In the Making of Celebrity: Wang Hong, Fashion Labor, and the Post-Feminist Identity in China

• In Event: Redefining the Feminist Identity in Today's World

Abstract

This study investigates the phenomenal field of wang hong, a group of online celebrities who are primarily fashionistas that practice social commerce on digital media platforms to cultivate fan bases, and monetize from their media production and relationship with their fans by selling value-adding fashion items through online shops. Wang hong are the fulcrum of contemporary cultural labor, who not only generate economic and financial capitals for different industrial stakeholders, but also produce social and cultural capitals to articulate their aspirations and ambitions. They actively package themselves into a whole set of lifestyle for sale, expressing their autonomy and pleasure while simultaneously subject to self-governed. The wang hong phenomenon and their practices demonstrate the search for the post-feminist identity in China, where the struggle is foregrounded in different identity positions as both powerful, playful, flexible and confining, calculating, regulating.

Author

• Sara Liao, The Chinese University of Hong Kong