Stigma, Visibility, and Embodied Labour: Grassroots Female Dance Livestreamers’ Boundary Work under Platform Governance in China

• In Event: Platformed Belonging: Identity, Visibility, and Exclusion in Digital Spaces

Abstract

This article examines how grassroots female dance livestreamers in China negotiate stigma, visibility, and respectability under platform governance, and how these negotiations reshape embodied labour. Drawing on 38 in-depth and ethnographic interviews, repeated informal conversations in work settings, and online ethnography across Douyin, Kuaishou, and TikTok, the study analyzes dance livestreaming as a platformed labour regime structured by a paradox of visibility: streamers must remain attractive, interactive, and traffic-generating to secure rankings, gifts, and income, while also avoiding penalties for becoming sexualized or “too visible” in ways that trigger moderation. I use the emic term cabian (擦边; “negotiating the boundary”) as an analytic entry point to capture how workers themselves name and manage the ambiguous boundary between entertainment, labour, and sexualized display.
Building on scholarship on platform labour, algorithmic governance, and symbolic boundaries, the article argues that “boundary navigation” is a core labour process in Chinese dance livestreaming. This process operates through three interrelated mechanisms. First, streamers professionalize boundary work by distinguishing online performance labour from offline moral personhood and by using professionalism as a worker-generated discourse to justify, defend, and evaluate labour practices. Second, they pragmatically negotiate algorithmic governance through tactical adjustments to costume, camera distance, movement, interaction style, timing, and self-censorship in order to remain visible without becoming punishable. Third, they internalize platform metrics as indicators of value, employability, and respectability, anchoring self-worth in traffic, rankings, and platform responsiveness while simultaneously generating social classifications of beauty and legitimacy. The boundary navigation of female dancing livestreamers is produced through professionalizing discourse, mediated by MCNs and operations teams, and embedded in the organization of intimate and economic relations. Dance livestreaming in China thus offers a particularly revealing site for analyzing how platform labour is organized through boundaries that are at once moral and technical, relational and economic, embodied and algorithmic.

Author

• Yubai Li