Domesticating Difference: Platformed Visibility and Racialized Narratives in African-Chinese Interracial Family Videos on Douyin
(2026) MKVM13 20261Media and Communication Studies
Department of Communication and Media
- Abstract (Swedish)
- Short videos featuring transnational marriage content involving African women and Chinese men (African-Chinese Interracial Family videos, hereafter ACIF) have gradually formed a stable content genre on Douyin in China. This generic stability is shaped by platform mechanisms, genre conventions, and accumulated audience expectations. Yet how this genre frames marital relationships and organizes race and gender relations remains underexamined. This study takes relational configuration as the core unit of analysis, focuses on how marital relationships are visually and narratively configured in ACIF, and further examines how race and gender are embedded and reproduced in this process.
This study adopts an interpretivist and social... (More) - Short videos featuring transnational marriage content involving African women and Chinese men (African-Chinese Interracial Family videos, hereafter ACIF) have gradually formed a stable content genre on Douyin in China. This generic stability is shaped by platform mechanisms, genre conventions, and accumulated audience expectations. Yet how this genre frames marital relationships and organizes race and gender relations remains underexamined. This study takes relational configuration as the core unit of analysis, focuses on how marital relationships are visually and narratively configured in ACIF, and further examines how race and gender are embedded and reproduced in this process.
This study adopts an interpretivist and social constructionist approach and employs a
multimodal interpretive framework. By combining descriptive analysis of relational
configuration coding and engagement data with critical race and gender analysis, this study systematically examines 74 videos from 9 accounts. The analysis identified five stable relational configurations across accounts: Solitary Labor Configuration, Collaborative Couple Configuration, Male-Framed Configuration, Cultural Integration Configuration, and Affective Confirmation Configuration. These five configurations differ systematically in their organization of labor, narrative control, and visual arrangement. The comparison of engagement data shows that the videos with the highest engagement rates do not come from the most common configuration. On the contrary, when racial or cultural differences are placed within specific narrative contexts and “resolved” through labor, interaction, or emotional expression, overall engagement increases significantly. Critical analysis further shows that labor is simultaneously naturalized as both “female responsibility” and “integration cost;” the gaze structure operates at three layers: visual control, comment marking, and creative strategic adjustment. The dual-track logic of content standardization and strategic re-racialization further reveals that race does not disappear from the narrative but is reorganized through platform visibility and audience interaction. Theoretically, this study contributes in three connected ways. By shifting the analytical unit from discourse-level reproduction to relational configuration, it opens an analytical path that moves beyond single-level discourse analysis in interracial media research. Building on this,the study integrates platform visibility mechanisms and relational reproduction into a unified analytical framework, explaining why the genre stabilizes into the forms it does through the mutual reinforcement of algorithmic feedback and genre practice. These two moves together ground the third contribution: the development of “conditional acceptance” as a localized analytical concept that advances understanding of how the logic of ‘doing race’ operates within China’s specific platform ecosystem. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
https://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/9226423
- author
- Bian, Jian LU
- supervisor
- organization
- course
- MKVM13 20261
- year
- 2026
- type
- H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
- subject
- keywords
- Interracial marriages, African-Chinese Interracial Family, Genre, Platform Visibility
- language
- English
- id
- 9226423
- date added to LUP
- 2026-06-05 15:46:25
- date last changed
- 2026-06-05 15:46:25
@misc{9226423,
abstract = {{Short videos featuring transnational marriage content involving African women and Chinese men (African-Chinese Interracial Family videos, hereafter ACIF) have gradually formed a stable content genre on Douyin in China. This generic stability is shaped by platform mechanisms, genre conventions, and accumulated audience expectations. Yet how this genre frames marital relationships and organizes race and gender relations remains underexamined. This study takes relational configuration as the core unit of analysis, focuses on how marital relationships are visually and narratively configured in ACIF, and further examines how race and gender are embedded and reproduced in this process.
This study adopts an interpretivist and social constructionist approach and employs a
multimodal interpretive framework. By combining descriptive analysis of relational
configuration coding and engagement data with critical race and gender analysis, this study systematically examines 74 videos from 9 accounts. The analysis identified five stable relational configurations across accounts: Solitary Labor Configuration, Collaborative Couple Configuration, Male-Framed Configuration, Cultural Integration Configuration, and Affective Confirmation Configuration. These five configurations differ systematically in their organization of labor, narrative control, and visual arrangement. The comparison of engagement data shows that the videos with the highest engagement rates do not come from the most common configuration. On the contrary, when racial or cultural differences are placed within specific narrative contexts and “resolved” through labor, interaction, or emotional expression, overall engagement increases significantly. Critical analysis further shows that labor is simultaneously naturalized as both “female responsibility” and “integration cost;” the gaze structure operates at three layers: visual control, comment marking, and creative strategic adjustment. The dual-track logic of content standardization and strategic re-racialization further reveals that race does not disappear from the narrative but is reorganized through platform visibility and audience interaction. Theoretically, this study contributes in three connected ways. By shifting the analytical unit from discourse-level reproduction to relational configuration, it opens an analytical path that moves beyond single-level discourse analysis in interracial media research. Building on this,the study integrates platform visibility mechanisms and relational reproduction into a unified analytical framework, explaining why the genre stabilizes into the forms it does through the mutual reinforcement of algorithmic feedback and genre practice. These two moves together ground the third contribution: the development of “conditional acceptance” as a localized analytical concept that advances understanding of how the logic of ‘doing race’ operates within China’s specific platform ecosystem.}},
author = {{Bian, Jian}},
language = {{eng}},
note = {{Student Paper}},
title = {{Domesticating Difference: Platformed Visibility and Racialized Narratives in African-Chinese Interracial Family Videos on Douyin}},
year = {{2026}},
}