And the final speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Nguyen Do Doan Hanh, whose focus is on reinterpreting masculinities through a Vietnamese virtual influencer. Virtual influencers are stylised social media figures existing across multiple social media platforms; they are artificially created and represent various agents.
Such figures have commercial potential, are aesthetically constructed, and navigate various environmental and ethical concerns about influencer culture; they are often hyper-feminised and embedded in patriarchal, cultural gender roles. In Vietnam, such roles are affected by a range of historical influences from Asian and western cultures.
Vietnamese virtual influencers represent commercial brands in the form of AI-generated personas; or gain social influence through animated social media figures. A particular figure, Tho Bay Mau, has gained influence through a humorous, playful, and silly personality which resonates with younger followers, and self-identifies as in between a young boy and a rabbit.
Analysing such content, it becomes clear that this character challenges normative masculine norms through its visual depiction; that its expressions of adapted masculinities are reproduced in meme form across platforms, leveraging the attention economy to challenge normative masculinity; and that its masculine persona is commodified through cross-promotion in a popular mobile game and via product placements, making such non-normative personas profitable.
Co-creative processes significantly amplify the visibility and acceptance of such new gender norms, and virtual identities are thereby naturalised; this blurs the lines between virtual representation and lived experience.
