In September 2023, Lisa, BLACKPINK's Thai member, headlined five performances at Crazy Horse Paris, prompting polarized reactions across global digital publics. This article examines how fan backlash contested the legitimacy of Lisa's post-feminist celebrity persona across K-pop and Parisian cabaret. Drawing on feminist critical discourse analysis of Lisa's Instagram comments, it identifies three interlocking dynamics: policing of K-pop “girl crush” empowerment norms, racialized-nationalist regulation of Thai/Southeast Asian femininity, and classed gatekeeping that constructs Lisa as a “fallen” female elite lacking artistic agency. The article argues that as post-feminist meanings circulate transnationally, their recognition remains contingent on the cultural and industrial frames through which performances are read. By rejecting Lisa's Crazy Horse performance as empowerment or art, critics exposed the conditions that make K-pop's “girl crush” readable as empowered femininity while reproducing gendered, racialized, and classed hierarchies that shape whose sexual performance can be recognized as agentic, respectable, and artistically legitimate.
Public service media are adopting artificial intelligence at a moment when diversity, equity and inclusion policies are increasingly politicised. Drawing on comparative qualitative research in the United Kingdom and Australia, this article examines how AI is embedded within Public Service Media governance and platformised audience infrastructures. We argue that AI operates not merely as a technical tool but as a cultural and institutional logic through which diversity, risk and legitimacy are reconfigured. In this shift, trust in diversity moves from relational practices grounded in representation and accountability toward procedural confidence embedded in automated systems, standards and compliance regimes. We conceptualise this transformation as the rise of procedural trust : a reorganisation of institutional legitimacy through technical infrastructures rather than social relations. Our thematic analysis shows how platform capitalism reshapes public service media by depoliticising diversity and redistributing responsibility across governance systems, with significant implications for democratic legitimacy.
This study explores how the Telangana folk songs were used as a launch pad in political agitation, cultural memory, and statehood shaping of identities in the period (1998–2014). It uses ethnographic fieldwork, interviews with performers, and study of lyrics as it tracks the growth of oral tradition that started in rural communities into the interface of digital worlds from mobile media to YouTube. The results reveal how these songs gave expression to marginal voices, how they rallied the grassroots into activism, and how they bridged the continuity of cultural tradition with the latest technology into a voice of rhythm-based resistance. Unlike supplying a background information to the protests, folk songs were used as a part of the active construction of the discourse, symbolism, and consciousness of the movement. Drawing on analytical work at the juncture of folklore, performance, and digital humanities, this scholarship shows the ways regional Indian oral traditions adapt to new media ecologies as part of maintaining political agency. It introduces a paradigm of intersection between storytelling, technology, and grassroots activism, in postcolonial contexts.
This article introduces the concept of digital voice to investigate the bustling soundscape of contemporary Chinese digital media. Digital voice, as I contend, constitutes both a techno-vocal condition that reworks existing ideas of voice, body, subjectivity, and sociality, and an iterative process of digital performance, in which voice partakes in the manifold human practices of meaning-making and world-making. Specifically, I attend to three forms of digital voice: ASMR, digital voice acting, and AI synthetic voice. The three case studies delineate contrasting yet complementary modalities of techno-vocality, of voice's embodiment, disembodiment, and re-embodiment, through which relations among body, labor, and value are negotiated and transacted under China's digital capitalism. Juxtaposing perspectives from voice practitioners, audiences, AI engineers, and data workers, the article demonstrates how the digital condition has introduced new ways of experiencing voice, and how these experiences refract broader tensions between embodiment and virtualization, and between automation and labor extraction.
This paper draws on semi-structured interviews with 12 rural and small-city-based women creators on the short video and livestreaming platform Kuaishou to examine how these women actively transform unpaid domestic labor into a double form of creator work: affective labor performed through food-related content to build and sustain audience relationships and material-commercial labor enacted through offline street food vending as micro-entrepreneurship. The paper argues that the conditions motivating these women to create, including platform and state opportunities, domestic skills, and the need to claim recognition inside and beyond the home, also reproduce the precarity they navigate, as platform algorithmic uncertainty, the undervaluation of affective labor, persistent family expectations, and gendered harassment remain constant features of their creator lives. Through three dimensions of analysis, “strategic money-making,” “recognition and sisterhood,” and “the navigation of authenticity, public–private boundaries, and gendered harassment,” the paper shows that these women generate real income, social presence, and communities of solidarity while exercising agency that remains contingent and precarious. The paper contributes to feminist labor theory by moving beyond extraction frameworks, and to creator studies by showing that offline micro-entrepreneurship and online affective labor are mutually sustaining, bringing these frameworks into dialogue with the specific conditions of platform labor in China.
This paper examines the adaptation of Kanafani's seminal novella Men in the Sun into Saleh's The Dupes (also known as The Duped and The Deceived ). It explores how this transformation walks the line between literary symbolism and cinematic realism, all while preserving the work's profound political critique. The significance of this case study transcends aesthetic considerations to encompass broader questions about how narratives of Palestinian identity, displacement, and exile translate across media in the context of the Arab cinema's evolution. Transforming Kanafani's sparse, symbolically dense prose into Saleh's visually expansive cinematic interpretation raises fundamental questions about fidelity, creative transformation, and the role of adaptation in shaping collective memory.
This article examines the revival of a short-lived, non-canonised medium to challenge dominant assumptions in media nostalgia research. Focusing on the resurgence of the Casio TR camera on Rednote, it draws on participant observation, analysis of 120 posts, and 11 interviews. The article shows that nostalgia is organised through four platformed scenarios - acquisition, use, loss/deception, and spectatorship-demonstrating that nostalgia is socially distributed and not confined to prior ownership. Building on the concept of mnemonic imagination, the study argues that nostalgia extends beyond recollection, linking past, present, and future practices. It further shows that revival is sustained through configuration and re-interpretation: users integrate the device into hybrid media ecologies while symbolically revaluing it through narratives of youth and aspiration. The article argues that platform-mediated nostalgia does not simply preserve obsolete media, but reworks the past into a resource for present use and future-oriented cultural production.
This study uncovers why tarot has become an integral—and often surprising—part of everyday life for Moscow's youth. Using a mixed-methods approach combining content analysis of 15,530 YouTube comments with in-depth interviews of 21 young tarot users, we show that tarot's allure stems less from magical beliefs and more from psychological, social, hedonistic, and aesthetic motives. The findings challenge stereotypes of ritualized esotericism: most youth view tarot as entertainment, emotional comfort, and a tool for community-building and self-understanding rather than mystical pursuit. Our analysis highlights online tarot practices’ dominance and identifies a novel aesthetic motive—fascination with ritual atmosphere and visual appeal distinctive to this generation. These insights argue that tarot's vitality in secular urban Russia derives precisely from its de-magicification: stripped of supernatural claims, it functions as a portable meaning-making system meeting psychological, social, and aesthetic needs simultaneously.
This study examines the structural asymmetry between cultural visibility and interpretive power. Through a critical discourse analysis of 349 media articles focusing on two Chinese cultural icons— Ne Zha 2 and Labubu —the study identifies a layered discursive defense system with selective visibility as its filtering precondition, followed by three core strategies: economic narrative strategies that erase cultural subjecthood, political narrative strategies that construct symbolic boundaries, and security narrative strategies that recode popularity as social risk. These layers operate as a structured mechanism of selection, evaluation, and management, collectively ensuring that Chinese icons remain subordinate to Western epistemic frameworks despite their market visibility. The study introduces the concept of interpretive incompleteness as a structural condition of global cultural flows, emphasizing that incomplete understanding persists as an inherent feature of cultural exchange, where cultural plurality is preserved through persistent negotiation and co-presence amid asymmetry.
This study investigates how hip-hop songs and memes operated as cultural and political alternative expressions during the July 2024 mass uprising in Bangladesh. The student-led movement, initially focused on quota fairness and accountability, evolved into the Chattro-Jonata Obbhothan (Student-People Uprising) after widespread state violence and the killing of over a thousand protesters. Using a qualitative interpretive approach that combines textual and visual analysis, the study examines 10 hip-hop songs and 77 memes from five meme groups shared across Facebook and YouTube. The findings reveal that these cultural forms served as tools of hybrid cultural resistance , merging digital creativity with street activism, and as mechanisms for constructing collective identity and solidarity among protesters. The study argues that hip-hop and memes transformed everyday digital practices into critical political participation, challenging authoritarian control and inspiring civic engagement in protest.
This article examines how popular culture and play deal with the fear of death and supersession of humanity by technology. Barbie is corporeal, but immortal. Her persona allows devotees to project wishful-thinking into the unknown, populating the world and the future with humanoid hallucinations. Barbie has not turned to religion; she supplants religion. If she becomes mortal, she'll die. If she becomes digital, she'll be coming for you.
This article develops the concept of toxic capital to explain how antagonism, derision, and nationalist outrage are converted into value within China's platformised anime, comic, and game culture. Moving beyond celebratory accounts of participatory fandom and predominantly Anglophone discussions of fan toxicity, it examines the 2024 controversy surrounding The Game Awards (TGA) as a revealing case of conflict-driven cultural participation. Drawing on digital ethnography and 12 semi-structured interviews, the study identifies three interconnected forms of toxic capital. At the micro level, toxicity becomes a source of affective gratification. At the meso level, it becomes a resource for factional belonging, boundary-making, and status. At the macro level, it is translated into monetisable traffic within conflict-driven platform economies. The article argues that algorithmic visibility and engagement metrics increasingly reward aggression over expertise, producing a shift from cultural capital grounded in taste and knowledge to toxic capital organised around exposure, antagonism, and circulation. Toxicity, therefore, operates less as an aberration than as an infrastructural logic of contemporary platformised cultural production.
As a transnational cultural flow, Hallyu offers overseas Koreans a space in which to navigate their sense of diasporic belonging in the host society. Amid burgeoning research on Hallyu engagement among Korean diaspora communities, the Chosonjok (Korean Chinese) diaspora remains relatively overlooked, despite their being an integral part of the Korean diaspora. Chosonjok are often represented in Hallyu content as uncivilized and violent, rendering them conspicuous as subjects of representation, yet invisible as audiences. Adopting marginality as an analytical lens, this study examines how Chosonjok youth negotiate their diasporic belonging while consuming Hallyu. Semi-structured interviews with Chosonjok youth revealed that their diasporic belonging manifests as a paradox across two dimensions: mediated marginalization, evidenced in shifting proximities and temporal displacement, and reflexive marginality, articulated in contesting "Koreanness" and pursuit of cosmopolitan selfhood. This study enriches the literature on diasporic Hallyu and captures diasporic subjectivation through the prism of marginality.
This article contributes to studying cultural production and intermediaries through music streaming from an Eastern European perspective, answering recent calls to de-Westernise cultural and media studies. Theoretically, it combines critical approaches to the platformisation of the cultural industries and to cultural intermediaries with world-systems analysis. Through qualitative research conducted in Hungary, it explores the characteristic roles, strategies, and discourses of digital music distributors, often ignored yet key (trans)local intermediaries between local, semiperipheral musicians and global platforms. Characteristic discourses reproduced by digital distributors as cultural intermediaries are analysed through a framework of moral geopolitics wherein the Eastern European semiperipheral position informs discourses around technological and music industry development.
This article examines Latin America and the Caribbean's position within contemporary cultural globalization, foregrounding the structural contradiction between the region's cultural centrality and its persistent marginality in global cultural trade. Despite its cultural vitality, the region's participation in global trade remains marginal, accounting for only 3-4% of exports. This paradox is reinforced by statistical biases that obscure artisanal production, grassroots economies, and digital creativity, sustaining global inequalities. Yet Latin America is not passive space of incorporation: the international circulation of urban music, cinema, regional cooperation mechanisms, and state-led audiovisual policies reveal processes of hybridization that negotiate tradition and modernity under asymmetrical conditions. Engaging critically with UNESCO's framing of culture as a global public good, the article argues for participatory governance, regional integration, and a redefinition of cultural value beyond neoliberal rationalities to support cultural rights, citizenship, and sustainable development.
This article explores affective governance in Chinese reality TV, with a particular focus on See You Again, a divorce-themed program aired on the state-run platform Mango TV. Debuted in conjunction with the Civil Code amendment imposing a divorce cooling-off period, the show is a manifestation of state interest in fostering family stability and social order. Using critical discourse analysis, this research examines how the program constructs dissolution and rekindling of marital relationships in emotionally appealing ways, capitalizing on Confucian values, as well as traces of neoliberal self-management and personal transformation. See You Again does not deliver explicit ideological messages, but it mobilizes viewers through affective techniques connecting forms of emotional comfort with the nation's goals. This research contributes to the ongoing discussion of how reality television functions as a liminal cultural space which forges intimate life and mediates public reaction to state intervention into the private domain.
This article examines the discourse of positive Blackness and whiteness in the Instagram posts of Francia Elena M & aacute;rquez Mina, an Afro-Colombian activist and politician, through content analysis of 1006 posts across three periods: activism, presidential campaign, and vice presidency. M & aacute;rquez's election as vice president represents a historic milestone, signaling the potential for increased Black political representation in Colombia. Her Instagram discourse reflects both strategies of collective empowerment and the negotiation of institutional visibility within a predominantly White political landscape. The analysis highlights how social media mediates race, gender, and political legitimacy, enabling marginalized voices to contest structural exclusion. These findings underscore the critical role of digital platforms in amplifying Afro-Colombian perspectives, fostering discussions on race and politics, and illustrating the transformative potential of social media for activism and political participation.
This study examines the life-cycle of LiPu, a Chinese ACGN (Anime, Comics, Games, and Novels) AI-powered fandom platform that integrates AI-generated fan creation and automated chatbots, to analyze the reconfiguration of participatory fan production in human-community-machine interactions. Employing the walkthrough method and interviews, this study introduces the concept of "AI-mediated gamification of affective labor" (AGAL) which encompasses the gamification of fan creation into a memetic replication of AI-generated content templates (content creation), the quantification and incentivization of emotional investment via algorithmic governance (labor management), and the simulation of reciprocal parasociality to sustain engagement (engagement sustainability). The AGAL reveals a shift in fan production, from platforms that manage fan activities to platforms that generate the very content and relational fabric of those activities, enabling governance not only through algorithmic extension but also through generative infrastructure. This study offers an account of early possibilities, user practices, and structural challenges in this emerging field.
The 'Bollywood item number' - a sexually charged song-and-dance sequence prevalent in Hindi films - has become an integral part of contemporary media culture across India. Drawing on qualitative research methods conducted among Assamese youth aged 18-25 in two cities of Guwahati and Mumbai, this article investigates how young audiences in regional cultures engage with item numbers in everyday contexts. Revealing the ambivalent forces of anxiety and desire that coexist within the landscape of regional reception practices, the article highlights the tension between 'rational perception' and 'affective engagement', a central paradox of engaging with erotic media texts in Bollywood. Unpacking the affective and moral negotiations youth audiences undertake in engaging with Bollywood item numbers, the article argues that the 'item number' serves as a site for active identity construction and conscious self-making, constitution of a 'moral subject' that is informed by intersecting hierarchies of class, taste, region, and gender.
"Study-with-Me" (SWM) streaming is a burgeoning livestreaming genre in China that virtually connects learners to enhance their productivity. This study explores study influencers' inspirational labor, a form of speculative work that generates hope and aspiration in both themselves and viewers, reinforcing the neoliberal belief that success is attainable through persistent individual effort. Through in-depth interviews and virtual ethnography, this research reveals that the inspirational labor of SWM influencers is characterized by (1) performative authenticity, centered on presenting a model student image that deprioritizes monetization and physical attractiveness, and (2) emotional labor, involving the creation of a pleasing learning environment and the maintenance of the emotional stability required to motivate viewers. Middle-class status is a defining characteristic of these study influencers. This is evident in their limited interest in pursuing influencer monetization and their stronger desire to advance along more conventional and promising career paths in real life. For female study influencers in particular, their middle-class background functions as an important psychological buffer when dealing with online harassment. They tend to dismiss such hostility by framing the attackers as "failures" from the lower class, thus minimizing the emotional impact of misogynistic comments.
