Laughter in the Time of Coronavirus: Epidemic Humor and Satire in Chinese Women's Digital Diaries

This paper is a study of humorous and satirical image-texts found in eleven Chinese women’s online diaries composed between 2020 and 2022 during the time of COVID-19, including three from Wuhan, one from Xi’an, two from Chongqing, one from Chengdu, one composed by a Shanghainese, and three by New Yorkers. The diarists’ intersectional positionings as social worker, medical practitioner, interactive designer, unemployed grassroots organizer, overseas student, filmmaker, teacher, journalists, writers, and mothers from different cities in China and the United States inform their individual articulations of concerns about sociopolitical changes, pandemic situations, everyday life, as well as gender and class issues.Epidemic humor and satire in these lockdown narratives will be introduced in light of multidisciplinary methods, including sociological studies, political philosophy, psychological theory, and literary criticism. These feminine expressions of comic feelings point to communal laughter as a strategy for survival, subversion, and nonviolent resistance against unprecedented state surveillance and interventions in everyday life. As Sinophone literature continues to go global together with the spread of the disease, the Chinese diaries tend to be more politically satiric, as seen in Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary and its English, German, and Japanese renditions, while the American–Chinese journals are rather humorous in terms of recording life, such as daily diet and necessities during the quarantine. This is due to cultural and situational differences, yet they have all exhibited their feminine sensitivity and sensibilities and formed a structure of feeling representing popular responses to the official discourse among digital citizens in the time of coronavirus.