Unpopular feminism: Popular culture and gender politics in digital China

In this essay, I discuss feminist activism and gender politics in the #MeToo movement and post-MeToo environment in China. I situate feminism in the country’s increasingly digitalized, commercialized, and controlled media ecosystem, where unpopular feminism reflects the intentional control of feminist visibility and, therefore, the difficulty to access feminist content and the disidentification of the feminist label. Also evident is the grip of the state-market complex on the discursive rights for women’s emancipation and the struggle over meanings of feminism as only visibility or also as a form of politics that divides us while simultaneously reimagining and rebuilding various forms of communities. Feminism today is both a popular genre to be consumed and a minority political pursuit. I also document the interweaving of feminist politics in contemporary China through gendered, classed, racialized, and ethno-national discourses in transnational encounters.