Officially cancelled but eternally remembered: the queering paradox of Chinese comedic influencers through multi-platform mediation

This article explores an alternative, comedic, lowbrow and queer(ed) group of Internet celebrities and influencers who developed a significant following amongst Chinese Internet vernacular cultures. These personalities sit at the intersection of state censorship, platform commercialisation, and subcultural resistance in an everyday sense, mediating gendered, classed, and sexualised discourses on Chinese social media platforms such as TikTok (Douyin) and Bilibili. Using a unique case of Guo Laoshi (郭老师 Guofucius) and her comedic Guotian (Guo language) with a cult following of 7 million, we demonstrate how gendered, classed and (de)sexualised groups benefit from the production and consumption of non-conforming narratives, humorous tropes and tactics, who are otherwise rendered invisible and hardly known in the Chinese mediascape. We argue that marginalised groups are empowered through alternative place-making where their identities get recognised, performed, rehearsed, and presented into being. We further offer critique on how such supposedly empowering tactics and place-making get appropriated and co-shaped by platformisation and state censorship in a Chinese context using a concept of ‘queering paradox’, where queered subjects and discourses get targeted and officially cancelled by the state while being regenerated and remembered through playful prosumption of fans from marginalised groups in China.