Beyond the Celebration of Losers: The Construction of diaosi Masculinity in Contemporary Chinese Youth Culture

Cao, Siyang

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-55634-9_13

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Along with the prevalence of feminism, the backlash against it is becoming more and more pronounced on Chinese social media (e.g., Cao & Xu, 2015;Hong, 2016). Initially, the antifeminist discourses present online caught our attention with a buzzword, "rural feminism" (tian yuan nv quan), which is often used to derogate feminist ideas and practices.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Is “Rural Feminism”? A Computer-Assisted Analysis of Popular Antifeminist Discourses in Chinese Social Media

Yang

Guo

Arteel

2023

Social Media + Society

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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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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Is “Rural Feminism”? A Computer-Assisted Analysis of Popular Antifeminist Discourses in Chinese Social Media

Yang

Guo

Arteel

2023

Social Media + Society

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“…Last but not least, as Spivak (1990) argues, if the subaltern can to some extent express themselves despite limited space and resources, they are partially incorporated into the hegemony by at least being heard, though in most cases imprecisely. For example, some members of the subaltern, particularly the rural migrant workers, never give up trying to "talk back" to the structures of power that erase or distort their subjectivities and realities by writing poems (Sun, 2010), creating documentaries (Sun, 2014), dressing with hairstyles and make-up that are inconsistent with mainstream aesthetic values (Sun & Qiu, 2015), mocking themselves as "pubic hair" (diaosi, which figuratively means "losers") (Cao 2017;Sum, 2017;Szablewicz, 2014;Witteborn & Huang, 2015), or expressing their frustrations through user-generated rap videos on specific platforms (Hou, 2021). Notably, when these various cultural practices may generate collective consciousness and mutual interaction among the subalterns themselves, they often trigger denunciations among the upper and middle class for being identified as morally and aesthetically problematic (Hou 2020), thus reinforcing the subaltern as both a position and a process of becoming the inferior and marginal other in China today.…”

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confidence: 99%

Making Ends Meet by Mining on Blockchain

Hou

2023

jdsr

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While public narratives indicate that blockchain is widely used in developed societies among privileged elites, either from socio-economic, ethnic, or techno-cultural perspectives, this study examines how some disadvantaged marginal others, specifically the subaltern shehuiren in China, survive in the increasingly precarious post-socialist Chinese society by engaging with blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Literally translated as “society people”, shehuiren are the socio-economically and techno-culturally disadvantaged others who face marginality due to various post-socialist institutional inequalities. This study aims at unpacking how, on the one hand, the blockchain scene has been reconfigured by the disadvantaged in the local context, and on the other hand, how subalternity is actualized in post-socialist China, where blockchain-related technologies deeply intertwine with various forms of social inequalities. By tracing a group of shehuiren crypto miners through ethnography, I demonstrate that this subaltern scene of blockchain not just reshapes the shehuiren individuals’ notion of time, space, and value and the social relationship among themselves, but also profoundly impacts the power dynamics between the subalterns, the more privileged others, and the state authorities. Specifically, I underline that, despite being treated as losers, outsiders, and potential wrongdoers due to the existing social structures, shehuiren miners are neither victims nor rebels opposing either the authoritarian state or the global neoliberal order. Instead, they are actors who harvest limited profits through their unacknowledged creativity, adeptly making use of various resources within their reach and weaving their differential aspirations by attaching themselves to the larger technology-mediated networks in an unequal post-socialist society where a united subaltern hardly exists.

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A study on identification of youth identity through a gender lens in network buzzwords: A critical discourse analysis

Tan,

2024

Humanit Soc Sci Commun

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As an emerging form of discourse in the Internet era, network buzzwords serve as an indicator of the mentality of the youth, reflecting their identity. However, research on the implementation of network buzzwords in the context of gender formations has been limited. This study fills this research gap by using critical discourse analysis to analyse the use of 11 gender-specific buzzwords listed in the annual list of top-ten network buzzwords published by the magazine Yaowen Jiaozi from 2012 to 2021 on the social media platform, Weibo. It discusses how the gender network buzzwords shape the identity of young groups, what kind of identities were formed, and how young people use gender buzzwords to construct both gender-conforming and patriarchal discourse, as well as gender-nonconforming discourse, from the perspectives of conformity and nonconformity. Additionally, it discusses the cultural significance of network buzzwords and their potential impact on contemporary society.

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Beyond the Celebration of Losers: The Construction of diaosi Masculinity in Contemporary Chinese Youth Culture

Cited by 3 publications

References 9 publications

What Is “Rural Feminism”? A Computer-Assisted Analysis of Popular Antifeminist Discourses in Chinese Social Media

What Is “Rural Feminism”? A Computer-Assisted Analysis of Popular Antifeminist Discourses in Chinese Social Media

Making Ends Meet by Mining on Blockchain

A study on identification of youth identity through a gender lens in network buzzwords: A critical discourse analysis

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