What Boundaries Were Mediated/Eliminated Through Transhumanist Ethnicity? A Feminist Perspective from Chinese Virtual Fashion Influencers

Fashion consumers are increasingly exposed to human-like virtual influencers as a mainstream marketing strategy in the fashion industry. Despite the substantial revenue generated by this sector, virtual influencers—and the fashion companies behind them—have faced backlash for perpetuating gendered and sexualised ideals, all while capitalising on a utopian illusion of human intellectual and physical perfection. As digital representations of human features, the rise of virtual influencers brings forth debates on transhumanism—a techno-utopian vision that pursues the enhancement of human existence through technology. This prompts critical questions: Will the rise of virtual influencers reshape the power relations in the current ethnic marketing structure?

This conceptual chapter engages with these questions by drawing on feminist and critical marketing scholarship to study China’s virtual fashion influencer market, reconceptualising ethnicity in the digital age—an era still marked by market-driven and anthropocentric logics, institutional incentives, and entrenched hierarchies of racial, economic, political, and symbolic power. We examine a selection of influential virtual fashion influencers, analysing their digital presence through secondary reports and interviews to explore how hegemonic, human-centred boundaries are reproduced or challenged through transhumanist entities.