Dare to Dream, Dare to Livestream: How E-Commerce Livestreaming Empowers Chinese Rural Women

China has witnessed rapid growth in its e-commerce markets and livestreaming communities in recent years. The commercialization of livestreaming has led to the rise of e-commerce livestreamers, among which rural women constitute a substantial portion. To understand the motivations underlying these women's choices to engage in livestreaming activities and probe the extent to which they are empowered by this new form of entrepreneurship, we conducted an interview-based study with rural female livestreamers. We found that these women chose to be livestreamers for practical and self-presentation purposes and they gained a sense of self-empowerment through economic, social, intellectual, psychological, and spiritual dimensions. At the same time, however, they experienced and confronted social stigmas rooted in rural societies and the strategies they used to deal with these biases were vastly different. Our work contributes to the HCI community by providing a nuanced understanding of the motives and lived experiences of rural female livestreamers and offers design implications that could improve the everyday experiences of these livestreamers.

• Human-centered computing → Human computer interaction (HCI); Empirical studies in HCI.