Liang Ge (they/them)

This paper examines a rapidly expanding human–nonhuman digital intimacy. We explore how women players form deep affective attachments with virtual male characters in women-oriented otome games in their everyday life💫 A core contribution is our proposal of the concept “digital intimacy literacies.”

We use the term “digital intimacy literacies” to describe the set of socio-technical, affective, sensory, and narrative competencies through which women players learn to interpret, negotiate, and cultivate intimate relationships in digital environments.

Digital literacies of intimacy: women’s engagement and learning in otome video games This article explores the concept of ‘digital intimacy literacies’ by analyzing how Chinese women gamers form deep emotional connections with virtual male characters in otome games. The study exami...

✨Thrilled to share our new article published in Information, Communication & Society: “Digital literacies of intimacy: women’s engagement and learning in otome video games”！！！ 🥳 💥 🎉

Open access link: doi.org/10.1080/1369...

TransDI Network Subscription How is intimacy changing in our hyper-connected world? The Transcultural Digital Intimacies Research Network brings together global researchers to explore diverse experiences of connection, affect, an...

💌 Join and Subscribe to our newsletter to stay updated on upcoming events, collaborations, and opportunities:
👉 www.liangge.blog/transdi-subs...

Let’s explore together how intimacy, technology, and culture intersect in today’s digital world.

Start or end of life? Advancing the Sociology of Life, Death & Bereavement The inaugural lecture of Professor Kate Reed, Department of Sociology.

INAUGURAL LECTURE:

🗣️ Start or end of life? Advancing the Sociology of Life, Death & Bereavement - Kate Reed

📅4-5pm Tues 29 Oct 2025
📌In person (University of Manchester) or online
🎟️Free, register via Eventbrite
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/start-or-e...

Big big congrats!🥳🥳🥳

YouTube video by Ryou L Ge China: Verliebt in eine KI (China: In Love with an AI)

Folks, please check out Liang's new mini documentary with the ARD German Media: In Love with An AI youtu.be/tIgXRkEPlZ8?...

@ioe.bsky.social @sriucl.bsky.social

Weltspiegel: China: Verliebt in eine KI - hier anschauen Millionen Chinesinnen spielen sogenannte „Dating Games“: Sie verlieben sich in eine virtuelle Figur auf einer spielerischen Ebene. Sehr viel ernster: Manche unterhalten sich so intensiv mit dem Chatbo...

It’s a very pleasant experience to work with Marie von Mallinckrodt and her team from ARD Germany on this mini-documentary project: In love with an AI 🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳!

Plz check it out here:
www.ardmediathek.de/video/weltsp...

Yay! Another output from our Posthuman digital intimacies project!!! This is our Women and Video Games block! Plz do check it out!

Speculative machines and us: more-than-human intuition and the algorithmic condition In the wake of Turing’s ‘universal machine’, this article foregrounds intuition as a generative concept and lens to unfold the affective genealogies of human-machine relations in post-war transatla...

Why is intuition is a generative concept and lens to unfold the affective genealogies of human-machine relations in post-war transatlantic cultures? 🤖✨👾 A key output for the @britishacademy.bsky.social 'Speculative Machines and Us' project! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

What happens when we centre ‘Asias’ in queer critique? The Queer Asia as Method editorial introduces a powerful framework to decolonise queer studies. #OnlineFirst @liangge11.bsky.social @jdanielluther.bsky.social @evacyli.bsky.social journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

We argue for examining how media technologies and transnational cultural flows across diverse Asian contexts shape, circulate and contest queernesses and Asian-nesses, offering rich ground for epistemological and methodological innovation❤️

❤️Our Queer Asia as Method framework challenges the Euro-American dominance often found within queer studies by centring the intricate, fluid intersections of ‘queernesses’ and ‘Asias’

Editorial introduction: Queer Asia as Method - Liang Ge, J Daniel Luther, Eva Cheuk-Yin Li, 2025 This introduction outlines the theoretical and methodological interventions proposed by the Crosscurrent special section, Queer Asia as Method, which interrogat...

✨New Pub Day! Since our Queer Asia as Method roundtable in 2021, our special issue Queer Asia as Method has now been published online first by Media Culture & Society!
Our editorial piece is here: doi.org/10.1177/0163...

China is cracking down on young women who write gay erotica At least 30 writers have been arrested across the country since February, a lawyer tells the BBC.

I have been interviewed by BBC News concerning the recent Haitang Incident: after last year’s detention of over 50 women danmei writers who produce explicit male-male romances and erotica in China, more women writers have been summoned this spring for www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

New job vacancy at TCRU! For a Lecturer (Teaching) in Social Psychology - 2.5 year post (www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...).

Please share widely! @sriucl.bsky.social @ioe.bsky.social @bps-social-psych.bsky.social

🎉 Announcing a new #ArtsBasedResearch toolkit!
Co-created by researchers @ucl.ac.uk & Wits University, it explores how creativity & the arts empower underserved communities.
A practical guide for researchers & practitioners.
📅 Coming 26 Jun.
@humeraiqbal.bsky.social @uclpophealthsci.bsky.social

Paper title: "The Haitang Incident 2024 and the ugliness of danmei culture/industry" by Liang Ge.

And @liangge11.bsky.social (@tcru-ucl.bsky.social) discussed the pressures facing danmei culture in China as it faces censorship and other challenges ⬇️

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

兰州警方跨省抓捕女性网络小说作者 法律与文学自由边界引发热议 近日，甘肃兰州警方展开大规模跨省抓捕行动，逮捕了多名创作耽美及R18题材的女性网络小说作者。这些作者中，既有在校大学生，也有刚入职的年轻职场新人，且不少人并未通过写作获得明显盈利。据知情人士透露，此次行动波及人数可能达到两三百人。

Radio Free Asia today on the #海棠文化 #Haiting arrests of mostly female #danmei authors, confirming what was shared on Weibo; also alleging the sweep was cross-province. Unlike the 2024 ≈50 arrests in Anhui, these weren't about profit but amount of traffic/number of clicks:

www.rfa.org/mandarin/she...

The Haitang Incident of 2024 exposed the precariousness of danmei (boys’ love) culture and its creators in China under the dual pressures of state surveillance and platform capitalism. I critically interrogate the Chinese danmei cultural ecology through ugliness – not as a state-imposed stigma but as a critical lens and a generative conceptual tool. Departing from previous scholarship’s binary framings of danmei as either resistance or escapism, ugliness reveals danmei as a site of struggles, where censorship, commercialisation and danmei creators and fans as affective communities entangle in unstable yet persistent ways. I interrogate the precarious position of Haitang Literature City authors, and reveal the ugly convergence of digital governance and economic exploitation. Furthermore, I explore the fragmentation of trust within the danmei community, where fear, survival and mistrust complicate solidarity. Centring ugliness as a productive analytic can move beyond the limitations of binary resistance narratives to better account for danmei culture’s messiness, contradictions and ambivalences.

(if you want to know more about the 2024 arrests, the rather brilliant scholar @liangge11.bsky.social, who teaches at UCL, published an article in March in EJCS: "The Haitang Incident 2024 and the ugliness of danmei culture/industry"—it's open access and they are VERY astute) doi.org/10.1177/1367...

Exploring digital intimacies across cultures!The Transcultural Digital Intimacies Research Network(TransDI)critically examines how technologies (AI, platforms, games, embodied technologies etc.) reshapes relationships, blurring online/offline lives and human/non-human connections! #DigitalIntimacies

✨Post-(socialist-)feminist sensibilities denote women's recognition of and response to the gendered culture and regulations of heteropatriarchy in post-socialist China and transnational post-feminism.... 3/3

✨I propose the novel concept of ‘post-(socialist-)feminist sensibilities’, which is embodied in the experiences of the one-child generation of Chinese urban young women who live as ambivalent desiring subjects. 2/3

✨I am so pleased to share that my article has been published in Feminist Theory today! This is the first piece for my exploration concerning China as Theory Generator and Danmei as a rich site for epistemic and methodological innovations.

Check out here⬇️ doi.org/10.1177/1464...

Drawing on 9-month autoethnographic engagement with the AI companion XingYe, we explore the very gamification of intimacy – a design paradigm that commodifies emotional labour by rendering affection efficient, quantifiable and achievement-oriented. @TransDINetwork

🥳🥳🥳I am extremely happy to share that our first research output on AI chatbot and gamifying digital intimacy, from our Posthuman Digital Intimacies project has now been published by Media Culture & Society! Please do check out here: doi.org/10.1177/0163...

•Feminisation of labor• understood here as a constant process of invisibility and vulnerability. Within the Chinese audio drama industry, female workers are stuck in invisibility, frequently find themselves relegated to backstage roles, and subject to an inflexible flexibility

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

✨In this 🆕 article, I examine the struggling lived experiences of women workers in the Chinese audio drama industry, and I reveal a pronounced process – the feminization of labor – within this burgeoning creative sector journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

In "The Haitang Incident 2024 and the ugliness of danmei culture/industry", Liang Ge explores the fragmentation of trust within the danmei community, where fear, survival and mistrust complicate solidarity. Read it here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....