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Paper short abstract

This is a study of how young Chinese women engaging with ADHD as an interpretive framework develop new languages and emergent care-based narratives through digital feminist storytelling, reshaping the ecologies of interpretation surrounding embodied difference.

Paper long abstract

ADHD is now one of the most contested medical and bodily category whose heterogeneity renders its meanings unstable across cultural and clinical contexts. In contemporary China, growing attention to adult ADHD has intensified public debates about the legitimacy, intelligibility, and social implications of the diagnosis. Young women have become central to this emerging field of concern, even as gendered and age-based assumptions continue to obscure their experiences and constrain the interpretive frames available to them. This research examines how young women navigate and rework ADHD as both an embodied difference and a communicative problem: a struggle to be understood, believed, and recognized within everyday interactions. In digital feminist worlds, women experiment with new forms of storytelling, affective expression, and peer-to-peer interpretation, creating loosely organized ecologies of support in which biomedical knowledge, lived experience, and political critique circulate together. These narrative practices offer alternative temporalities—nonlinear, uncertain, and emotionally saturated—through which participants articulate their distress, recalibrate self-understanding, and contest prevailing norms about personality, productivity, intimacy, and gender. Drawing on neurodiversity theory and collective narrative approaches in critical ADHD studies, this project explores how digital storytelling becomes a site for negotiating legibility and cultivating partial forms of biocitizenship. Rather than treating ADHD as a fixed diagnostic object, young women mobilize its interpretive flexibility to claim epistemic authority, reorganize relational expectations, and imagine more livable ways of being within a polarized social landscape.