In-Person Panel PS4.1

Gender Discourses on Chinese Digital Platforms: Beauty-Oriented Femininity, Disenfranchised Masculinity, and Pro-Heterosexual-Marriage Misogyny

Politics of Authenticity: Chinese Women’s Affective-Discursive Constructions of Cosmetic Surgery on RED (XiaoHongShu) 

Xiaowei Liang

This paper explores female bodily-alteration blogs on RED (XiaoHongShu), a popular e-commerce and lifestyle platform in China. Drawing on digital ethnography and critical discourse analysis, I examine how cosmetic surgery blogs on RED adapt makeover TV’s genre conventions to construct the body as a site for producing authentic selfhood. Authenticity is a key theme in these two genres in two aspects. First, both makeover TV and makeovers on RED construct a sense of realness through mediated visibility of the ordinary, inviting the public gaze to monitor individual transformation into the extraordinary. Second, like televisual makeovers, makeovers on RED code one’s pre-makeover body as flawed and abject, necessitating cosmetic surgery for women to attain ideal outer physicality that signifies their inner, ‘true’ selves. I argue that these two manifestations of authenticity, along with the cultures of surveillance and selfhood they echo, are intensified in the social media context of RED that values self-representation. The imperative of authenticity further resonates with post-socialist Chinese cultures’ ‘neoliberal’ turn, which celebrates consumerist individualism and gender essentialism as a gesture towards modernity. On RED, beauty is presented as an aesthetic/style choice, which obscures the structural gender, class, and ethnic systems informing normative femininity on this platform.

Mapping Disenfranchised Online Masculinity among Lower-middle-class Chinese Men 

Chenglin Liang

Since the early 2010s, Chinese online youth culture has undergone a dramatic affective shift. Faced with severe social injustice and worsening class stratification, young online youth no longer firmly believed in the state-endorsed dream that the nation’s prosperity would ultimately guarantee a prosperous middle-class life for young people in the future, practicing self-deprecation and anti-work philosophy to illustrate their pessimism which ran counter to the state-emphasized “positive energy”. This sense of financial and cultural disenfranchisement in manosphere nevertheless largely leads male users to assign blame to China’s emerging popular feminism, rather than to the party-state. This situation resulted from Chinese party-state’s open stigmatization of women’s struggle for rights, its emphasis on (neo-)traditional familism, and the long-lasting hypergamy. As a result, misogyny and male chauvinism prevailed in China’s manosphere, and went hand in hand with lower-middle-class men’s compromise caused by their limited financial capacity. This paradoxical scene promoted the emergence of a type of ordinary and indifferent masculinity, in which men try to deny their responsibilities imposed by the state propaganda and gender hierarchy and exercise a modest pursuit of a low-desire, ordinary and even passable life in the highly unstable social environment.

Semiotic Undoing and Redoing of Made-in-China Feminist Killjoys

Rong Wan

In the context of the globally circulated slippery trope of “gender ideology” espoused by right-wing groups against feminist and LGBTQA+ agendas, this study offers a sociolinguistic reading of how grassroots feminists undo misogynistic registers and redo feminist enregisterment in Chinese cyberspace. Built upon Susan Gal’s theorisation of three moments in enregisterment (2018, 2019, 2021), this study takes one step further by teasing out the semiotic processes deployed by Chinese feminist killjoys to, first, anatomize misogynistic words, images and modes of action that otherwise go unnoticed and legitimised by de-clasping, de-relaying, and de-grafting, and secondly to facilitate the dissemination of feminist thoughts through semiotic engineering of re-clasping, re-relaying and re-grafting. In doing so, this study provides another disciplinary perspective and toolkit that help unravel online misogyny and capture feminist refusals in a more meticulous and micro-level way. Furthermore, this study shall demonstrate the emancipatory power of language and semiosis, and of language, gender and sexuality scholarship, to document and dismantle hegemonic gender ideologies.

Transnational Aesthetics and Gender Norms: Critical Discourse Analysis of 'Korean Aesthetics' in Chinese Government and Media 

Haiqing Li 

In 2021, the Douyin platform took action against popular user Feng Xiaoyi for content that purportedly promoted negative social trends among youth. This highlighted China's growing concerns regarding the perceived influence of foreign aesthetics, particularly the 'flower boy' trend from Korea and Western metrosexual styles, on the current hegemonic ideas about masculinity. This confrontation between emerging popular trends and established gender norms sets the stage for an in-depth examination of the shifts in the linguistic landscape of masculinity in China. This research aims to explore the influence of contemporary Korean idol aesthetics in constructing ideal cosmopolitan masculinity among Chinese urban youth. Utilizing critical discourse analysis, this study will examine the linguistic representation of 'Korean aesthetics' in Chinese young men as presented in official Chinese government policies, news narratives, and other public documents. The analysis will investigate how these representations engage with or resist the dominant government stance regarding the influence of Korean popular culture on concepts of masculinity. Furthermore, the study will assess the underlying assumptions, beliefs, and ideological implications at the national level as embedded in the language of governmental policies and public discourse, and how these elements construct or reshape perceptions of masculinity in the contemporary Chinese context.