Online feminist stand-up comedy: an emerging affective-discursive intervention on gender in China

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on online women’s stand-up comedy in China and its intervention on gender-related and feminist issues. Acknowledging the role of affect in both stand-up comedy performance and the formation of feminist politics, we conduct an affective-discursive analysis of women’s stand-up performances from the popular Chinese online stand-up comedy show Rock & Roast (脱口秀大会). In the analysis, we explore how the female comedians discursively and physically express two affects – disgust and shame – in ways that reveal their bodily and affective awareness of everyday gender inequalities. We argue that these online performances create a digital affective space which allows everyday affects of Chinese women to be expressed, circulated, and shared. These stand-up performances are affective-discursive manifestations of female comedians’ self-authorship and self-empowerment in the contemporary context of Chinese digital feminisms.

KEYWORDS:

• Stand-up comedy
• gender
• digital feminism
• China
• affect

Women’s stand-up comedy and/in digital China

Stand-up comedy, originating from live club performance in America but now claimed to be a ‘ubiquitous art’, has gained global traction through digital media, such as television comedy shows, online streaming services, and social media channels (Lintott 2020). In China, stand-up comedy, as a glocalized culture, began to trend through television and the internet after 2010 (Zhang and Zhou 2023). The popularity of stand-up comedy in China can be traced to the Tonight 80’s Talk Show (2012–2017),¹ broadcast on the Shanghai Dragon TV channel, which had a direct impact on translation of the term ‘stand-up comedy’ in Chinese language.² In 2017, the Xiaoguo Culture Media company launched an online stand-up comedy show, Rock & Roast, on Tencent Video, one of the major Chinese streaming platforms. Since then, online media has become the primary means for stand-up comedy to be distributed, watched, circulated, and discussed in China. From 2017 to 2022, Rock & Roast has aired five seasons with a total of 52 episodes, and it becomes the most famous stand-up comedy show on the Chinese internet. Particularly, female comedians on the show gained much attention as their performances sparked discussion on Chinese social media, especially from female audiences who experience sexism and gender inequality in their everyday life (X. Meng and Literat 2023). While the previous scholarship has addressed Chinese audience’s networked discussion about female comedians’ performances on the show (Liao 2024; X. Meng and Literat 2023), this article examines how the resonance is created in these popular performances through the mobilization of affects.

Women’s performances in stand-up comedy have gained significant attention in feminist scholarship. In different social contexts, researchers have taken women’s stand-up comedy as a site through which to investigate feminist humour and cultural politics of gender, race, and/or LGBTQ+ identities (Burrell 2020; Sundén and Paasonen 2019). In the contemporary Chinese context, for example, Chen and Gao (2023) argue that online Chinese stand-up comedy opens discursive pathways towards transgressive views on social issues, including gender norms. Zhang and Zhou (2023), more specifically, suggest that female comedians in Rock & Roast break the gender barrier of traditional verbal arts, igniting a new wave of feminist thinking in China. Building on the existing research, our study focuses on women’s stand-up comedy on Rock & Roast and contextualizes it within the emergence and development of digital feminisms on the Chinese internet. By using the plural ‘feminisms’, we acknowledge the diversity and heterogeneity of feminist activism, politics, and cultures in China. Due in part to the Chinese party-state’s heavy-handed censorship of political activism both offline and online, digital cultural spaces become sites for women’s voices and feminist interventions, often focusing on personalized issues and everyday gender inequality (Mao 2020). We view the performances we study as what Joanne Gilbert (1997) calls women’s ‘autobiographic performances’, in which comedians ‘perform both self and culture, exemplifying for audiences the inevitable interdependence [and tension] between personal and social identities’ (317). We suggest that popular women’s stand-up comedy on the internet illustrates feminist self-authorship and self-empowerment in digital China.

Specifically, we attend closely to affect, a notion which has been crucial in feminist studies. Feminist scholars have actively and deeply engaged with the ‘affective turn’ across multiple disciplines (Pedwell and Whitehead 2012). Among various scholarly understandings of affect, we are particularly interested in how affect plays out in gendered relations of power. As Margaret Wetherell states,

[Power] leads to investigations of the unevenness of affective practices. How are practices clumped, who gets to do what when, and what relations does an affective practice make, enact, disrupt and reinforce? Who is emotionally privileged, who is emotionally disadvantaged and what does this privilege and disadvantage look like?

(Wetherell 2012, 13)

Aligned with Wetherell’s understanding of affect and power, we intend to explore how autobiographic performances in women’s stand-up comedy (re)tell women’s affective experiences in everyday life and examine how these affects are subjected to, but also challenge gender norms in Chinese society. More importantly, we consider what possibilities an analysis of affect offers to understand women’s online stand-up comedy, which is distributed and widely discussed in cultural spaces on the Chinese internet (X. Meng and Literat 2023). We regard women’s online stand-up comedy as a ‘digital affective practice’ (Döveling et al. 2018) that forms ‘a moment of [feminist] recruitment… when many complicated flows across bodies, subjectivities, relations, histories and contexts entangle and intertwine together’ (Wetherell 2015, 160).

Another field of scholarship useful for exploring affect is stand-up comedy studies. Researchers in stand-up comedy studies tend to emphasize the role that affect plays for the comedians in connecting their audiences. Eric Shouse (2007), for instance, argues that stand-up comedy ‘relies upon the transmission of affect [from the comedian to the audience] and that affect is dependent upon context and performance’ (35). While affect is a relevant and useful concept for studying stand-up comedy, we want to expand its application in our study by employing an affective-discursive approach (Wetherell 2012). Taking such a pragmatic approach means we analyse stand-up performances, including the embodied affects in spoken words as well as the ways and contexts in which these words are situated, produced, distributed, and consumed. The affective-discursive analysis enables us to investigate embodied experiences uttered by female comedians and the ‘digital affects’ (Döveling et al. 2018) they shared with online audiences. We argue that women’s stand-up comedy, by transiting affects and interrogating gender issues, serves as a cultural indicator of Chinese digital feminisms. In the next section, we elaborate on the relationship between affect and discourse and introduce the affective-discursive analysis employed to study the sampled online women’s performances from Roast & Rock.

Affect vs. discourse and affective-discursive analysis

The affective-discursive approach that we follow in this study has been developed and advocated by Margaret Wetherell (2012, 2013). Reflecting on the understanding of affect as a ‘pre-personal’ and ‘extra-discursive’ force, Wetherell proposes the notion ‘affective practice’ to capture ‘how the affective textures and activities of everyday life are shaped’ (2012, 4). The focus on affect as practice centres affect’s social, performative, and patterned nature, and allows us to interrogate the interactions between affect and gendered relations of power through the case of online women’s stand-up comedy in Chinese context. As Wetherell argues, ‘power works through affect, and affect emerges in power’ (2012, 16). She characterizes affective practice as ‘figuration where body possibilities and routines become recruited or entangled together with meaning-making and with other social and material figurations’ (2012, 19). As central to such ‘meaning-making’ process, discourse ‘does not consist of one statement but of several statements— [each one implies a relation to all the other]—working together to form… a discursive formation’ (Hall 2019 [1992], 155). Hence, a potential of discourse is ‘indissolubly and tightly woven’ with affect (Wetherell 2013, 364) and ‘provide the [relational] means for affect to travel’ (Wetherell 2012, 20). Affective-discursive approach is an appropriate tool for studying online women’s stand-up performances as a form of discursive and affective practice, then, because it allows us to examine the interrelations between affect, power, and feminine subjects in networked cultural spaces on the Chinese internet.

Feminist researchers often use an affective-discursive approach to trace ‘the affective workings of gender’ – as part of gender norms in a society – through representations of those affects surfaced as ‘conscious feelings’ and ‘unconscious bodily feelings’ (Åhäll 2018, 43). As feminist researchers, we believe that women’s felt experiences are connected to the patriarchal system they are living through, and that recognizing women’s affective practices, for this reason, can lead to more nuanced understandings of gendered experiences and subjectivities. More specifically, we want to recognize the networked affects that are discursively generated, circulated, and shared by Chinese women who write, perform, watch, laugh at, forward, and discuss stand-up performances in online cultural spaces. By analysing the ways in which affect is discursively constructed and circulated in online women’s stand-up comedy, we gain insight into how Chinese women affectively respond to, navigate, and challenge gender norms and disciplines in the context of Chinese digital feminisms.

The materials of this study are from stand-up performances of Roast & Rock Season 1–5. We select two individual and a duo of female comedians who were the most featured on the show: Yang Li (Seasons 2–5, 20 performances), Niao-Niao (Seasons 4–5, 10 performances) and Yan Yi & Yan Yue (Seasons 2–5, 12 performances).³ Each performance lasts approximately five minutes. At the early stage of this study, we quickly noticed that much of their stand-up performances centred around the feelings when they encountered gender disciplinarity, hegemonic/toxic masculinities, and discriminations in everyday life. We used an Excel worksheet to extract all the sampled performances with lines related the comedians’ feelings and emotions. By applying affective-discursive analysis, we paid attention to embodied affects, discursive functions of the lines, and the subject positions that the comedians took in their described scenarios. In the analysis, we select two types of frequently occurring affect: disgust in the performances from Yang Li and shame in the performances from Niao-Niao and Yan Yi & Yan Yue. In addition to being the most prominent elements in the analysis, disgust and shame are also crucial to feminist research on affect (Ahmed 2004; Probyn 2004, 2005). Drawing on the theoretical bases of feminist studies on disgust and shame, we situate the analysis in Chinese online cultural spaces and digital feminisms.

Performing disgust, mocking men, and transgression of gendered power relations

Disgust, initially connecting to the visceral, reveals a strong feeling of revulsion or disapproval (Ahmed 2004). In this article, however, we understand disgust as a ‘social affect’, indicating that it ‘requires a social context in which to take on meaning’ (Sullivan 2022, 81). The meaning-making structures of disgust, therefore, can be considered as formed in ‘selfhood, interpersonal relationships, and the worlds we inhabit’ (Joensuu 2020, 9). More specifically, Sara Ahmed (2004) conceptualizes ‘the performativity of disgust’, arguing that disgust does things in everyday interactions, institutions, and cultures. Following these scholarly understandings, we see disgust not merely as an affective response to disgusting objects but allowing people to organize and express their experiences. While scholars have widely studied how disgust functions to ‘other’ marginalized groups through stigmatization and reinforce hierarchies of power and privilege (Ahmed 2004; Tyler 2008), we suggest that it can also be productive when deployed in a reverse manner. In the following case of Yang Li’s stand-up performances, we find that disgust is deployed to transgress boundaries and challenge dominant gender norms in Chinese society, rather than reinforcing them.

Yang Li debuted on Rock & Roast Season 2 in 2019 and quickly rose to national fame for her witty and sharp jokes about gender issues. Her popularity cannot be separated from the broader, at times controversial, debates about masculinity that currently circulate across multiple Chinese social media platforms (Liao 2024), on which many Chinese women ‘express their discontent with men, marriage, and procreation’ (Xu and Liu 2024, 2). Yang, as she reveals in public interviews, is as well faced with discomfort and struggle brought by male superiority in everyday life and in her comedian career (Liu 2020). In the context of Chinese society where the majority of wealth, social resources, and power are still accumulated by men (B. Chen and He 2020), feeling and expressing embodied disgust towards men and masculinity should be understood as transgressive.

Using her jokes performed on Rock & Roast, Yang mocks typical men’s behaviours, which could be seen as hegemonic/toxic masculinities in China, while expressing women’s feelings of disgust when encountering such behaviours in everyday life. In Yang’s arguably most well-known online performance, she says:

Men are beautiful and mysterious, [because] you can never figure out what things are in their little brains. Why does he seem so average but so confident?

…

Why do men act like this? I think it is [because of] confidence. They think every sentence they say is important. [They think] they are the main characters in the world. [They wonder] why does this person come to talk with me about her life trouble?! She must want to learn something from me! Then you will learn, men are trash. (Rock & Roast Season 3, Episode 5, aired on 19 August 2020)

In the punchline, Yang mockingly calls men ‘trash’ and shows that she, as well as many other women, are sick of ‘mansplaining’. Her sarcastic question, ‘Why does he seem so average but so confident?’ introduced the term puxinnan (普信男, translating to ‘average yet confident men’) to the popular lexicon on the Chinese internet in 2020 and elicited fierce pushback from some men (Liao 2024). We suggest that Yang’s subtle yet precise expression of her disgust with ‘mansplaining’ exhibits everyday gendered power dynamics and how women feel living with men’s structural superiorities. Here, disgust, as an affective register and a rhetorical device, is Yang’s response to ‘mansplaining’ and the underlying superiorities of the men whom she encounters. By mobilizing personal affect to publicly interrogate gender norms, Yang strategically attends feminist critique in an everyday-life style that is ‘safe’ for censored digital spaces in China. Simultaneously, in ‘transmitting’ from the comedian to the audience (Shouse 2007), the disgust performed by Yang can provoke resonance among audience who are living with the gender inequality of Chinese society. We suggest that it is because Yang expresses disgust (‘men are trash’) with hegemonic masculinity (‘average yet confident’) that explains why she was attacked on Chinese websites associated with the ‘manosphere’, and even boycotted by some self-identified male netizens (Liao 2024). In this case, disgust, as women’s embodied feeling about hegemonic masculinities and gender inequalities, challenges structural sexism through the power of transgression.

Another performance of Yang on Rock & Roast Season 5 can help further illustrate our opinion on performing disgust in women’s stand-up comedy. In this performance, Yang first mimics over-confident and arrogant characteristics that youninan (油腻男, translating to ‘greasy men’) display. Youninan, another internet buzzword in China, refers to men who have unpleasant behaviours, flaunt their masculinities, and are disrespectful to women. By imitating a ‘greasy woman’ persona on an online comedy stage (Figure 1), Yang flips the gendered relation of power in everyday scenarios and unveils the inappropriate, disrespectful, and thus disgusting masculinities of the so-called youninan in China. The inappropriate masculinities Yang performs in this clip, such as self-centred arrogance, boasting, and telling sexist jokes, are objects of women’s disgust. In the final part of the performance, Yang admits that she watched many online videos of youninan to learn all the behaviours she has just mimicked on the stage. Yang says:

[Youninan] have so many bodily movements and they are so irritating. You want to shout at them: don’t act like this! Watching these videos, you would unconsciously move your phone away from you. As if he jumps out of the screen accidently, it is easier to avoid him. During watching these videos, you always need to take a break [before you could continue].

(Rock & Roast Season 5, Episode 9, aired on 9 November 2022)

Figure 1. Yang mimics youninan.

Then Yang puts on a disgusted face (Figure 2). Through such a deliberate expression of disgust, Yang clearly questions and criticizes masculinities many women consider ‘hegemonic/toxic’ in the context of China. Mimicking men’s characteristics and expressing disgust enable Yang to delineate the types of men’s behaviours in daily life that she views with contempt and defiance. Such an individual affect aims to resonate with the audience, especially when directly performing a persona who evokes disgust. By performing disgust publicly/online, Yang distances herself from the ‘uncomfortable proximity’, while calling upon audience to ‘witness the pulling away in uttering the disgust’ (Probyn 2000). In this way, disgust, as an affect uttered and circulated through stand-up comedy as an affective-discursive practice, works to align the individual with the collective, which is consistent with the long-held feminist understanding of ‘the personal is political’.

Figure 2. Yang portrays her reaction to youninan.

To summarize, Yang’s online stand-up performances, by making fun of and showing disgust with hegemonic masculinities and men’s privileges, function as transgression of everyday patriarchal gender norms in Chinese society. We also suggest that Yang’s performances are not simply ‘malebashing’ or ‘manhating’ as her haters claim. The disgust Yang expresses in her stand-up performances is never aimed at individual men. With disgust’s function of ‘world making’ (Joensuu 2020), Yang’s performances transgress and challenge the everyday patriarchal structure that people, including men, exist within in Chinese society. In the next section, we move our focus to the other comedians in our analysis: Niao-Niao and Yan Yi & Yan Yue. We suggest that they perform shame on the online stage and demonstrate their (self-)reflections on everyday gender norms and disciplinarity.

Performing shame, affective connection, and feminist (self-)reflection

Gendered shame is a central mechanism that secures the continued subordination of women in contemporary China. In post-socialist China, women’s bodies and femininities are disciplined to retreat into patriarchal gender roles and heightened consumer culture (B. Meng and Huang 2017). While beauty, fashion, and fitness industries are rapidly developing in Chinese markets, Chinese women contend with endless shame and anxieties about their bodies, which are positioned as perpetually unfinished and imperfect. As central to the rhetoric of gender normativity and self-perfection, shame allows us to develop a wider notion of everyday politics – of ‘what is personal and what is social’ (Probyn 2004, 331). In the stand-up performances of Niao-Niao and Yan Yi & Yan Yue, the exposure and satire of shame manifest the feminist dictum of ‘the personal is political’. Simultaneously, the emphasis on gendered shame in these performances provokes an empathetic feminist politics that contributes to the digital formation of affective connections.

Niao-Niao, the second comedian studied in our analysis, humorously portrays shame associated with the feminine body through her performances. Since debuting on Rock & Roast Season 4 in 2021, Niao-Niao, who describes herself as ‘shy’, ‘introvert’, and having ‘ordinary looks’, has quickly risen to fame for her ‘social phobia’ performance style. ‘social phobia’, known as shekong (社恐) in Chinese, has recently sparked widespread discussions in China. While many young people identify themselves as having ‘social phobia’ on social media, Chinese mainstream media also expresses concerns on this seemingly unproductive personal characteristic. Consequently, ‘social phobia’, which can be considered a form of shame, is increasingly becoming a ‘form of [affective] politics’ (Ahmed 2004) in Chinese society. In Niao-Niao’s performance, specifically, ‘social phobia’ is narrated as gendered shame, stemming from women’s affective experiences in the predicaments they face in everyday life. As she narrates in a podcast interview, ‘being ordinary feels like something to be ashamed of’ (‘Be a Dodo’ Podcast 2021). In Niao-Niao’s second performance on the Rock & Roast stage, Niao-Niao tells her shame regarding Chinese women’s agency in both the bodily and discursive realms:

Being an average-looking girl is especially tough, nothing you do seems right. When I don’t dress up and wear make-up, people say there are only lazy women, not ugly women. Before that saying came along, I was happy to be an ugly woman!

(Rock & Roast Season 4, Episode 3, aired on 24 August 2021)

Using the punchline ‘I was happy to be an ugly woman’, Niao-Niao mocks the amplification and normalization of everyday shame on women’s bodies. Here, everyday shame about the appearance not only disrupts her life rhythm and leads to low self-esteem but afflicts every supposedly ‘average-looking woman’. This verbal violence against women’s bodies persists in Chinese media discourses and daily life, to the extent that even appearing ordinary becomes a source of shame. In contrast, Niao-Niao publicizes her private shame, creating connectivity between the personal and the political by recounting individual anecdotes to expose the taken-for-granted and obscured ordinary shame. At this point, her comedy does not prematurely reduce shame to an object to be erased or hidden. Instead, it draws from a productivity that opens women’s muffled voices and their potential resonance, manifested in laughter where shame is released. Here, we expand our understanding of the productivity of shame in relation to feminist politics in online stand-up performances, with a particular focus on its viability in establishing resonance and connectivity with (mostly, female) audiences. As Probyn argues:

Shame illuminates… our desire to be connected with others, and the knowledge that… we will sometimes fail in our attempts to maintain those connections… [S]hame is always productive… It produces effects—more shame, more interest—which may be felt at a physiological, social, or cultural level.

(Probyn 2005, 14–15)

Probyn’s argument highlights an implicit aspect of shame associated with interest and joy, where shame alerts us to our ‘unknown or [yet-to-be] appreciated investments’ (Probyn 2005, 14). Consequently, shame can be the intrinsic energy that animates the generative function of humour, fostering a desire for (re-)connection.

Further, Niao-Niao’s performances exhibit the ‘push and pull’ towards different gendered power relations by (re)shaping the affective space of shame. In the aforementioned performance, she talks about both her avoidance and proximity to everyday social situations:

Because of the low self-esteem in looks, I gave up a lot of things. Don’t go to job interviews, I’m sure I won’t be selected. Don’t contact the boy I have a crush on, it will be fruitless. Don’t rob a bank, I will be captured by the surveillance camera, and besides, I’m not photogenic.

(Rock & Roast Season 4, Episode 3, aired on 24 August 2021)

Here, Niao-Niao tells the psychological and physical dilemmas created by gendered shame for women, including the loss of confidence and missed opportunities in job seeking and relationships. As she further exaggerates the scenario and delivers the punchline about bank robbing, Niao-Niao employs satire to prompt feminist reflection on the gendered structure of shame, particularly its impact on women’s agency regarding what they can or cannot do.

Arguably, Niao-Niao’s performances not only depict the feeling of shame but also illustrate the ‘push and pull’ of shame in everyday life. Through publicly satirizing her experiences of shame imposed by misogyny and gender inequality, and turning them into jokes in online stand-up comedy, Niao-Niao’s performances transform personal shame into transgressive joy. Using shame as a resource to generate laughter, she negates the patriarchal shame that would constrain her agency. We argue, therefore, that Niao-Niao’s ‘shame-focused’ online stand-up comedy is productive in negotiating gendered power relations and potentially forming affective alliances in the digital space.

Similar to Niao-Niao, Yan Yi & Yan Yue also focus on everyday gendered shame in their performances on Rock & Roast. Explicitly identifying themselves as feminists, the Yan sisters not only reveal gendered shame but also deliberately question and challenge the mechanism of shame as an apparatus disciplining women’s bodies and perpetuating gender norms. As they articulate their motivation of performing online in a public interview, they use humour to tell ‘what vulnerable, sensitive that women feel in China, therefore expressing empathy and self-deprecation for them’ (Stochastic Volatility 2022). An example is their performance addressing body shaming and sexual harassment, where the Yan sisters allude to a scandal involving a group of men sexually harassing and beating four young women in a restaurant at midnight in Tangshan, China, in 2022. The performance aired two months after this incident, during a period of heated online discussions about the vulnerability of women in a patriarchal society. To circumvent media censorship, they strategically present the performance as ironic commentary on body shaming, aiming to prompt feminist reflection on the relationship between everyday shaming on women’s bodies and sexual harassment. As they state:

Yan Yue: We researched why there are no pockets on women’s clothes.

Yan Yi: Because pockets ruin the curves of a woman’s body.

Yan Yue: But men find only women with curves attractive.

Yan Yi: That’s why when a woman goes out for a nightcap, she always ends up with some dirt on her, like cigarette smoke, dirt, and men’s hands.

Yan: Yue (mockingly): They’ll even chastise us in return and ask, ‘Why do your clothes [curves] keep seducing my hands?’ (Rock & Roast Season 5, Episode 1, aired on 31 August 2022)

Using stand-up comedy to expose the disturbing connections between shaming women and sexual harassment, the Yan sisters demonstrate how shame/shaming is enacted to maintain oppressive gender structure. By using their personal and anecdotal style of comedy performance, they broach the potentially censored topic related to the sensitive news (the Tangshan incident). In the scenario that they describe, men who harass women often imply the women are at fault for their own harassing acts by slut-shaming the feminine body. The Yan sisters reveal that everyday forms of body shame, such as ‘fashion without pockets’, problematically intersect with sexual harassment (‘the hand that touches the body’). By repositioning the perpetrator of shame (the male harasser) as the object of ridicule, they question the ‘social deployment and manipulation of shame’ (Fischer 2018, 1) used to justify and perpetuate sexual harassment and its embedded patriarchy.

In their stand-up performances, the Yan sisters also manifest shame politics by urging women to reflect on the manipulated shame imposed on their own bodies and the resulting self-discipline. On the stage of Rock & Roast, they repeatedly present various aspects of women’s body shame in everyday life, such as facial features, body shape, body hair, body odour, and so on. In a highly regarded scene, Yan Yue publicly displays her armpit (Figure 3), which is typically considered a private body area for women in Chinese culture, to their online audience. They say:

Figure 3. Yan Yue shows her armpit.

Yan Yue: After reading fashion magazines, you might wonder why it is so embarrassing for a woman to have body hair.

Yan Yi: Especially armpit hair.

Yan Yue: As if men just look at it and they get dizzy, nauseous, vomit.

Yan Yi: If armpit hair is such a big deal—

Yan Yue: Why not women use it for self-defence?

Yan Yi: If you go out at night, you can hide your armpit hair in advance. When you encounter a bad guy, and he asks, ‘Aren’t you afraid of me?’

Yan Yue: I will respond (lifting the arm, showing the armpit), ‘Aren’t you afraid of the embarrassment?’ (Rock & Roast Season 3, Episode 1, aired on 22 July 2020)

Through rhetoric and bodily performances, the Yan sisters transcend the traditionally defined boundary between the private and the public for women’s bodies, which is maintained by the gendered manipulation of shame. By making this everyday shame publicly visible and debatable, they encourage women to reflect not just on the iterated shames produced by self-disciplinary practices (such as shaving body hair because of feeling ashamed), but also on structural gender inequality. While social and cultural aesthetic imperatives have shaped women’s bodily experiences of shame, the Yan sisters ironically twist these feelings of shame into body empowerment (using armpit for self-defence), through which they evoke feminist interrogation on both women’s internalization of male gaze and men’s (sexual) harassments (‘Aren’t [men] afraid of embarrassment?’). The focus on women’s everyday shame empowers the Yan sisters’ feminist stand-up comedy, allowing it to ‘function in the duality of the public and the private, the extraordinary and the mundane’ (Probyn 2004, 330). Amidst the humorous atmosphere of online stand-up performances, they establish a temporal connection with audiences and promote a collective-affective transgression to renegotiate the private and the public, as well as reflections on gendered power relations.

By sharing, making fun of, and reflecting on their experiences of shame together with audiences, Niao-Niao and Yan Yi & Yan Yue create a shame politics that forms affective resonance in the digital space of online stand-up comedy. Their performances endeavour to show how shame is experienced, or not experienced, in gendered power relations, and to interrogate shame as a feminist issue in women’s everyday lives. By performing shame, they recount the private and gendered shame, and use it to generate resonance as well as potential (self-)reflection among online audiences. Performing shame in online women’s stand-up comedy on the Chinese internet connects the personal and the political, the private and the public, thus opening ‘an [inter-] and intra-subjective moment that produces a new sense of self’ (Probyn et al. 2018, 325).

Conclusive remarks

This study examines how online women’s stand-up comedy, as an affective-discursive practice, forms and develops an intervention on gender in the context of Chinese digital feminisms. By performing certain affects online, Chinese female stand-up comedians express, transit, and share their embodied everyday feelings and experiences situated in a patriarchal society with online audiences. On the Chinese internet, authoritarian monopoly over political power produces censorship, which includes scrutiny and restriction of digital feminist movements. However, women’s stand-up performances can bypass this censorship by strategically mobilizing anecdotal and private affective expressions, thereby securing and enhancing the political potential of such affective-discursive practices.

In the cases we analysed, Yang Li’s performances demonstrate the function of disgust in transgressing and challenging gendered power relations, while Niao-Niao and the Yan sisters showcase the productivity of shame in evoking resonance, connectivity, and (self-)reflection among the networked audience. While arguing that ‘disgust does things’ (Ahmed 2004) and ‘shame is productive’ (Probyn 2005), both of which demonstrate again the feminist potential of using affect in online Chinese women’s stand-up comedy, we also suggest that these subtle, yet productive displays of affect can consolidate and advance women’s and feminist voices in digital cultural spaces. In other words, affective-discursive interventions of online stand-up comedy contribute to the formation of a feminist digital authorship.

The dynamics of Chinese digital cultural spaces, including the online stand-up comedy discussed herein, however, is fluid and changing fast (D. Chen and Gao 2023). From Chinese #MeToo digital activism (Mao 2020) to online women’s stand-up comedy, researchers have explored the creativity and resilience of digital feminisms in negotiating media censorship and mediating public politics in China. Therefore, the cultural and political outcomes of online women’s stand-up comedy require constant scholarly efforts to further contribute to our understandings of Chinese digital feminisms.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In this article, the English names of Chinese shows, companies, and platforms are original translations. The comedians’ names adhere to the Chinese naming format. Their lines are translated by the authors.

2. Nowadays, the most common term in the Chinese language for referring to stand-up comedy is tuokouxiu (脱口秀), but originally, this term was used to describe the talk show genre. Episodes in Tonight 80’s Talk Show began with a stand-up comedy performance followed by an interview. The stand-up performances were warmly welcomed by Chinese audiences, leading to the term tuokouxiu being widely used to specifically refer to stand-up comedy.

3. Yan Yi and Yan Yue are twins. They perform as a duo.