Re-feminizing Beauty in the Multimodal Storytelling Practices of Chinese Social Media Influencers on Xiaohongshu (RED)

Influencers are a prominent group of content creators and opinion leaders on social media. In China, influencers are referred to as “wanghong” (internet red) or “bozhu” (bloggers), whose practices are deeply interwoven with the development of the digital market economy and the creative and cultural industry. Wanghong is also a gendered profession, notably consisting of young women engaging in discussions of beauty and fashion who manifest postfeminist sensibilities of beauty as personal choice and empowerment, with consumerism serving as a subtext. Taking a transnational perspective on postfeminist media culture, this study examines the multimodal storytelling practices of nine micro- and mid-tier influencers in the beauty and fashion domains on Xiaohongshu (RED), a highly popular Chinese social media platform that remains largely unexplored in digital communication research. Using a small stories approach and social semiotic multimodal analysis, this study shows how storytelling, particularly in the influencers’ discourse practices of OOTD (Outfit of the Day) and product review, imbues beauty with ordinariness and communicability. The results shed light on the construction of Chinese femininities on social media in the post-socialist context on the one hand, and the linguistic-semiotic features of influencer marketing and Electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM) on the other hand.