Censoring the Body and Reading the Moves: Queer Male Dances as Translation on Xiaohongshu in Mainland China

Revisiting Lefevere’s (1992) question - “Who controls the ‘logic of the culture’?” – this article examines queer male “edge-teasing” dance videos on Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book) as a form of survival-oriented inter-semiotic translation under circulatory digital patronage. Dance creators “translate” K-pop and Euro-American street-dance repertoires, i.e., strategically trans-creating verbally censored queer desire into deniable, affectively charged somatic codes (such as bodily gesture, formations, and movements) that evade text-based moderation while remaining legible to queer viewers (Baer & Kaindl 2018; Massumi 2002).

Extending queer translation studies to platform ecologies (Baer, 2017; Kaindl, 2021), the study conceptualise dancers as translators, dancing bodies as translated texts, and platform algorithms as ideological “editor-patrons” that exert the evaluative, valuative, and governmental forces. These forces shape visibility through recommendation logics prioritizing engagement metrics (likes, shares, saves) over moral or political propriety, thereby generating contingent queer visibility. Comment threads interact with the creator-translator through euphemistic language, collective decoding, and shared interpretation, stabilizing precarious somatic meanings and co-constructing the translated text in real time.

Profit-driven algorithms cluster “coded bodies” into fragile, algorithmically sustained “protector bubbles” (Zhou, 2024), enabling a “third space” (Oldenburg, 1989) of negotiation that resists full erasure despite shadowbanning and moderation pressures (Zhao, 2024). Methodologically, the analysis employs platform ethnography, including video scraping, multimodal analysis of choreography with visual and somatic elements, and examination of engagement metrics to trace the paradoxes of circulatory patronage: while algorithmic governance constrains queer legibility through pre-emptive moderation, engagement imperatives inadvertently foster niche queer ecologies and affective circulation via the inter-semiotic translations of dances.

By framing circulatory digital patronage as algorithmic modulation of cultural and affective flows, and somatic coding as a tactical form of inter-semiotic transcreation that renders queer desire unspeakable yet circulable, this study aims to bridge translation studies and queer platform scholarship. It highlights how creators, interactive commenters (as paratextual co-translators), and profit-driven algorithms collectively enable precarious yet resilient queer meaning-making and survival tactics within restrictive, algorithmically governed digital environments.


Keywords: digital patronage; queer translation; inter-semiotic translation; circulatory patronage; algorithmic governance; Xiaohongshu