Sara Liao

This project focuses on the knotted relationship among the state, digital platforms, and media users to reveal the nuances of contemporary feminist movements and gender politics in China. The project concerns two prolonged processes that post-2010 feminist activism has undergone. On the one hand, feminists and activists have utilized digital media to cultivate progressive feminist cultures. On the other hand, the assemblage of digital technologies, the platform economy, patriarchal cultural conventions, the state’s regulatory imperatives, and media users’ practices have spawned a powerful and oppressive set of digital discourses and acts characterized by witch-hunting, sexism, and misogyny.