Turning Delivery to Vlogging: Female Rider Creators’ Navigation of Peripherality on Chinese Platforms

• In Event: Student Forum Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Roundtable 9: Social Media and Digital Culture

Abstract

While platform gig work and creative labor are often analyzed as distinct regimes, one governed by algorithmic monitoring and the other by visibility, less attention has been paid to the labor across these overlapping, multiplatform spaces. This article bridges this gap by studying female delivery riders in China who are also content creators. Working simultaneously in the male-dominant and stigmatized delivery sector and a misogynistic cyber ecology, these female rider creators work in socially peripheral positions in both regimes. This hybrid peripheral creative labor remains understudied, as previous studies on creative labor focus on socially privileged creators in Western societies, while the studies on platform gig workers lack analysis of internal disparities, such as gender dynamics in delivery work. This lays out the main research question: how do female rider creators navigate their labor dynamics shaped by the intersection of gender and labor, when these two types of platform labor intersect? Combining digital ethnography on 17 female rider creators and three-month on-site participatory observation, this research identifies that female rider creators cultivate a dual spectatorship, each with its own tension. On one hand, they use counter-narratives yet under male-centric languages to build attachment to a predominantly male rider audience; on the other hand, they mobilize self-presentation of gendered obstacles, social roles, or body to foster affective ties, turning peripherality into self-branding. However, this dual process pulls these explorative female platform workers into an ambiguous negotiation of identity between labor and gender. Simultaneously, it binds them to accepting harassment from the largely male spectatorship and dependence on an active role in the precarious delivery industry. By conceptualizing peripherality as relational and mobile, this study demonstrates that peripherality can be temporarily converted into visibility across platforms, while simultaneously reproducing marginality operated by labor regime logics.
Keywords: Creators, labor, platforms, work, social media.

Authors

• Hanyang Zhou, Duke Kunshan University

• Fan Liang