The working of affect and emotion around the retranslation and (pre-)reception of Barbie on social media: A cross-platform analysis
This study focuses on the retranslation process and (pre-)reception of the film Barbie (2023) on two Chinese social media platforms, Red and WeChat, through the lens of affect. The retranslation in Chinese was self-commissioned, disseminated, and promoted by 秃炮怪 Tū Pào Guài (TPG), a subtitling collective lauded for their female-friendly and feminist stance by the mostly female audience. Informed by a relational understanding of affect, this study theorizes affect as latent potentialities and catalytic forces that shape encounters. To this end, the study traces online encounters by examining related posts and audience comments on both Red and WeChat regarding Barbie’s retranslation and (pre-)reception. The findings suggest that TPG’s retranslation, embedded in the collective’s affective labor, intersected with audience emotion work. This intersection manifested as audiences actively acknowledged TPG’s translatorial efforts through both verbal cues and less- or non-verbal expressions of appreciation. While TPG’s strategic stance-taking, presentation, and promotion of their retranslation facilitated an indisputably positive pre-reception, some dissonance did emerge, prompting TPG to regulate audience responses to maintain their engagement. This study demonstrates how affect can be methodologically applied in TS, showing its operationalization and theoretical explanatory power. By foregrounding the role of affect, this research advances the understanding of feminist cybersubtitling as a social practice, revealing such subtitling as a site of affective and digital labor that is intricately shaped by the affective architectures of social media.
Publication history
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The so-called ‘affective turn’ (Clough and Halley 2007; Gorton 2007, 333) has led researchers in both social sciences and humanities since the late-1990s to question the entanglements between the emotional, affective, sensorial, and social formations (Gregg and Seigworth 2010). It has gained significant traction in the highly mediatized era where affect and emotion are viewed as “driving forces in contemporary media and society” (Lünenborg and Maier 2018, 1). Scholars conceptualize affect in multiple ways, largely shaped by their disciplinary backgrounds, ranging from Cultural Studies (where studies of affect are mostly grounded), Psychology and Neuroscience, Feminist (Media) Studies, Translation Studies (hereafter TS), and so on. For example, in an important edited volume on the study of affect, The Affect Theory Reader (Gregg and Seigworth 2010), affect is understood as potential — “a body’s capacity to affect and to be affected” (2; emphasis in original). In TS, Koskinen (2020) emphasizes the dynamic, social, and interpersonal nature of affect in translatorial activities, and there has been an ongoing shift in the discipline towards recognizing affect (and emotion) as integral to translation as a fundamentally social and communicative practice. This is attested by the growing scholarly interest in the topic (Koskinen 2020; Spezzatti, Monzón, and Goemans 2026) in different sub-areas, for example, in interpreting (Hokkanen 2017; Ruiz Rosendo 2021; Xi 2023), in amateur and fan translation (Pérez-González 2016; Lee 2019; Mo and Jin 2023), and in theater translation and queer contexts (Baldo 2019, 2023; Huddleson 2023). However (with some exceptions), previous research on affect in TS either predominantly departs from a cognitive and psychological perspective (Hubscher-Davidson 2018) instead of a socio-cultural one or lacks a fuller and direct engagement with the notion of affect in their analyses (see the critiques from Koskinen 2020, 8–10; Baldo 2023, 9; Mo and Jin 2023, 263; Spezzatti, Monzón, and Goemans 2026).