Curating Unmarked Banality

Abstract

Bindi Kang's ‘Curating Unmarked Banality’ explores the digital videos in Jingjing's Life Journal on Today's Headlines and examines the seemingly ordinary and repetitive nature of vlogs by migrant workers, uncovering their captivating appeal to online audiences. The research argues that the vlogging of mundane life offers an updated narrative of migrant workers' urban experience, creating a contemporary Asian worker's rendition of the flâneur–a classical literary archetype known for its associations with urban public life and leisurely observation. By self-documenting their daily experiences, these workers are shown to challenge the conventional urban-rural binary that prevails in Chinese mainstream media portrayals. These vlogs serve as an act of 'reverse (un)marking', reaffirming and showcasing a mediated urban identity for the migrant population. The analysis adopts Peggy Phelan's concept of the 'unmarked'–which examines the ideology of visibility and its relation to power in performance–and Wayne Brekhus's sociological extension of the term to critique the disproportionate focus on the 'marked' in academic inquiry. Through 'reverse marking', this research discusses the significance of these digital narratives in the broader cultural landscape, examining how such mediated performances engage with issues of visibility, representation and identity formation of traditionally underrepresented groups.

Notes

1 This article focuses on Jingjing’s self-media vlogs before 2019, when they lived in Shenzhen, to examine her work as a migrant worker. In 2019, she and her husband moved from Shenzhen to Hunan.