Guarriello, Nicholas-Brie2022-12-022022-12-022021-09https://hdl.handle.net/11299/250056University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. 2021. Major: Feminist Studies. Advisors: Aren Aizura, Laurie Ouellette. 1 computer file (PDF); 257 pages.This dissertation broadly asks how content creators are building relationships with their audience that foster continued financial support as well as how content creators are navigating shifting platform ecologies that promote or hinder monetizing their content and relationships. By incorporating a digital ethnographic and case study approach, I ask what are the various relational labor strategies that Pokémon GO influencers and microcelebrities engage in order to create and maintain a financially supportive gaming fanbase across platforms? Concretely, I am concerned with the interaction of neoliberal ideology and platform capitalism and how they shape future and current influencer’s labor strategies within the Pokémon GO gaming community. As such, my project expands the influential work of Arlie Hochschild, Nancy Baym, and Jan Padios to think through the shift from emotional labor to relational labor when there is a mandate to build profitable friendships with one’s audience. Relational labor is the “ongoing, interactive, affective, material, and cognitive work of communicating with people over time to create structures that can support continued work” (Baym, 2018, 19). In her work about Philippines call centers, Jan Padios defines relational labor as “the labor required to positively identify with, signal proximity to, and effectively communicate with others, particularly in ways that meet the demands of capital (2018, 9). Here, relational labor is referring to how the worker (or creators for the sake of this dissertation) interact with their audience or clients rather than being trained by corporations.enThesis or Dissertation