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Paper short abstract

This paper analyzes how feminine aesthetics in digital China are organized through decorative, enhancing, and resistant readability. It shows how platform infrastructures shape desirable, aspirational, and refusing forms of femininity, making visibility a key site of power and resistance.

Paper long abstract

In China’s platform-mediated beauty culture, women’s bodies are styled, modified, and made socially readable through algorithmically organized visual regimes. This paper proposes a three-part framework—decorative, enhancing, and resistant readability—to analyze how femininity, desire, class, and power are rendered legible and contested within platform capitalism. Using digital ethnography and interviews with beauty influencers and users on platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Douyin, this paper examines how these regimes shape embodied subjectivity and structure aesthetic opposition in contemporary China.

Decorative readability emerges through soft, carefully curated aesthetics that make femininity appear inviting without becoming risky. The pure-desire aesthetic captures this dynamic by allowing a faint shimmer of sensuality while preserving innocence and keeping desirability safely consumable.

Enhancing readability orients aspiration. Mixed-race aesthetics, supplemented by light mixed-race aesthetics such as Thai-style beauty and ABC/ABG looks, gain traction because they approximate Euro-Asian features rewarded by platforms as signs of cosmopolitan mobility, leaving other mixed-race possibilities comparatively marginalized.

Resistant readability operates through a different logic. The earth-mother aesthetic, marked by natural skin, physical weight, and emotional distance, reorients recognition rather than courting it, withdrawing from the affective availability that platform femininity typically demands and resonating with women seeking alternatives to the white-young-thin ideal.

Situated within platform infrastructures and postcolonial visual hierarchies, these regimes reveal how visibility in digital China is organized around contrasting conditions: safe desirability, algorithmic and class optimization, or refusal of platform-oriented norms. Visibility thus becomes a pivotal terrain through which gendered discipline, aspiration, and resistance are negotiated.