Virtually boyfriends: the ‘social factory’ and affective labor of male virtual lovers in China

As China continues to neoliberalize in the new millennium, the Internet and other social media also enable new subjects of affective labor to emerge. Since 2014, young men increasingly hawk 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. Using fieldwork data gathered from male virtual lovers, we argue that that their sale of immaterial affective labor substantiates Virno, P. (2004). A grammar of the multitude: For an analysis of contemporary forms of life. New York: Semiotext(e) idea of the social factory by demonstrating that social relations are indeed transforming (albeit incompletely) into relations of production.