ABSTRACT
As China further neoliberalizes, social media also enables new subjects of affective labour to emerge. Since 2014, young men increasingly hawk their services as xuni lianren (virtual lovers) online. While these men neither sell sex nor meet their clients in person, they otherwise behave as actual boyfriends would: they talk to clients online for leisure and provide relief from the frustrations of family and work. Using fieldwork data gathered from male virtual lovers, we argue that their sale of immaterial affective labour substantiates Virno’s (2004) idea of the social factory that unmoors value-extraction from fixed physical spaces.
