The real digital househusbands of China: The alienable affects of China’s male ‘virtual lovers’

Abstract

As China continues to neoliberalize in the new millennium, the Internet also enables new subjects of affective labour to emerge. Since 2014, young men have been hawking their services as xuni lianren (‘virtual lovers’) on popular Chinese websites. These men explicitly state that while they neither sell sex nor meet their clients in person, they behave otherwise as actual boyfriends would: over chatting apps, they talk to clients for leisure and provide relief from frustrations accumulated from family, school and work. We frame this study as one of the ‘digital housewife’, a conceptual figure who produces two use-values of alienable user data and inalienable affects like offline houseworkers do. Male virtual lovers, however, commodify even their supposedly inalienable affects, so we argue that they (as digital househusbands) embody digital housewife-ness even more so than Jarrett’s original formulation.