Book review: A grassroots dissident feminism? Weibo feminism (original) (raw)
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Cyber-feminism in China: between expression and oppression
openDemocracy
How social media can be used and abused has become a pressing question globally. It has also become a framework for examining the nature of power in the circumstances in which powerless people operate. And in patriarchal societies, women are often the least powerful among the powerless.
Book Review: Jia Tan, Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China
Global Media and China, 2023
Digital Masquerade starts with a carnivalesque wedding and ends with a funeral disco. The wedding was performed by two women in public spaces of Beijing, appropriating the matrimonial ceremony to underline same-sex marriage rights and undermine heteropatriarchal biases, all captured and circulated on (social) media and a documentary made by one of the spouses. It was 2015. Three years later, queer and feminist activists, in colourful, full-body costumes, enacted a disco act in some deserted site of urban ruins to mourn, mock and mutate the shutdown of a feminist social media account into funeral rituals and beliefs that the deceased will return, in spiritsjust like: what happens, even amidst increasing censorship, will find its way to the digital world. Between the wedding and the funeral, lynch-pinning 200 pages of lucid writing is Tan's introduction and explication of what she calls 'digital masquerading'. Pushing the boundaries of masquerade theory, typically employed to investigate gender and identity expressions in cultural texts, Tan formulates her theorisation of digital masquerade as 'the myriad ways of acting and doing with technology' (p.19, emphasis in original); more specifically, she takes into consideration 'the technological affordance and regulatory environment in an "illiberal" context' (p.18). It is with this notion of digital masquerade that Tan wedges open a space as theoretical as it is political to investigate and understand what has been going on surrounding feminist rights and queer media in contemporary China. This richly informed and informative treatise is indebted to Tan's impressive fieldwork from 2014 to 2019, in particular one major observation during this period. Increasingly, Tan noticed a mobilisation of the word and discourse of 'rights', quan in Chinese, in sexual and gender minority advocacy practices in China. As 'the first monograph to look at feminism and gender activism in China from the perspective of rights' (p.15), Tan's investigation offers a refreshing, solid update to the body of works that take the Chinese experience to challenge the universalising tendency of Global North's emancipatory discourse of rights. More ingeniously, Tan connects her own critique of the 'liberal queer paradigm' with another observation, namely, more and more of the activistic practices take place in the realm of the digital. Tan demonstrates with robust data and persuasive analyses how the conceptual tool of digital masquerade breaks open and reconfigures the dominant
More than two decades after China was first connected to the Internet, scholars still debate the political impact of online media. Yet, the debate is stalled by a limited view of both politics and the media's role in political contestation. In order to offer a more nuanced account of the relationship between online media and politics, this article proposes a theoretical framework that pays attention to discursive struggles, identifies strategies to contest hegemonic discourses, and employs a broadened notion of politics, referred to as minimal politics. The framework is then used to analyze a corpus of Weibo (microblog) posts published by the charity organization, Love Save Pneumoconiosis (LSP). LSP activists use Weibo to campaign for medical treatment for workers with pneumoconiosis, and the article identifies two strategies of contestation in LSP activists' online activism. First, LSP activists articulate alternative discourses that challenge the hegemony of official discourses. Second, LSP activists' discourses are polyphonic expressions that legitimize the organization's work, while subtly politicizing the problem of pneumoconiosis. The strategies of contestation used by LSP activists exemplify how political contestation is possible in repressive contexts and illustrate the need to refine the theories used to study the political impact of online media.
Chinese feminists on social media: articulating different voices, building strategic alliances
Continuum, 2019
This article considers the importance of social media to contemporary Chinese feminism, in the process introducing two important groups, Feminist Voice and Women’s Awakening, who have used social media platforms for their activism in the past few years. Various online strategies have been taken up by their young members to ensure the best outcome for their advocacy. In particular, these feminists use social media to articulate a specific presence, or voice, that would be more difficult to sustain using more traditional modes of Chinese feminism. And they also attempt to cultivate relationships with mainstream journalists, building alliances they hope will encourage more gender-conscious reporting and more positive representations of feminism. While social media does not overcome all the obstacles to feminism becoming more visibly influential in China, these media groups stand out as key voices in Chinese feminist and youth activism today, with implications for how we understand contemporary feminism on an international scale.
Feminism without guarantees: Reflections on teaching and researching feminist activism in China
Asian Journal of Women's Studies, 2020
The current status of feminism in China reflects its precariousness as a school of thought, an activist practice, and a topic of study. By historicizing the study and practice of feminism since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, this essay reflects upon conducting research and teaching feminist activism in contemporary China. The shift from state feminism to NGO feminism to a loose and current network of feminists who greatly rely on digital media and the internet for their visibility and advocacy sits in accordance with the liberation of the market, the proliferation of consumer culture, the embrace of all things feminine, and the convergence of state control and market capitalism. Ever-evolving gender dynamics in Chinese society oblige researchers to investigate these dynamics when they seek to explain Chinese feminist activism, given the nuances of history, transnational influence, the impact of media and technology, and specific geopolitical factors.
Feminist Activism in Post-2010 China: Identifying Issues, Sharing Knowledge, and Building Movements
Registration is now open to non-presenting participants Recent years have seen significant changes to and growing tensions regarding Chinese feminism. Some have argued for a new generation of feminist activism entirely, one which self-consciously distinguishes itself from the earlier reform period and thereby claims a historically significant turning point with regards to the meaning, tactics, and practitioners of such activism. Others emphasize connections between earlier eras of feminist engagements and aspects of modern state-formation in analyzing contemporary forms of feminist protest. In any case, the current historical moment is defined by several monumental challenges in China and globally: Growing authoritarianism, reactionary attacks on gender and minorities, global pandemic and climate crises, political pressures on higher education and academic research, and dependence on digital technologies and social media platforms, to name but a few. For an emerging new generation of activists and scholar-activists, in the context of global circuits of knowledge production and sharing, these challenges inspire feminist engagements in Chinese societies. This workshop brings together scholars and scholar-activists to explore this critical field, through a set of suggested key questions, informed by relevant scholarship.
Feminist activism 25 years after Beijing
Gender and Development , 2020
Young women have taken the lead in a new wave of feminist and democratic protests that have erupted across a wide range of countries, North and South. These movements raise a range of political and analytic questions: To what extent is it useful to identify the recent wave of activism in terms of a new generation of activists? How different is the ‘new’ feminism to earlier forms, and what differences and continuities divide and unite the generations? These questions are explored through examining the characteristics common to contemporary feminisms, and through case studies of different campaigns in Brazil, India, and Malawi.
Journal of the Asia-Japan Research Institute of Ritsumeikan University, 2023
The use of popular youth culture for the service of political propaganda is not new, but the risk of doing so is unpredictable. During the early COVID-19 pandemic, the virtual idol project launched by the Chinese Communist Party Youth League was immediately appropriated by feminist netizens and evolved into an online protest event that finally cut short the infamous attempt. This article focuses on how collective identity is constructed among the protest's participants on social media. Previous literature pointed out the power of social media to connect dispersed individuals that promotes social movement participation without previous identity building, while others reaffirmed the continuous importance of the concept. Taking the "Jiang Shanjiao" incident that initially criticized menstruation shame in China as a case study, this article analyzes the slogans applied by participants, which contribute to building feminists' cognition of the current problems, their moral sense, collective consciousness, and emotion, and highlights that the affordances of social media are instrumental in the process of constructing collective identity in online protests. The article also argues that even though collective identity created on social media protests emerges and disappears in a short period of time, the content of collective identity exemplified in the protest, including women's experiences, shared emotions toward gender injustice, and solidarity, is steady and gives lasting vigor to feminist movements.
Media as a core political resource: the young feminist movements in China
Chinese Journal of Communication, 2017
In 2012, a group of young activists changed the landscape of the Chinese feminist movement. These activists placed women's rights in the mainstream public discourse by drawing the media's attention to their "performance art". This study compares the intergenerational differences between China's first generation of women's NGOs, which were mostly founded or flourished in the wake of the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing, and a new generation that burst on the scene in 2012. The study argues that their main differences lie in their mobilization models and their ability to access key political resources, both of which were heavily influenced, and even decided, by their relationship with the state. Moreover, the change in the relationship between the state and feminist movements is reflected in the differences in the relationship with the media of the two generations of feminist movements. Because of the differences in their organizational models, resource conditions, and status, the two generations of feminists adopted different media strategies in their promotion of women's rights. Using the "performance art" of the "Occupy Men's Toilet" campaign as an example, we examine the media strategies employed by young feminists and illustrate how they legitimated the movements, aroused public attention, imposed pressure from the outside, and finally gained policy responses from the government. The study proposes the tripartite relationship between the state, media, and the two generations of the women's movement in China, and concludes that the relationship between media and the women's movements examined here was influenced and even decided by their respective relationships with the state.
In early January 2022, a tabloid video exposed an incident of woman sex trafficking in a Chinese rural village, the victim was brutally enchained and has given birth to 8 children since her abduction. The outraged Chinese publics heatedly quested for authorities' attention under the hashtag #Feng County 8-child-woman, lobbying for the victim as suffering from the chronical social ills of Chinese rural area sex-trafficking. Digital feminism in China has its own characteristics under a relatively constrained internet landscape, endowing each movement with unique intersectional features, conforming discourse to the strict regulatory regimes, and participants' extra effort to maximize public efficacy. This study adopts a dual-faceted network (participants-semantics) approach to map out whose voices are heard, and what issues are framed and put forward in the hashtag activism. The findings show that there is a considerable common focus on rural area women who has long been marginalized in the elite-led Chinese digital feminism, a conscious identification with the group manifested in the discourse, while the overall participatory network displays a non-hierarchal grassroot characteristics in information circulation. The adopted network-based approach might be applied for further studies on Chinese digital feminism in a similar vein.