Not A Love Message: Gender and Intimacy as Spatial Practices in Online Tarot Reading

Abstract

This thesis explores how space functions as a central organizing logic in online Tarot readings on China’s video-sharing platform Bilibili, shaping experiences of gender, intimacy, and collective meaning-making. Using a poststructuralist theoretical framework consisting of Michel Foucault’s heterotopia, Michel de Certeau’s spatial practices, and Lauren Berlant’s intimate public, the study analyzes four videos by a popular Tarot reader and hundreds of viewer-participants’ comments through digital ethnography and thematic analysis. Four key findings emerge. First, gender in online Tarot reading is reimagined as a heterotopic space, where the use of Chinese cosmological Yin-Yang principles softens rigid binary roles. Second, viewer-participants move between Tarot videos and comment sections like walkers, creating flexible spaces for confession, reflection, and shared meaning. Third, online Tarot generates a relational public in which personal stories, collaborative interpretations, and peer validation blur the line between private emotion and shared experience. Fourth, online Tarot spaces are constantly enacted through rhetorical movements yet often usurped by dominant romantic scripts that overwrite inclusive relational possibilities. This study positions online Tarot as a spatialized practice where people move, dwell, and connect. By foregrounding space, it highlights how gender and intimacy are not only represented but actively shaped through the emotional and architectural contours of digital life.