Despite popular understandings of the docusoap genre of reality television being about drama and bad behavior, friendship between women is the organizing logic of these shows’ social worlds, running the spectrum from contentious relationships to close friendships to diegetic expressions of homoerotic attraction. Through the framework of homosociality—which suggests a porous boundary between the platonic and the erotic—I attend to the implications of these polysemous relationships, focusing on the displacement of heterosexual unions to the narrative periphery, the quasi-political ethic of women’s homosociality, and the metaphor of marriage that is frequently used to define women’s friendships in the genre. The constructed social worlds of these highly produced and mediated programs are largely predicated on homosocial arrangements. Ultimately, docusoap homosociality is productively ambiguous, suggesting alternative forms of social organization outside of and beyond the marital home.
Eroticism has surged across social feeds as a lucrative trend. In China's hyper-monitored digital landscape, however, it not only survives but thrives in unexpected, diverse forms. To explore this alternative platform-based cultural creation, this study examines the risky yet prevalent soft eroticism known as cabian ((sic)(sic) content and practices that hit the edge of rules). Drawing on online and offline participatory observation, we investigate how soft eroticism is manufactured through the interplay of content production and moderation. The findings demonstrate that cabian reconfigures "platformized bodies" by weaving semiotic, technical, and moral bodies into subjective eroticism situated in a regulatory liminal zone. Accordingly, content moderation has evolved from relevant content filtering into "relational moderation," targeting the networks among users, platforms, and the state that sustain monetized eroticism production. The co-construction of content production and moderation reveals that embodiment not only embeds within but actively reshapes the logic of platformization.
This study examines platformed television reception through the case of Ruyi’s Royal Love in the Palace , a controversial Chinese women-centred gongdou (palace intrigue) drama. Drawing on qualitative analysis of high-traffic videos and comments, this study demonstrates how participatory commentary on Bilibili circulate and vernacularise collective meaning-making around affective ambivalence, moral tension and evaluative shifts. Rooted in the drama’s narrative contradictions, particularly its representation of female agency and mobilisation of victimhood logic, this study explores how critical discourses are structured through the interaction of influencer-led interpretive framing, algorithmic amplification and audience affective engagement. While viewers appropriate influencer frameworks through vernacular and cross-textual critique, interpretive authority remains concentrated among highly visible creators. By foregrounding the interplay between television texts, influencer mediation and platform logics, this study contributes to digital television studies by demonstrating how participatory commentary cultures reshape feminist critique within Chinese digital culture.
Pod Save America (PSA) is the flagship show of Crooked Media—a venture designed to build liberal media infrastructure and counter the Trump administration in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Drawing on Wodak’s discourse-historical approach (2001), this paper examines interviews and media coverage of the podcast, with particular focus on the “Resistance” movement of 2017 and 2020/2024 elections, to analyze its contested status as an alternative voice within the liberal media ecosystem. The podcast’s evolution reveals an agonistic identity born of a partisanship deploying the affective registers of alternative media in service of institutional Democratic politics, fueling its success during the first Trump administration and constraining its ability to offer meaningful critique during the Biden years. Ultimately, analysis of PSA demonstrates both the possibilities and limitations of composite approaches to alternative media development in a period of media fragmentation and partisan polarization.
This paper examines recent Chinese televisual portrayals of women’s revenge against men who abuse their gender privileges afforded by patriarchy. Focusing on two recent women-centered Chinese dramas as case studies, I interrogate how women’s revenge against male villains is represented on television and received by audiences. I characterize both narratives as “unfinished,” insofar as structural gender injustice is rendered visible and questioned but not dismantled through women-led revenge. Online audience comments express resentment at this very incompleteness, thereby problematizing the popular feminist promise of happiness. At the same time, feminist rage against gender injustice becomes entangled with grievances at fictional characters, cast members, and other marginalized groups in reality. By critically examining targets of women’s rage on and off the screen, I suggest that feminist scholar should not treat rage as a monolithic or inherently politically productive affect, but rather be cautious about its potential appropriation for non-emancipatory ends.
