Materializing the virtual? Post-digital intimacy and women players of otome video games in China

This article challenges the dematerialization bias in digital intimacy studies and the sociological assumption that digital capitalism dissolves social bonds (alienation) by examining how Chinese female otome video game players materialize and embody their virtual relationships in their everyday life. While there is a rich literature on screen-based interactions, this study uses a multi-sited ethnography (2021–2024), including 106 participant interviews, to analyze the lived, material practices of post-digital intimacy . We present two case studies representing distinct modalities of embodied post-digital intimacy. The first, cotton doll attachment, reveals an object-as-medium for achieving perpetual presence. Through community-driven prosumption and the affective labor of reconfigured nurturing, the doll functions as a tactile avatar and affective anchor that stabilizes the ephemeral affect of the digital game. The second, the cosplay commission date, utilizes a human-as-medium to create an intense, multi-sensory ephemeral co-presence. This practice is a hyperreal, commodified, and fragile assemblage. By developing an embodied post-digital intimacy framework, we argue these material practices are not peripheral but are central components of a more-than-human intimate assemblage, one in which these Chinese young women’s affective labors function as imaginative negotiations with the gendered realities of post-socialist China.