Youth culture of self-mockery: bodily memes and economies of affect in China’s online space

This article provides a general picture of the decade-long self-mockery culture in China’s online space, unraveling its generative mechanism in the mediascape from both macro and micro perspectives. On the macro level, it historicizes the emergence of three emblematic cases: diaosi (dick hair), sang (grieving), and tang ping (lying flat), highlighting the central roles of digital media and the attention economy while teasing out the evolving affects and consistent threads, including the recurring theme of the body. On the micro level, the article probes into the agency of actual meme users, employing focus group discussions and interviews. It discovers their varied interpretations, practices, and motivations while uncovering the performativity, contradictions, and transformations of emotions embedded in the memetic articulations. The article concludes by proposing a dual-economy model, in which the affective economy interacts with the attention economy and operates at both the macro level of cultural production and the micro level of everyday communication.