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Paper short abstract:

Why do many young Chinese females watch mass tarot divination videos on Bilibili, a well-known Chinese video-sharing website? Through examining video configurations and people’s watching experiences, this paper explores online tarot divination as a social and therapeutic activity.

Paper long abstract:

How is online tarot divination practiced, and what does its experience do to and for young Chinese females within its socio-cultural contexts? Choosing mass tarot divination (dazhong zhanbu 大众占卜) clips on Bilibili as a “bounded moment” (Singler, 2020), I analyze how the website’s built-in features, such as barrage subtitles or the bullet screen (danmu, 弹幕), configure watching these clips into a social event, on the one hand, for these clips invite both diviners and video viewers to encounter, gather, and interact with each other virtually.

On the other hand, watching mass tarot divination videos is a therapeutic activity. By examining a prototype of a mass tarot divination clip on the theme of love fortune, I illustrate that tarot divination, leveraged as a coping strategy and therapeutic resource, manifests young females’ creativity in expressing their distress of female liminality while maintaining their psychological well-being.

By describing how the ritual ought to be performed, I demonstrate that diviners and video viewers create a focused situation—a momentarily shared reality—which thereby generates solidarity and symbols. Through these brief moments of cyber encounter, participation, and interaction, individuals who perform rituals accordingly obtain agency—or emotions and emotional energy (Collins, 2005), which provides reassurance, boosts confidence, and encourages one to take the initiative.

I also acknowledge how the discourse which emphasizes tarot divination’s therapeutic effect is both enabling and disabling. While de-stigmatizing the practice, it inevitably juxtaposes tarot divination and psychotherapy, resulting in the criticism of the former under the criteria of the latter.