Affective Visibility: Monetizing Care Work and Emotional Labor Among Full-Time Mothers on Douyin

Abstract

Full-time mothers in China have increasingly turned to Douyin—China’s most influential short-video platform—as a space to showcase, narrate, and monetize their everyday caregiving practices. Drawing on a feminist political economy and affective labor framework, this study examines how mothers convert intimate domestic routines and emotional performances into public-facing digital commodities within China’s visibility-driven platform economy. While motherhood in China has traditionally been coded as private, unpaid, and morally valorized labor, Douyin introduces new economic possibilities through algorithm-driven exposure, influencer culture, and participatory audiences. Through a qualitative content analysis of 20 high-visibility Douyin accounts belonging to full-time mothers, this study reveals how care work, emotional warmth, maternal vulnerability, and “authentic” domestic routines become central currencies in the pursuit of attention, followers, and monetized partnerships. The findings show that affective labor—ranging from displays of patience and affection to curated depictions of exhaustion, self-sacrifice, and family intimacy—functions as a form of entrepreneurial visibility that enables mothers to reposition domestic labor as economically valuable. However, this monetization process is heavily shaped by platform logic: the algorithm prioritizes emotionally resonant content, viewers reward idealized maternal personas, and platform marketplaces commercialize family intimacy. As a result, full-time mothers must navigate a complex tension between empowerment and exploitation, authenticity and performance, agency and algorithmic pressure. This study argues that Douyin transforms motherhood into a public commodity, amplifies gendered expectations of care, and embeds affective labor within China’s rapidly expanding attention economy. In doing so, it contributes to scholarship on digital labor, affective economies, and the gendered dynamics of platform capitalism.