Post-human Digital Intimacy and Wellbeing: Affects, Women and Digital Technologies in East and Southeast Asia
This funded project explores the affective experiences of women who play women-oriented video games and intensively use emotional AI chatbots or companions in East and Southeast Asia. We examine the multi-facets of such more-than-human and more-than-digital intimacies between women and virtual characters.
Principle Investigators:
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Dr. Liang Ge (University of Manchester)
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Dr. Tingting Hu (Xi'an Jiaotong - Liverpool University)
Block 1: Women and Women-oriented Video Games (Otome Games)
Block 2: Women and Emotional AI
Block 3: Women and Virtual YouTubers
Research
Explore various research outputs from our projects, showcasing innovative findings and insights that contribute to academic discourse and knowledge advancement concerning the more-than-human, more-than-digital intimacies.
Block 1: Women and Video Games
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Ge, L., Hu, T., & Ouyang, M. (2025). Digital literacies of intimacy: women’s engagement and learning in otome video games. Information, Communication & Society, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2025.2587132
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Hu, T., & Ge, L. (2025). Datafication of Digital Intimacy: The Dual Logic of Empowerment and Commodification. Games and Culture, Online First. https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120251358522
Block 2: Women and AI Lovers
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Ge, L., & Hu, T. (2025). Gamifying intimacy: AI-driven affective engagement and human-virtual human relationships. Media, Culture & Society, 47(6): 1265-78. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437251337239
Block 3: Women Fans and Virtual YouTubers
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Hu, T., & Ge, L. (2025). Affective liquidity, synthetic bonds: VTubers as posthuman mediators of digital intimacies. New Media & Society, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251403091
Documentary: In Love with An AI (2025)
Mini Documentary
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In Love with An AI (Liang Ge with ARD TV, the German public broadcaster, 2025)
Engagement
Discover our public talks, workshops, screenings, and events that bring the project into conversation with wider audiences beyond academia. This section highlights how our research on post-human digital intimacies, women and technologies is shared, discussed, and debated across public, cultural, and scholarly spaces. From invited talks to collaborative events, these activities extend the project’s engagement with contemporary questions of affect, wellbeing, and more-than-human relations in East and Southeast Asia.
Liang Ge: Public Talk at Lobourough University, London Campus, February 2026
Liang Ge: Presentation at Ordinary Intimacies Symposium, Manchester, April 2026
Liang Ge & Tingting Hu: Invited Talk - Gamifying Intimacy: AI-Driven Affective Engagement, at 22nd Chinese Internet Research Conference (CIRC) Peking University, July 2025
Tingting Hu & Liang Ge: Invited keynote - Datafication of Digital Intimacy, Transnational Media in China: A Global Perspective Talk Series, University of Exeter, June 2025
Tingting Hu: Presentation: Datafication of Digital Intimacy: Female Sexual Fantasy in Otome Games at the 21st Chinese Internet Research Conference (CIRC), ADM+S Centre, Brisbane Australia, July 2024