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Humanities
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Labor Utopias and Dystopias
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Labor Utopias and Dystopias

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 January 2026) | Viewed by 11138

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Ping Zhu

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Literature, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA
Interests: Chinese modern literature; literary theory; women and gender studies; Chinese cinema

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Labor fundamentally shapes human existence, from our daily rhythms and social relationships to our deepest hopes and fears about the future. As global capitalism continues to redefine the boundaries between production and reproduction, the local and the global, nature and technology, and what is human and non-human, labor finds itself at the crossroads of dystopian threats—such as alienation, datafication, precarity, and environmental devastation—and utopian promises, including creative fulfillment, collective bonding, and human emancipation. This Special Issue examines how labor practices, discourses, and imaginaries oscillate between these poles, creating spaces for both oppression and liberation.

This Special Issue seeks to explore how labor practices, discourses, and imaginaries both reflect and resist the totalizing logic of market rationality. At the same time, it aims to highlight how labor gestures toward alternative forms of collective organization, community, and existence.

We welcome theoretically informed and interdisciplinary submissions that engage with labor at the intersection of other key axes of social power. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Platform capitalism and digital labor;
  • Artificial intelligence, automation, and posthuman labor;
  • Climate crisis and labor transformation;
  • Gender, affective labor, and social reproduction;
  • Labor, migration, and community;
  • Alternative modes of labor from the Socialist past and the Global South;
  • Labor, bodies, and health;
  • Labor, religion, and spirituality.

Prof. Dr. Ping Zhu
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • utopia and dystopia
  • global capitalism
  • posthuman labor
  • environment
  • gender

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Further information on MDPI's Special Issue policies can be found here.

Published Papers (5 papers)

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Research

12 pages, 442 KB  
Article
Governing Survival, Managing Excess: Selection, Evaluation, and Survival Labor in The Wandering Earth Franchise
by Zhuoyi Wang
Humanities 2026, 15(3), 47; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15030047 - 18 Mar 2026
Viewed by 645
Abstract
This article reads the recent Chinese sci-fi blockbuster franchise The Wandering Earth (2019) and The Wandering Earth II (2023) as linked thought experiments about planetary survival as governance. It argues that the franchise operationalizes survival through administrative techniques that allocate life chances and [...] Read more.
This article reads the recent Chinese sci-fi blockbuster franchise The Wandering Earth (2019) and The Wandering Earth II (2023) as linked thought experiments about planetary survival as governance. It argues that the franchise operationalizes survival through administrative techniques that allocate life chances and format subjects for compliance, including selection policy, evaluative procedures, and computational judgment. Drawing on feminist social reproduction theory, affective and emotional labor scholarship, and critical posthumanism, the article shows how the films redistribute life-making work under catastrophe by routing care, sacrifice, and intergenerational continuity through gendered paternal figures. Fathers become the privileged conduits through which attachment is rendered socially legible as authorized labor, while other forms of care remain structurally secondary unless crisis forces their instrumental uptake. At the same time, the franchise is preoccupied with the limits of procedural governance. Across both installments, paternal attachment repeatedly appears as a governance problem: it cannot be fully stabilized as procedure yet becomes actionable at system stress points. The survival regime thus depends on a recurrent sequence of emergency recruitment followed by retroactive legitimation, whether through official affect, selective recognition, containment, or memorialization. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Labor Utopias and Dystopias)
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18 pages, 1740 KB  
Article
Platformativity of Desire: Affective Labor, Libidinal Economy, and Prosumer Fantasy in Chinese Entertainment Live-Streaming
by Kun Qian
Humanities 2026, 15(2), 21; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15020021 - 28 Jan 2026
Viewed by 978
Abstract
This article examines labor relations in China’s entertainment live-streaming, where the state and private companies jointly regulate desire to secure political control and economic profit. Using Hao Wu’s documentary People’s Republic of Desire as a case study, I analyze how physical and affective [...] Read more.
This article examines labor relations in China’s entertainment live-streaming, where the state and private companies jointly regulate desire to secure political control and economic profit. Using Hao Wu’s documentary People’s Republic of Desire as a case study, I analyze how physical and affective labor are converted into emotional commodities circulated across platforms. Drawing on Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the “libidinal economy,” I argue that while desire carries the potential to disrupt economic structures, it is ultimately absorbed into sustaining the political-economic status quo in contemporary China. Moreover, engaging Thomas Lamarre’s notion of “platformativity,” I further show how video platforms interweave the political, economic, and psychic to sustain a “tittytainment” economy that masks ongoing labor exploitation. The rise of live-streaming thus offers a critical lens for understanding the shifting relations among capital, labor, technology, and state governance in the digital age. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Labor Utopias and Dystopias)
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14 pages, 2274 KB  
Article
The Impossibility of Representation: Delivery Riders and a Failed Storytelling in Li Jianjun’s The Metamorphosis (2024)
by Jasmine Yueming Li
Humanities 2025, 14(12), 237; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14120237 - 8 Dec 2025
Viewed by 733
Abstract
This essay analyzes Chinese theater director Li Jianjun’s play The Metamorphosis (Bianxingji) under Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of cultural capital. Reimagining Kafka’s Gregor Samsa as a package delivery rider in contemporary China, the play stages a failed narrative of storytelling through live-feed [...] Read more.
This essay analyzes Chinese theater director Li Jianjun’s play The Metamorphosis (Bianxingji) under Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of cultural capital. Reimagining Kafka’s Gregor Samsa as a package delivery rider in contemporary China, the play stages a failed narrative of storytelling through live-feed video and informs the impossibility of representing the riders’ labor resulting from the fragmented realities of postsocialist China. It thus challenges the middle-class writers’ efforts to transform delivery riders’ labor into a form of cultural capital and confronts the audience with the exploitative potential of their spectating position. Ultimately, the impossibility of representation staged by the play articulates the inequality and stratification that structures China at the postsocialist moment. The play interweaves three layers of narratives: Geligaoer’s family’s various forms of labor, documentary clips of real-life delivery riders in contemporary China, and an interplay between an external voice and the performers’ bodily movements. This layered narrative foregrounds the artificiality of storytelling and can be situated within the ongoing discussions in the recent decade in China, in which scholars and journalists attempt to secure their middle-class identities by transforming the riders’ laboring condition into a form of cultural capital. In contrast, the play stages the failure of the narrative of storytelling through a projection screen and live-feed cameras to inform the impossibility of a transparent representation of the delivery riders. By excluding the audience from the riders’ subjectivity, the play blocks the audience’s identification with the latter. Through the heavy beauty filter projected on the screen as a metaphor, the play confronts the audience with their own middle-class identity and warns them of the violence inherent in their spectating position. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Labor Utopias and Dystopias)
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21 pages, 387 KB  
Article
Escaping the Workshop: Writers from the Factory in China’s Early Reform Era (1978–1989)
by Sandy J. S. Zhang
Humanities 2025, 14(10), 189; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14100189 - 26 Sep 2025
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2131
Abstract
This article traces the trajectory of China’s dominant literary field as it shifted from proletarian to intellectual literature in the early reform era. It examines the conditions and cultural logic underlying the striking phenomenon whereby former industrial workers, once incorporated into the literary [...] Read more.
This article traces the trajectory of China’s dominant literary field as it shifted from proletarian to intellectual literature in the early reform era. It examines the conditions and cultural logic underlying the striking phenomenon whereby former industrial workers, once incorporated into the literary field, rapidly distanced themselves from the very genre historically rooted in their own industrial experiences, namely, worker literature. Focusing on writers emerging from factories and on Shanghai Literature—a journal once known for publishing worker literature. The article analyzes the reconfiguration of class and identity that accompanied China’s transition from its high socialist past. I argue that socialist worker literature never fully reconciled the structural antagonism between manual and mental labor. In the early reform era, factory-based writers appropriated literature as a mode of symbolic escape and ideological critique. Hence, literature itself became a site where the contradictions of socialist and capitalist modernity were negotiated and contested. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Labor Utopias and Dystopias)
15 pages, 10097 KB  
Article
The Disaster Empire in The Wandering Earth 2
by Ping Zhu
Humanities 2025, 14(3), 63; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14030063 - 13 Mar 2025
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 4541
Abstract
This paper analyzes how the 2023 Chinese science fiction blockbuster The Wandering Earth 2 constructs what I call a “disaster empire”—a biopolitical system that seamlessly integrates authoritarian governance with capitalist logic through the constant threat of catastrophe. Through close readings of the film’s [...] Read more.
This paper analyzes how the 2023 Chinese science fiction blockbuster The Wandering Earth 2 constructs what I call a “disaster empire”—a biopolitical system that seamlessly integrates authoritarian governance with capitalist logic through the constant threat of catastrophe. Through close readings of the film’s reappropriation of the Chinese Moving Mountain fable, its treatment of human sacrifice, and its portrayal of digital afterlife, I argue that the film presents a troubling vision where crisis enables the formation of a homogeneous time-space where the patriarchal family, the nation-state, and bio-capital converge to form a massive, enduring system of domination. While the film has been celebrated for its socialist values of collective survival, I demonstrate how it actually embodies the convergence of authoritarianism and global capitalism in its most insidious form. Drawing on theories of biopower, affect, and dead labor from Marxist scholars, this paper reveals how The Wandering Earth 2 functions as a work of prescriptive realism that faithfully encapsulates the deep drive of authoritarian capitalism. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Labor Utopias and Dystopias)
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