When positive energy meets satirical feminist backfire: Hashtag activism during the COVID-19 outbreak in China

Abstract

Amid the eruption of the COVID-19 outbreak in February 2020, the Chinese Communist Party Youth League promoted VTubers on Weibo to diffuse positive energy. However, the female VTuber Jiangshanjiao was appropriated immediately as political satire by netizens to air public grievances. While political satire is widely considered as political resistance in authoritarian states, little research has addressed its combination with feminist narratives and online activism. This article builds on previous literature on the propagandistic nature of positive energy and the Chinese feminist movement to consider how positive energy lying under Jiangshanjiao was deconstructed and how femininity was invoked to serve for broader political purposes in a repressive online environment. Drawing on the framework of online connective action and political satire as a networked practice, this research sheds light on the hashtag #JiangshanjiaoDoYouGetYourPeriod#. This research explores how the satirical hashtag was collectively produced in an Internet trolling culture and contributed to building a collective identity through personalized narratives. Through the feminist hashtag, netizens expressed their multilayered grievances against misogyny, state propaganda, and censorship. However, this article also offers evidence that the satirical hashtag and ambiguity associated with it limited the influence in catalyzing online and offline changes.

Television, women, and self-objectification: Examining the relationship between the consumption of female TV dramas and sexism, the internalization of beauty ideals, and body surveillance in China

“…Although the consumption of female TV dramas is not directly associated with self-objectification among Chinese women, their relationship is mediated by the internalization of beauty ideals. By turning to female audiences in China with a long patriarchal history and a male-dominated discourse system (Yang, 2022), this study intends to break the status quo that academic research employing objectification theory was mostly limited in Western contexts. Hopefully, its findings will contribute to the research of the newly arising female-oriented economy and culture in Chinese society.…”

When feminists became ‘extremists’: A corpus-based study of representations of feminism on Weibo

“…The focus of the present study was solely on noun bigrams, as they have been shown to be the most commonly used linguistic patterns to depict feminism on the Chinese internet, such as pastoral feminism (Du, 2017; Mao, 2020), feminist bitch and feminist cancer (Mao, 2020; Wu and Dong, 2019), female fist (Yang et al, 2022), and female boxers (Yang, 2022). In addition, as seen in Table 2, these 180 distinct noun bigrams account for 31.9% of all occurrences of feminism in the corpus, highlighting their importance in representing feminism on Weibo and their high research value.…”

Violencia de género en período de pandemia de coronavirus en los países del G-20: Campañas publicitarias en redes sociales

“…Estas etiquetas permiten analizar su impacto mediático y sus posibilidades o disfunciones como instrumento de movilización social y empoderamiento -hashtivismo feminista digital (Tarullo & García, 2020)-en un entorno volátil de rápida viralización de mensajes. El hashtag toma protagonismo en el mensaje como sucedió con el movimiento #MeToo y otras tendencias feministas mundiales como el hashtag satírico #JiangshanjiaoDoYouGetYourPeriod#, promovido en la red china Weibo tras la aparición del brote de Covid-19 (Yang, 2021) o las acciones de repulsa activadas con la etiqueta #LhamoBill, tras el asesinato de la influencer Lhamo a manos de su exmarido mientras retransmitía un vídeo en la red Douyin (Lindberg, 2021).…”