Shelved under ‘M’ or ‘F’: The Political Economy of Chinese Online Fiction

• In Event: 30483 - Producing, Circulating, and Evaluating Culture

Abstract

Chinese online fiction is primarily and explicitly categorized into female/male channels—a unique practice not observed in other cultural products. This paper explores the formation of this division. Combining computational text analysis with qualitative historical methods, it traces a two-stage process: in the pre-platformization era, gender was an implicit logic within fragmented BBS communities; in the platform era, monopolistic platforms, enabled by payment infrastructure gap and selective state regulation, formalized gender as a dominant classification. The study shows how platformization interacts with cognitive infrastructures, and how strong but selective regulation unintentionally shaped monopolies of platform and gendered systems, contributing to platform studies and category theory.

Author

• Wanze Ma, Zhejiang University