Becoming a ‘Chinese wife’: digital subjectivity, platform geopolitics, and the aesthetics of Ugandan influencer Rose Adikin’s media ecology

Digital media is the latest form of global communication, enabling political, economic, and cultural interactions at the macro level while simultaneously mediating these encounters into micro-level inter-user engagements. This paper argues that digital media platforms register and reinforce disparities of race, gender, and geopolitics within the ostensibly mundane practices of everyday content production and consumption. This paper focuses on the figure of the ‘digital subject’ that emerges on digital platforms – specifically, influencers who exploit platform logics to construct an online persona while subtly negotiating existing stereotypes to attract audiences and generate profit. I examine the case of social media influencer Rose Mary Adikin, a Ugandan woman who married a Chinese man and moved to Zhejiang, China. Her videos construct an image of everyday life as a rural ‘Chinese wife’, yet they also leverage the spectacular tension between her performance of ‘Chineseness’ and her racialised Black body, the asymmetrical gender dynamics within her household, and her shifting personas across different platforms. The gaps between Rose’s visible performance as a typical Chinese rural housewife and the invisibilized aspects of her African origins are constitutive of her digital subjectivity. Far from signalling a failure in self-representation, these gaps generate a unique pleasure in witnessing a mimicry that is ‘almost the same, but never fully Chinese’. The construction of digital subjectivity in her videos, and the constitutive gaps embedded within them, illuminate the complex mechanisms shaping Africa–China dynamics in popular visual culture, shedding light on the paradoxical nature of online self-representation, which simultaneously reflects and responds to the desires of others.