The womb as Battleground: negotiating motherhood and feminism on Chinese Social Media

ABSTRACT

This article conducts a feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA) of a widely debated occurrence within the Chinese public sphere, where a mother’s decision to accompany her six-year-old son into a female restroom ignited substantial discourse. Employing FCDA to interrogate postings on Zhihu, China’s preeminent question-and-answer platform, the research navigates the discursive construction of motherhood intertwined with the prominence of digital feminist narratives. It engenders a bifold analytic perspective by interweaving “digital feminism” with “C-fem,” a conceptual representation that integrates the entrepreneurial and dissenting elements of feminism within China’s unique socio-cultural matrix. Facilitated by FCDA, the study disentangles three salient discursive trajectories that forefront challenges to entrenched patriarchal paradigms. The emergent strands encompass discourses oscillating between lauded and scrutinized maternal figures, contending perspectives on sexuality education, and forceful rebuttals to gendered childbearing expectations. Collectively, these narratives contribute to a multilayered critique of normative gender constructs and signal a fortified agency of Chinese women in digital feminist praxes. Despite the pressures of traditional gender ideologies and state censorship, the study uncovers the burgeoning assertiveness of Chinese digital feminists, particularly within the non-cooperative C-fem contingent, who increasingly call for transformative societal change. This study not only highlights Chinese women’s negotiation with gender identities in the digital realm but also enriches the global discourse on feminism’s adaptation and resistance in authoritarian contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• FCDA
• patriarchal gender order
• Digital feminism with Chinese characteristics
• C-fem
• expectations of “good mother”

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to editors and anonymous reviewers for their extraordinarily helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. All the screenshots referenced in this paper are from the column of “#Woman was lambasted for not letting a six-year-old boy go to the Women’s Restroom#” on Zhihu platform, from https://www.zhihu.com/topic/26959511/top-answers.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Basic Research Funds for Colleges and Universities in Autonomous Region under Grant [XJEDU2022P031], and Shandong Social Science Planning Project under Grant [21DYYJ05].

Notes on contributors

Weiqi Tian

Weiqi Tian got her Ph.D. degree from Dalian University of Foreign Languages. She is now a lecturer in College of Foreign Languages at Xinjiang University and a fellow of Key Research Center of Humanities and Social Sciences in Colleges and Universities，Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China. She is also a researcher in the Center of Northeast Asia Studies, Dalian University of Technology, China. Her research interests include Critical Discourse Studies, Corpus Linguistics, and Area Studies.

Jingshen Ge

Jingshen Ge got his Ph.D. degree from Belgorod State University (Russia). He is now an associate professor in the College of Liberal Arts, Journalism and Communication at Ocean University of China. His research interests lie at the intersections of Critical Discourse Studies, Feminism, Media and Cultural Studies.