(Un)doing Gender via Mobile Platform-Based Trading

This chapter begins with a puzzle: What causes the biased gender ratio and gender stereotyping of daigou practitioners? It appears that the degree of reliance on the operation of digital platforms and business objectives differentiate between two types of daigou practitioners: full-time mothers/housewives who rely on buying as their main source of income and actively market on Taobao or WeChat, and others for whom daigou is part-time work done in their spare time. How does such a biased labor division connect with the normative expectation of female service workers on digital platforms, and how do practitioners’ platform-based trading practices react to fulfil such gendered expectations? I will show how and why the elements of platform-based trading practices are contextually adjusted to realize feminized service labor on social media platform interfaces.