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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.