More than selling food: The affective labor of rural and small cities female creators in China

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.