The managed sisterhood: Gendered labor and intimacy in Chinese fashion influencer industry

As China’s leading multi-channel network (MCN) institutions become increasingly industrialized and bureaucratic, their operations are paradoxically characterized by intensified emotional dynamics. Drawing on ethnographic research within a women-dominated fashion influencer team, this study identifies a sisterhood-based production model that embeds sisterly ties within hierarchical organizational structures. It traces the formation and collapse of this managed sisterhood. By cultivating an illusion of unity and belonging, intimacy makes labor more governable, obscuring coercion while facilitating the mobilization of emotional, aesthetic, and physical capacities. In this way, sisterhood becomes integral to production, intensifying labor and rendering precarity routine. Under platform capitalism, traditional Chinese sisterhood, once grounded in kinship and flexible resistance, is reconfigured into an occupational form of informal labor control, producing “disposable kinship” in which affective bonds become temporary and replaceable. This study challenges dominant political readings of sisterhood and demonstrates how intimacy itself becomes a mechanism of governance within platform capitalism.