So you choose to “Lie Flat?” “Sang-ness,” affective economies, and the “Lying Flat” movement

ABSTRACT This study aims to analyze the affective economies that propel the viral circulations of the “Lying Flat” movement as a form of youth counternarrative in contemporary China with a special focus on the historic specificity and social imaginary revolving around the “Lying Flat” meme on Chinese social media. This study sees affect as social actions and historical constructs, exploring the sociohistorical conditions of the movement and an analysis of the bodily experience in the “Lying Flat” meme. The transduction of such experience further propels the development of the “Lying Flat” movement. We intend, through this study, to offer a detailed understanding of the uptake, circulation, and affect of the recent youth counternarratives in China. Transduction of affect across audio-visual resources in multimodality in this case suggests that objects of emotions can simultaneously take on varied forms, which propels wider circulations of affect that bind collective identities of marginalized groups of individuals.