Interpretive Labor and the Embodied Cost of Folk Theories: Censorship Imaginaries of Chinese Fan Content Creators

• In Event: Open Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 16: Culture, Meaning, and Everyday Life

Abstract

For content creators on Chinese platforms, digital censorship based on algorithmic technology is a black box they must continually learn to work around. Studies have documented the rich field of folk theories that creators develop to interpret algorithms and manage content creation accordingly (Bishop, 2019; Meyers West, 2018; Shi, 2025). Despite their tech-savviness in managing censorship, this project shows that creators often find the process physically and emotionally draining. This exhaustion, an embodied cost of folk theories, has been overlooked in the celebration of such knowledge as evidence of user resistance and empowerment. Downplaying embodied experiences in the production and application of folk theories risks romanticization and leads to an over-optimistic discourse that neglects less visible forms of exploitation and oppression. Drawing from interviews and content creation diaries of Chinese fan content creators, this project asks: when content creators have to develop folk theories about opaque censorship, what costs do they pay? I find that folk theories about censorship consist of a plural terrain of rumors, theories, and contradictory information that creators continuously process, verify, and translate into practice. These endeavors demand substantial interpretive labor, including the cognitive, affective, and temporal effort to understand digital censorship (Graeber, 2012). My findings suggest that censorship regulates cultural production and perpetuates domination less through deterrence and silencing but through the embodied interpretive labor that constrains creators’ creative capacity and limits them to every moment of surviving censorship. Opaque technologiesimpose an unequal cognitive burden on creators, who must expend interpretive energy simply to participate. This study contributes to the sociology of digital labor and cultural production by rethinking how creative workers’ folk theory practices reproduce, rather than resist, technological inequality through exhaustion and disillusionment.

Author

• Ran Wang, University of Pennsylvania