ABSTRACT
This article examines positive dimensions of emotional labor through ethnographic fieldwork on paid online companionship in China’s pei liao industry. We argue that dominant concepts in emotional labor research outside anthropology have limited the extent to which emotional labor’s brighter possibilities can be recognized—specifically, by framing it as inherently self-deceptive, overlooking workers’ interactional skill in shaping encounters, and relying on static models of the self. Drawing on participant observation and in-depth interviews with pei liao workers, we address these limitations by introducing “identity positioning” as both an analytic concept and an observed interactional strategy. Identity positioning refers to the deliberate selection and foregrounding of role-, group-, and trait-based identities that are already meaningful to workers, rather than the suppression or reworking of inner feelings, as a means of building rapport with clients. We then show that identity positioning’s positive outcomes may arise through two pathways: it can enable workers to engage and develop identities that are acknowledged yet underdeveloped in their repertoire, and to elaborate already salient identities into distinct variants through interactions with different clients.