Queer Activism in the Age of Platform Capitalism: How Digital Queer Vlogs Perform Subversive Queer Politics in China

Queer visibility has been heavily edited out in mainstream culture and media in China due to the increasingly stringent censorship and state’s promotion of heterosexist and nationalist ideologies in the last decade. Despite their continuous presence amidst the rising of short-video industry in 2018 and the corresponding mediation of platform capitalism, queer vlogs stands out as a, if not the only channel where queer lives can be heard and seen. Taking a digital queer Marxist lens, this paper unpack the complex digital material conditions around queer lives in Chinese society today, and explores how queer vlogs on Bilibili.com, a Chinese equivalent of YouTube for video content, uses stereotyping as a gateway to visibility, and constructs online persona that performs camp with Chinese characteristics as tools of resistance against the intentional erasure of queer visibility and form counterpublics against heternormative and homonormative ideals. Furthermore, this paper sheds light on how, in doing so, these queer vlogs perform queer politics and digital activism that subverts state’s oppression of queerness in public culture in non-violent, tacit and creative ways in a society where formal social activism protests are prohibited under the ideological promotion of ‘social harmony’ and ‘positive energy’.