This week I’m in Glasgow for the biennial Social Media & Society conference, and after a morning of workshops the first session I’m attending has started with Qianzao Yang, whose focus is on the phenomenon of the ‘hot nerd’ as constructed on social media in China. This concretises and reconstructs contemporary cultural capital, and valorises university credentials, the STEM disciplines, and international experience in desirable locations.
It appreciates a ‘scholarly aura’, expressed through visible middle-class taste and lifestyles; intelligence and knowledge are transferred here into visible signs of attractiveness, and this reflects broader hierarchies of education and social status. At the same time, though, this also appreciates a slim physique which refuses more narcissistic masculinity performance. This fuses softened masculinity with a focus on attention to personal appearance.
A real ‘hot nerd’ is also seen as emotionally intelligent, empathetic, and stable; sapiosexuality extends from intellect to emotional and caring capital. This is also doing class boundary work: it engages in class taste-making, a rejection of stupidity, an assessment of suitability via academic credentials, and very practical romantic strategies that seek to avoid ‘marrying down’.
