This article presents three distinct examples of Viennese theatre’s engagement with recent waves of migration and refuge-seeking: the collective Wiener Wortstaetten offers migrants and refugees a platform on which to present themselves as the authors of their own stories; Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Schutzbefohlenen, a rewriting of Aeschylus’s The Suppliants, was inspired by the eviction of refugees from the Votivkirche in Vienna; and the artistic collective Die schweigende Mehrheit opened up the stage to refugees as co-creators and actors in their production of Jelinek’s text. While these three cases represent different positions in the contemporary theatre scene and display distinct views on dramatic authorship, each demonstrates a firm belief in the theatre as a site of intercultural speech agency, particularly suited to reflect on the lived experiences of mobility, migration, and refuge. Moreover, all three cases interrogate the status of German as a stage language and its adoption by non-German speakers.
Along with the popularization of feminism in Chinese social media, an antifeminist wave has become increasingly prominent since 2014, marked most notably by the stigmatization buzzword “rural feminism.” We collected 2,104 texts regarding “rural feminism” on Zhihu (the Chinese Quora) and applied approaches of computer-assisted discourse studies (i.e., topic modeling, collocation, and concordance analyses) as lenses to help us understand the connections and patterns within these fragmented social media texts, to uncover hidden antifeminist strategies. The findings reveal that popular antifeminism adopts strategies that we defined as “double embrace” and “double rejection” to minimize the realistic threat of feminism to men’s vested interests. These deliberate strategies hint at and further exacerbate the complex interplay between current Chinese antifeminism and feminism. On this basis, we argue that the previous framework of understanding this relationship as a simple dichotomy no longer applies and that we need to reconceptualize the current challenges and threats to Chinese feminism in the context of the specific history and reality of Chinese society and the rich interactions between antifeminism and misogyny, neoliberalism, postfeminism, and various versions of feminism active in China.
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