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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.