Interrogating Feminist Identity in the Online Dispute of “Pseudo-feminists” in China

This article looks into the question of feminist identity in an online dispute in China. In recent years, several feminism-related pejorative phrases have been invented and used widely online in China to dismiss women who claim to support the feminist cause but “play the gender card” to gain benefits. These women are generally called “pseudo-feminists”. This online dispute is a puzzling one as past research findings show that feminist identification in China is rare. By comparing the online dispute with the post-feminist media environment in the West, this article tackles the question of feminist identity and the implication of this phenomenon for Chinese feminist politics. Applying both qualitative content analysis and discourse analysis it interrogates 84 posts of more than 500 likes from Zhihu, a Chinese Quora-like Q&A platform, this study finds that these posts seldom refer to an ordinary individual who is self-identified feminist. Rather, feminist identity is recognized or repudiated in these posts through three different ways: 1) feminist identity is deemed as legitimate and also used to refer to historical figures, whereas women who raise the issue of sexism in everyday life (in an “inappropriate” way) are labelled ”pseudo-feminists”; 2) feminist identity is viewed as trivial for its mere focus of gender issue, and middle class women who mock deprived men through the discourse of gender are considered as “pseudo-feminist”; 3) feminist identity is repudiated for its Western origin and thus unsuitable in the Chinese context, as China has already achieved gender equality through its own path. The findings of this study have several implications. First, in contrast to the widespread discourses of feminism, self-identified feminist is still rare, which is consistent with the previous findings. Second, the articulation of feminist identity should be understood locally through China’s class conflict and history of women’s liberation. Third, despite the local entanglement and variance, feminist identity is commonly treated as outdated, trivial or unnecessary, which is akin to the post-feminist phenomenon, resulting in the denial of both women’s grievance and collective politics.