Negotiating "Wanghuang": Chinese Gay Men’s Pornographic Practices on X

Abstract

This thesis examines a persistent tension in Chinese gay explicit content creation on X: many of them regularly post nude images and homemade sex videos, yet refuse to be called wanghuang, a commonly used label for those perceived as producing pornographic content or services. Taking this refusal as an analytic entry point, I treat wanghuang less as a stable practice-based identity and more as a contested label of social placement. Methodologically, I use qualitative digital ethnography, including long-term participatory observation since 2018, informal conversations, and twelve semi-structured interviews with members of this field, to trace how the label circulates in everyday talk, and how it sorts practices and persons into more or less acceptable positions. Drawing on Georges Bataille’s distinction between restricted and general economy and his vocabulary of the profane and the sacred, I argue that X’s platform logic functions as a profane ordering apparatus. Through metrification and monetization, erotic posting is translated into commensurable units of visibility and exchange, enabling creators to apprehend desire and exposure through an optimizable attention economy. At the same time, creators’ everyday micro-practices and affective ties mark out a surplus that cannot be fully absorbed into this restricted-economic logic, opening a sacred opening within platform life. The thesis concludes that wanghuang operates as a movable line of placement, with money serving as a key hinge for interpretation. It enables some creators to defend their legitimacy by resisting reductive readings, even as platform infrastructures continually pressure erotic practice toward measurability and exchange.