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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.