopping in UK, US, and Southeast Asia, featuring sellers based in China. Sellers and intermediaries increasingly recruit women with English-speaking capacities to sell products targeting global female consumers. Many Chinese women working in English-language live shopping use Xiaohongshu to document their professional paths and share their experiences with those also interested in joining this profession, as Xiaohongshu becomes China’s biggest lifestyle platform with a female-dominant user base. This paper asks how women mobilize Xiaohongshu’s textual, audiovisual, and interactive functions for creating inspirational content based on their experiences with professionalization in platformed cultural and economic production, and for building a community of potential mutual aid. I propose to conceptualize the work of these live streamers in their cross-platform cultural production on Xiaohongshu as “inspirational labor,” which fosters communities for collectively navigating precarious labor realities. Furthermore, this research also situates the proliferation of this particular type of cultural production within the gendered division of labor in China’s platform economy and the broader social contexts of labor precarity that happens at the intersection of capitalism and authoritarianism in contemporary China.

This essay draws out the nuances of digital platform politics and community building through digital ethnographic field work and discourse analysis within the Twitch.TV (Twitch) content creator community. Throughout 2020 and 2021, as the pandemic continued to surge, people confined in their homes turned towards live streaming in record numbers. This influx of users in spaces like Twitch exacerbated moderation and algorithm issues that demanded attention. One phenomenon, the act of a “hate raid” is of particular interest in this analysis. Hate raiding is the act of a Twitch live streamer bringing over their audience to another content creator’s stream for the purposes of harassment and antagonism. For months throughout 2020, Twitch Inc., refused to make infrastructural changes to prevent these occurrences, which were disproportionately targeting Black, trans, and femme content creators on the platform. As a result, creators banded together to develop resources to help creators protect their streaming spaces through plugins, stream deck programs, and other infrastructure “hacks.”

To understand the social and political culture ramifications of Twitch during this time, I contend that the application of rhetorical theories around place and space illuminates how digital users are engaging with these platforms and galvanizing the communities they cultivate there for political action (Endres & Senda-Cook, 2011; Lefebvre, 1991).

On Tuesday, February 7th, 2023, a collective of trans activists, upset over J.K. Rowling’s embrace of trans-exclusionary ideologies, flocked to the livestreaming platform Twitch to express their opposition to the promotion of Hogwarts Legacy: a 3D open-world action role-playing game set in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. For the next 24 hours, channels featuring the game provided a staging ground for an explosion of political activity (and a level of player engagement that executives from Warner have described as spectacular), featuring protestors clashing with anti-protestors in frenetically scrolling chats with livestreamers (and their moderators) reacting disparagingly. By bringing research on livestreaming, affective labor, and platform studies into conversation with research on affective economies, media archaeology, and information capitalism this paper uses the events of February 7th to provide a critical media framework for understanding how livestreaming platforms use asynchronous chat as a mechanism for amplifying and filtering the tactical use of noise into metrics of engagement. In other words, this paper is not interested in arguing over the ethics of revolutionary tactics being used by trans activists as much as it is interested in the mechanisms that platforms (and corporations) are using to amplify, filter and extract value from the noise generated by these arguments, which are driven by an affective stew of anger and pain, on the one hand, and joy and nostalgia on the other.

From greenscreens in the bedroom to webcams on refrigerators, household surfaces underlie the broadcast of personality on Twitch.tv, Amazon’s $15 billion platform for live video entertainment. This paper examines how homemaking and visibility are co-conceptualized in the labour of gendered and racialized game live streamers. Drawing from a virtual ethnography of Twitch creators’ domestic spaces in North America (n=12), I document the staging of household visibility in relation to Twitch’s affordances of on-demand broadcast and play. Extending feminist and social reproduction theorizations of housework, I discuss how this convergence of house- and sight-making reifies the gaming industry’s historic reliance upon unremunerated spousal support.

How such marginalised Twitch streamers calibrate opacity between their broadcasts and their homes reveals the affinities between platform aggregation and domestic privatisation on local and global scales. The converging geographies of labour, leisure, and living demanded by Twitch represent more than ancillary sites where gameplay(ers) are visually recomposed as “web-ready” for live platform(ization). Rather, the management of a domestic timespace on Twitch represents a struggle for autonomy over the means of cultural production by workers across social media entertainment. This paper reframes “Bleed Purple” as more than Twitch’s company slogan, branded by emojis. Rather, it proffers Twitch as a vital case study on why social reproduction and feminist theories are integral to deepening our understanding of platform work, in and beyond the home.