Jianqing Chen

My research combine a global perspective with critical race and feminist approaches to investigate digital media, big data and AI. My current book Touch Screen: Everyday Media in Contemporary China addresses touchscreen users’ differences in race, gender, sexuality, and social class status that the normative historical narrative of digital media technologies often ignores or reinforces. The book also highlights Chinese female touchscreen user’ efforts and struggles to combat the racial and gendered biases that media technologies conspire to amplify. In the chapter about selfie retouching practices, I study Chinese female users’ digital production of “fair and flawless” faces as their ideal self-images through the simplified or automatic facial retouching process enabled by the popular beauty app, Meitu. Chinese women’s digitally produced whitefaces, I contend, perform a controversial gendered and racialized ideal, which negates the socialist portrayal of women featuring technicolor-enhanced rosy cheeks and their assigned gender roles in socialist agricultural modernization. Simultaneously confirming and contesting white supremacist logic, the digital production of whiteface is symptomatic of the dilemma confronting East Asians when encountering Western skin tone-based racial hierarchy. In this book and elsewhere in my research, I explore how a critical race approach reimagines the ways we critique and engage contemporary technological systems.