Live streaming, intimate situations, and the circulation of same-sex affect: Monetizing affective encounters on Blued

Abstract

Drawing on interviews with 10 gay streamers and 30 viewers, this article analyzes a new feature of live streaming on Blued, a Chinese gay male dating app. Live streaming invites users to either perform themselves or watch others perform. Unlike western gay dating apps that monetize users’ hooking-up encounters, the business model behind Blued instead capitalizes on affective encounters among gay streamers and viewers. Through paid virtual gifts, which circulate as affective signs, live streaming fosters and intensifies viewers’ intimate attachment to gay streamers. The virtual intimacy produced by gay live streaming entails a significant economic dimension, and is therefore stigmatized. In consequence, gay streamers do not see streaming as sex-related work, and paying viewers do not portray gifts as consumption. In understating the economic and sexual underpinnings of affective encounters mediated by live streaming, gay streamers and viewers not only reinforce heteronormativity, but also produce homonormativity.