Virtually boyfriends: the ‘social factory’ and affective labor of male virtual lovers in China

ABSTRACT

As China continues to neoliberalize in the new millennium, the Internet and other social media also enable new subjects of affective labor to emerge. Since 2014, young men increasingly hawk their services as xuni lianren (virtual lovers) on popular Chinese websites. These men explicitly state that while they neither sell sex nor meet their clients in person, they behave otherwise as actual boyfriends would: over chatting apps, they talk to clients for leisure, and provide relief from frustrations accumulated from family, school, and work. Using fieldwork data gathered from male virtual lovers, we argue that that their sale of immaterial affective labor substantiates [Virno, P. (2004). A grammar of the multitude: For an analysis of contemporary forms of life. New York: Semiotext(e)] idea of the social factory by demonstrating that social relations are indeed transforming (albeit incompletely) into relations of production.

KEYWORDS:

• Affective labor
• neoliberalism
• cell phones
• male virtual lovers
• China

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Chris K. K. Tan (PhD) is an associate professor in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Nanjing University, Nanjing, China. His research interests center on new media, gender, sexuality, and their intersections. He has previously published in Information, Communication & Society, Urban Studies, Anthropological Quarterly, and Journal of Homosexuality. [email protected]

Zhiwei Xu is a PhD candidate at the School of Journalism and Communication at Renmin University of China, Beijing, China. His research interests focus on digital anthropology and health communication. He has 11 publications in Chinese academic journals. [email protected]

Notes

1 We refer to informants using their Internet nicknames throughout this essay.

2 Besides virtual lovers and administrative clerks, a shop also employs ‘emotion consultants’ (qinggan zixunshi) or strategists (chumouhuace shi). The main job of both positions is to formulate suitable phrases for different scenarios that lovers may encounter with their clients, including how to politely deflect questions that lovers deem too intrusive on their privacy. Both the consultant and the strategist are also part-time jobs, and they each pay around 800 RMB a month.

3 The first person to respond is the lou’s first guest. The bedroom goes to the louzhu, so this first guest sleeps on the shafa (‘sofa’) and he is referred to as such. Subsequent responders are also referred to humorously as furniture and other parts of a building’s structure. The second responder is called bandeng (‘bench,’ as the sofa is already taken); the third diban (‘floor,’ as there are no seats left); the fourth dixiashi (‘basement,’ because the floor is gone); and the fifth xiashuidao (‘sewage pipes,’ because everything else is taken).