Becoming Chinese Digital Feminists : Examining the Rural-Urban Divide and the Value of Kinship

Wu, Lily Jinxian and Wood, Helen and Li, Eva Cheuk-Yin (2029) Becoming Chinese Digital Feminists : Examining the Rural-Urban Divide and the Value of Kinship. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

Text (2024LilyJinxianWuPhD)
2024LilyJinxianWuPhD.pdf - Published Version
Restricted to Repository staff only until 19 October 2029.
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs.
Download (6MB)

Abstract

This thesis focuses on Chinese digital feminists, a generation of digital natives born under the One-Child reproductive policy (1979-2015). As an emerging generation of feminists in post-socialist and neoliberal China, Chinese digital feminists are characterised by their unique feminist agendas and activities/activism. Centrally, this thesis counters the image of Chinese feminists as exclusively urban middle-class women, which has been the main focus of a disproportionate amount of research on Chinese feminism (such as Fong, 2002; Zheng, 2016; Yang, 2020). Rather, based on 34 in-depth semi-structured interviews, I found the backgrounds and experiences of Chinese digital feminists are diverse and complicated. Almost half of the digital feminists (16 out of 34) in this research originate from rural areas, and some of them even hail from disadvantaged rural peasant backgrounds. Drawing on Bourdieu’s ‘capital theory’ (1979, 1984, 1986, 1987), I propose the concept of ‘kinship capital’ – a robust kinship relationship as a significant form of capital – to explain how feminists from different family backgrounds can mobilise resources related to their family ties. Building upon feminist scholarship on emotions, feelings and affect, the concept of ‘kinship capital’ helps to deconstruct the production and reproduction of intersectional social inequalities in the Chinese context. I investigate digital feminist agendas by analysing the debates on ‘anti-marriage’, and examine their feminist activism through Chinese MeToo as an example. I argue that the feminist agendas and activities/activism of different feminist cohorts are not only shaped by their economic, social and cultural capital, but also by their differing levels of kinship capital. I also assert that ‘kinship capital’ plays an important role in the reproduction of feminisms among Chinese digital feminists. Specifically, rural feminists with insufficient ‘kinship capital’ tend to advocate feminism through collective actions, while urban feminists with sufficient ‘kinship capital’ prefer an individualist discourse for self-development under the feminist framework. In other words, ‘a collective feminism’ is reproduced by reduced ‘kinship capital’, whereas ‘an individualist feminism’ is reproduced by plentiful ‘kinship capital’. This thesis contributes to furthering the understanding of the diversity of Chinese digital feminists and the (im)possibility of collective action and solidarity. Even though, it is important to acknowledge that women do also share similarities and that the rural-urban divide is not entirely absolute.