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‘Broadcast yourself’, the slogan of YouTube, captures the essence of social media as platforms for self-presentation, friendship maintenance, and impression management (boyd & Ellison 2008). Indeed, over the last fifteen years, social media have not only spawned new forms of cultural production and participation (e.g. posting, commenting, ‘stories’, memes) but have also engendered new ways of being—and of becoming famous. It is now possible for completely unknown, ‘ordinary’ individuals to amass a great number of social media followers and in that process also to monetize on their online fame. The success of these ordinary celebrities hinges on the creation and distribution of original content across multiple platforms and the curation of a visible and distinct persona capable of sustaining a loyal audience (Khamis, Ang, & Welling 2017).
Given the cultural salience of such microcelebrities and social media influencers, analyses of their carefully performed online selves constitute a growing area of scholarly research into the cultural and communicative aspects of self-presentational digital media. This article is aligned with this scholarship through its focus on the mediated communicative activities of a Chinese online microcelebrity, Jiang Yilei (姜逸磊), better known by her stage name Papi Jiang. Papi has been highly popular in China, with 34,828,000 followers on Tik Tok and 6,379,000 fans on bilibili, both popular among teenagers, and 3,100,000 followers on the more established Chinese video-sharing platform IQIYI, at the time of writing. Many of Papi's videos, certainly the subset examined in this article, can be read as critical-satirical commentaries on contemporary social issues in China such as consumerism, gender norms, and family relations. Yet the topics of her videos alone are insufficient to account for Papi's massive popularity; the key to her fame and resonance with audiences must also come from the
This article aims to explore how the sociolinguistic notions of stance and style could be usefully employed to empirically analyze mediated performances as constructions of microcelebrity personae. We are by no means the first ones to analyze style/ing in relation to performance; in fact staged performances specifically have been studied in the last ten years as important sites for sociolinguistic creativity and critique (Podesva 2007; Bell & Gibson 2011; Coupland 2011; Koven...