Paper short abstract

This paper examines how digital space in China discipline women victims while enabling feminist counter-appropriation. It introduces “digital witch hunts” to analyse state-aligned narratives, and shows how feminists sustain critique and connection through coded digital practices under censorship.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how digital platforms in China have become central sites for the governance of gender, where narratives of female victimhood are simultaneously rendered visible and subjected to discipline. Drawing on emblematic cases involving trafficking, disappearance, and sexual violence, the paper analyses how state-aligned media, platform moderation, and selective censorship redirect attention away from structural violence toward moralised and individualised explanations of women’s suffering. Rather than treating these incidents as isolated events, the paper situates them within broader dynamics of demographic anxiety, pronatalist politics, and the reassertion of normative femininity. It introduces the concept of digital witch hunts to describe coordinated discursive responses that discredit victims, deter feminist critique, and reinforce hierarchical gender norms in online spaces.

At the same time, the paper attends to the ways Chinese feminists navigate these constraints through counter-appropriation strategies, including the strategic use of coded language, ironic reframing, and platform-specific practices that subtly repurpose dominant narratives to sustain feminist visibility and solidarity under conditions of repression. These practices reveal how digital feminism in China operates not only through overt resistance but also through adaptive and relational forms of connection-making. Engaging with decolonial feminist debates, the paper argues against the uncritical application of Global North frameworks and calls for context-sensitive analyses that account for the specific configurations of state power, media politics, and everyday digital practices shaping feminist action in contemporary Asia.

Paper short abstract

Contrasting viral "milk tea" displays of love with women-only "emotional toilets", this paper argues that Chinese women’s disillusionment with romance generates forms of harsh care and feminist sisterhood as survival strategies beyond heteronormative intimacy.

Paper long abstract

In the polarized affective landscape of contemporary China, heterosexual romantic relationships increasingly fail as reliable sites of love, care, and security for women. Under platform capitalism and patriarchal governance, intimacy is reorganized around visibility and performance, producing structural emotional deprivation.

This paper first examines how this failure is temporarily patched through rituals like the viral trend of “the first cup of milk tea of autumn.” Drawing on digital ethnography of Weibo and Xiaohongshu, it analyzes how women perform strategic incompetence for monetized proofs of love. Yet, the repeated failure of such rituals to sustain intimacy generates collective exhaustion.

The paper then traces how this accumulated disappointment becomes collectivized in digital spaces, where women increasingly articulate romance not as personal misfortune but as a structurally extractive system, catalyzing feminist counter-intimacies. Focusing on all-female online spaces known as “emotional toilets,” the study shows how women deliberately reject therapeutic or conciliatory modes of care. Instead, these spaces operate through harsh, confrontational, and often humiliating forms of discourse—what I describe as “shock therapy”—that mobilize anger, shame, and despair as tools for collective awakening, mutual support, and withdrawal from heteronormative romance.

Engaging the panel’s focus on meaningful life under surveillance, I argue that this transition from performative romance to “militant sisterhood” reconfigures female agency through refusal, care redistribution, and affective reorientation. Methodologically, the paper reflects on the ethical challenges of studying anonymous digital spaces where invisibility and aggression function not as failure, but as necessary survival strategies.

Paper short abstract

This study focuses on feminist influencers on Rednote, the largest female-oriented platform. Building on Lauren Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism, it explores creators’ attachments to platform viability and the unequal power dynamics between feminist influencers and platform governance.

Paper long abstract

Feminist practices across Asia increasingly unfold through—and are shaped by—digital platforms. In China, Rednote (Xiaohongshu) has become a key site where feminist-oriented creators circulate knowledge, cultivate “sisterhood,” and share everyday scripts for navigating gendered constraints. Yet producing feminist content is never simply a matter of expression. It is continually negotiated within infrastructures of visibility: algorithmic recommendation, content moderation, harassment and reporting cultures, and monetization systems that amplify some forms of feminism while discouraging or penalizing others. Chinese digital feminism, in other words, is deeply entangled with the media infrastructures that condition its legibility, circulation, and survival.

This paper develops an ethnographically informed framework for studying feminist influencer practices on Rednote as a form of platform-mediated feminist praxis. It asks how feminsit influencers make feminism “platform-viable”, a form that sayable, visible, and sustainable, through everyday strategies such as boundary-setting, disclaimers, euphemistic speech, comment moderation, and the careful negotiation of authenticity and commercialization. To theorize the ambivalence of this work, I draw on Lauren Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism as a sensitizing lens for tracing attachments to platform viability that enable feminist life-making while also generating exhaustion, compromise, and precarity. By centering these tensions, the paper contributes to debates on digital feminism beyond Western contexts and offers an empirically grounded account of how feminist praxis is reshaped by platform governance in contemporary China.

Paper short abstract

Kyrgyzstan has become one of the most dangerous countries in Central Asia for women to live in. Under increasingly authoritarian conditions, young polyglot Kyrgyzstani women began to practice their feminist 'sisterhood' online, protesting against neo-traditional practices and crimes against women.

Paper long abstract

Kyrgyzstan has become one of the most dangerous countries in Central Asia for women to live in. Forced marriages, violence against women, and particularly femicides are well-known in the country and have been reported in critical media outlets. But as Kyrgyzstan’s authoritarian government increasingly tightens its grip on local media, the legal profession, and NGOs deemed influenced by 'outside forces', it has become harder for women to publicly raise their voices and inform each other of their rights in classical public settings. In consequence, critical forms of expression have moved to social media: On Instagram and YouTube especially, a new generation of women practice a form of digital feminist ‘sisterhood’ that combines explicit critique of the patriarchal state and of neo-traditional practices such as bride-kidnapping, by means of comedy, edutainment, and through their own music. They speak in a mix of Russian, Kyrgyz and English, reference internet memes in one, and Kyrgyz folk tales in the next sentence, scold their politicians, but embrace their country’s flag and thereby refuse easy categorization. While this form of digital sisterhood also draws on elderly women’s knowledge of feminist practice during Soviet times, it especially forges its own kind, adapted to the circumstances of the young women's own lives.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how “Dreaming Girls” in China use AI chat apps to form romantic relationships with virtual characters. Based on digital ethnography, it shows how AI transforms private fantasy into shared emotional and social practices, fostering new forms of intimacy and community.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the emergent and emotionally charged relationships between young Chinese women, known online as “Dreaming Girls” (梦女), and AI-powered virtual lovers. Drawing on twelve months of digital ethnography, including interviews, participant observation, and discourse analysis on Chinese social media platforms such as Rednote and Weibo, I examine how AI chat applications, like LoveyDovey, Character AI, and ChatGPT, are transforming solitary fantasy into an emotionally interactive space. These platforms allow users to co-create romantic relationships with fictional characters from anime, manga, and games (ACG), enabling the simulation of mutual affection, customized storylines, and real-time dialogue.

While the integration of AI is often associated with social isolation, Dreaming Girls demonstrate the opposite trend. AI agents have fostered new forms of social connection within this subculture. Many Dreaming Girls share their custom AI character models with one another, allowing others to bypass the labor of personalization and immediately engage with pre-configured virtual partners. These models become communal resources, further deepening emotional immersion. In addition, users frequently share romantic or disappointing experiences with AI in online forums, reflecting on moments of joy, sadness, or narrative surprise. These exchanges transform solitary experiences into communal storytelling. Emotions initially directed toward fictional partners are partially redirected into community relationships, fostering a collective space of empathy, reflection, and co-experience. AI, in this context, functions not only as a tool for fantasy but also as a social infrastructure, facilitating affective exchange, cultural production, and a shared sense of belonging.

Paper short abstract

This study employs textual analysis and interviews to examine how stand-up comedy in China becomes a site of feminist expression. It finds female comedians articulate gender inequality while being limited by monetization, producing an affective, banal feminism and outlining a made-in-China feminism.

Paper long abstract

In the contemporary cultural context of China, stand-up comedy has undergone a process of localization and transformation from a purely imported form of popular entertainment into an important cultural practice. From its early male-dominated tradition characterized by a strong sense of masculinity to the rise of female comedians and the emergence of gender discourse, stand-up comedy has gradually become a crucial cultural arena for feminist expression. Drawing on gender performativity as the theoretical framework, this study employs a methodology combining textual analysis with in-depth audience interviews. The findings reveal that early Chinese stand-up comedy inherited a discourse of “male humor,” marked by mockery, authority, and rationality, thereby reinforcing masculine hegemony. In contrast, contemporary female comedians use humor to articulate experiences of gender inequality, emotional repression, and identity dilemmas. However, their feminist expressions remain constrained by commercial imperatives and platform governance, which shape content boundaries and limit expressive autonomy.Meanwhile, stand-up comedy advocates a kind of original feminism under pervasive post-feminism media culture and penetrates softly into the lives of audiences, transforming feminism into an affective practice where the everyday and the political are intricately intertwined, which evokes emotional resonance and feminist awakening within an “intimate public sphere”. This paper explores media practices within China’s specific cultural and feminist contexts, revealing how feminism is produced, regulated, and perceived in highly commercialized and platform-based entertainment spaces, and clarifying the contours of a made-in-China feminism theory, thereby providing an important supplement from Chinese experience for understanding the localized and differentiated development of global feminism.

Paper short abstract

Digital affordances offer vital avenues for reinventing activities that are frequently seen as disruptive and ‘unfeminine’. This paper examines how digital forms of gambling enable women to negotiate with algorithms and enact ingenious household provisioning towards performing ‘good’ motherhood.

Paper long abstract

Feminist gambling scholarship has revealed that the discourse about women’s gambling remains dominated by patriarchal frameworks. Women gamblers are more likely to be portrayed as irresponsible parental figures than their male counterparts (Palmer du Preez et al. 2021). In the Philippines, how the liberalization of online gambling in the previous decade has democratized gambling accessibility for ordinary Filipinos, especially women, remains understudied. Yet it is this very liberalization that has exposed women gamblers to intense moralizing regulation, reproducing sexist norms while rendering invisible their agency. This paper interrogates the moralistic framing of women's gambling by examining it through the lens of working-class indigenous women in Southern Philippines. Drawing on two months of ethnographic fieldwork in Davao City, I demonstrate how online gambling in a context of economic precarity is reinvented from a potentially disruptive activity into one that is socially and economically generative. For the women of my research, gambling was perceived as a calculated activity through which they could enact ingenious household provisioning while fulfilling their caregiving responsibilities. I further argue that ‘algorithmic negotiation’—the deliberate sensing, testing, and timing of platform affordances—enables modes of self-regulation integral to maintaining respectability and resisting addiction. By negotiating with online gambling algorithms, my interlocutors creatively embodied and fulfilled the norms of ‘good’ motherhood. This contributes to a broader understanding of the anthropology of gambling in a polarized world by challenging dominant perspectives that pathologize gambling and theoretically integrating a feminist framework with the notion of algorithmic negotiation.

Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork with young Chinese women during Covid-19, this paper examines everyday feminist aspirations for alternative ways of living in peripheral “utopian” spaces, and how longing, loss, and resistance emerged as pandemic surveillance and precarity intensified.

Paper long abstract

This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Southern China during the first fifteen months of the Covid-19 pandemic. It follows the lives of young Chinese women who migrated to Kunming, Dali, and Yangshuo—locations idealised as peripheral, “free,” or alternative spaces within contemporary China. These sites are imagined as places where different modes of living and being a woman might be possible, beyond patriarchal expectations of marriage, family obligation, and respectability.

The women I worked with were not part of a coherent feminist network and often did not know one another, yet they shared experiences of gendered frustration, disillusionment, and harm within familial, romantic, workplace, and social structures. Their feminist aspirations were articulated primarily through everyday practices—choices about work, mobility, intimacy, and community—rather than explicit political discourse, shaped by restrictions on feminist expression and activism in China.

The paper examines how these aspirations became constrained during the Covid-19 pandemic. Processes already underway in these sites—gentrification, social homogenisation, and expanding state presence through infrastructure and surveillance—were intensified by lockdowns, digital track-and-trace technologies, heightened policing, and employment precarity. As livelihoods narrowed and mobility was curtailed, women’s attempts to sustain alternative ways of living were marked by frustration, loss, and foreclosed possibility.

Focusing on affective experiences of longing and disillusionment, the paper argues that everyday feminist projects illuminate both the possibilities and limits of seeking feminist “utopias” under surveillance and patriarchal governance. It concludes with reflections on ethical and methodological challenges of conducting feminist ethnography in authoritarian settings.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Tibetan Buddhist nuns navigate encounters with Western feminist discourses through digital connectivity and transnational networks. Whilst younger nuns seek an own voice, they demonstrate cautious resistance to frameworks that do not emerge from their lived worlds.

Paper long abstract

Examining Tibetan Buddhist nunneries in Nepal, this paper demonstrates how the binary of intra muros and extra muros – inside and outside monastic walls – has been fundamentally reconfigured through internet connectivity. A new generation of nuns increasingly engages with global discourses, yet their encounters with feminism reveal complex dynamics of translation, appropriation, and resistance.

Through ethnographic work in Nepalese exile communities, this paper explores how feminist discourses reach these often patriarchal religious institutions via Western and Southeast Asian visitors, benefactors, and digital platforms. These encounters frequently transmit Euroamerican feminist frameworks without adequate contextualisation for the specific social, religious, and political worlds nuns inhabit. Whilst some younger nuns express eagerness to participate in broader conversations about gender and agency, many demonstrate an internalised sensitivity – a kind of epistemic caution – that prevents them from connecting too readily with feminist vocabularies that feel externally imposed.

This paper asks: How do nuns navigate digital spaces whilst maintaining commitments to Buddhist values and community hierarchies? What happens when feminist solidarities cross cultural and religious boundaries without sufficient translation work? How might anthropologists trace these encounters ethically, particularly when our own analytical frameworks may replicate the very dynamics of epistemic violence we seek to critique?

By examining the gap between nuns' lived experiences and available theoretical tools, this paper considers how digital connectivity simultaneously opens possibilities for voice whilst potentially foreclosing others – revealing the tensions inherent in transnational feminist knowledge production in polarised times.

Paper long abstract

Researchers have remained constant interest in the topic of Chinese feminism and gender politics ever since the founding of PRC. Particularly in recent years, due to the ever repressed political climate, practicing street gender activism can trigger intense state censorship; therefore, more and more grassroots Chinese feminists have sought social media as alternative ways to express their gender dissent, which have attracted many scholarly attention, yet meanwhile, have also made the offline sphere of Chinese feminism less explored. Responding to this lack of attendance to the offline Chinese feminism, in this article, I will look rather into the everyday offline settings of Chinese feminism. By ethnographically observing two selected queer friendly feminist spaces in two Chinese cities, I hope to delineate how feminism embodies itself in everyday offline settings and how the process of feminism is practiced by grassroots queer feminists in their everyday urban lives. Following Hemmings’ “affective solidarity” (2012) critique and Ahmed’s argumentation of “feminist attachments” (2004), in this article, I argue to temporarily abandon the framework of feminist activism and adopt instead the one of feminist activities, in exploring the process of feminism and the process of becoming a feminist in everyday offline world. I propose to pause the “Chinese Feminism is dead” statement for the moment and chant instead “Let feminism cook” at current uneasy hours, so that the fluidity of feminist epistemology across time and space can be fully acknowledged.