4: Once Bitten, Twice Mediated: Gua Aesthetics on China's iXigua Platform

This paper compares the material politics and aesthetics of growing, harvesting, pickling, cooking, and eating of two Chinese rural microcelebrities. Gan Youqin, better known by her internet name, Qiaofu Jiumei (Smart 9^th Sister), and Li Ziqi, publish videos on iXigua, a popular online video-sharing platform owned by ByteDance (the parent company of TikTok). Literally “Love Watermelon,” iXigua has been instrumental in the People’s Republic of China’s digital-rural revitalization strategy, hosting live-streams of agricultural produce and consolidating rural internet celebrities’ vlogger personae. Insofar as the popular fruit serves as the symbolic plat-form for further fruit-related content; the necessitous, basic cutting-up of melons—that is, its divisibility and texture—surprisingly resonates with the language of digitization. By focusing on videos of cucumbers and watermelons in Gan and Li’s archives, I also identify similarities and differences in the two women’s representation of gendered, physical, and rural labor, as the latter intersect with and indirectly comment on social media’s increasingly ubiquitous capturing of attention and viewership as work.