Lala activists in dark times: queer feminist resistance to the cyber-nationalist attacks in China

Abstract

This article explores the challenges faced by Chinese queer feminist activists as they navigate the rise of cyber-nationalist attacks. Drawing from the author’s involvement in China’s lala and feminist movements, activists writings, and three interviews, the article discusses how lala activists cope with the rising Chinese cyber-nationalism through various strategies and reconceptualize activism beyond identity groups. The first part of the paper situates the rise of nationalism in Chinese cyberspace in relation to global neo-fascism, identifying the overlapping cyber-trolling infrastructures, the basic form of “palingenetic ultra-nationalism”, and the anti-gender/queer sentiments in neo-fascist movements transcending ideological and political divisions in different regions. The second part discusses the difficulties faced by lala activists when dealing with imbalanced accountability and censorship, as well as the “hegemonic masculinity” in cyber-nationalist attacks, revealing that hegemonic masculinity seeks not only to reinforce traditional gender norms but also to control everyone’s personal lives. The last part argues that Chinese lala activists’ friendship-based alliances provide a valuable strategy under intensifying cyber-nationalism and state censorship. By engaging in diverse social issues and collaborating with various groups, this friendship-based solidarity prioritizes a caring life and fosters a situation where activists explore different social issues, initiate actions, and seek supporters based on specific issues instead of identities. This strategy may offer valuable insights into feminist/queer resistance during dark times, when the rise of global neo-fascism and its appropriation of identity discourse increasingly creates incommensuration between national identities and gender/sexuality identities.

Keywords:

• Chinese nationalism
• global neo-fascism
• cyber-nationalism
• queer feminism
• lala

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Lala is a Chinese slang which has its origin in Taiwan literature and then spread out via the internet to the broader Sinophone world. Lala activists often use the term “lala” to construct a more diverse, inclusive, and flexible lesbian subjectivity, different from the term ‘female homosexuality’ in psychiatric diagnoses, or the western term ‘lesbian’ which sometimes carries a separatist implication. The activist network Chinese Lala Alliances used to define lala as women-loving-women in its broadest sense which includes LBTI – lesbian and bisexual women as well as women-loving trans and intersex people. Lala activists often adopt both feminist and queer perspectives in their social advocacy actions.

2 The Foreign NGO Management Law, which came into effect in 2017, imposed restrictions on domestic NGOs with transnational connections and portrayed NGOs as untrustworthy organizations which are easily be infiltrated by “foreign forces.”

3 In Mandarin Chinese, the pronunciation of 女权 (women's rights/power, feminism) and 女拳 (women's fist/punch) are the same, “nvquan,” so the latter has become a stigmatizing term for the former. Nationalists use 女拳 to describes women as engaging in hysterical, irrational “fist fighting” attacks to men to “create” antagonism between men and women.

4 The Beijing Lala Community Oral History Project has been conducted by the lala organization Tongyu (Common Language) since 2009. The first two phases (2009-2012), through multiple interviews with 44 people and investigations of 9 activity spaces or grassroots groups, outlined the general context of lala community and activism development in Beijing from the mid-1990s to post-2008, not only collecting oral histories of lala activists but also including personal stories of six experienced feminist scholars and activists. The ongoing third phase (2021-) of the oral history project explores changes from 2008 to around 2018 through over 70 oral history interviews.

5 I would like to acknowledge the significant contributions of Xiao Kekewaan (she/they), PhD candidate in linguistic anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Xiao and me co-conducted interviews and co-drafted the initial submission of this article. Although they had to step back from the project due to scheduling conflicts, their valuable insights and efforts were instrumental in shaping this research.

6 Detailed discussion about the “left-right” ideological spectrum in Chinese political contexts is beyond the scope of this article, but Lin (2022) and Hioe (2017) offer good analyses about the discussions on the differences of “left/right” in China and the West in both popular and academic platforms.

7 Actually, the articles written by activists which are analyzed in this paper (Liang, 2022; Xiao, 2021; Zheng, 2021) have all been deleted from the platform they were originally published on and even been deleted from the whole cyberspace within “the Great Firewall” in mainland China.

8 The organizers and main agents are said to come from a fan-based forum called Diba, where most users are (male) Chinese soccer fans. Ironically, Facebook was banned by the Chinese government, so trolls also had to share VPN accounts to cross the “Great Firewall” of China to attack a Facebook page.

9 One year after the Diba event, Weibo fully implemented its real-name identification requirement for all users. However, although users know that theoretically, other users should be real people with their real-name identified, one has no idea whether the real-name identification system works as it claims, as only the platform holds the information of the real-name identification.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Dian Dian

Dian Dian is a Ph.D. Candidate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Their/Her current research, “Translingual, Transgressive, Transnational: Queer Lala Feminism in the Sinophone World,” explores the discourse and activism of gender and sexuality in the Sinophone world. Dian received two BAs in Chinese Classics and Political Philosophy in Beijing, where they/she started her career as a feminist lala activist. They/she also worked as a full-time lala activist in Hong Kong after she got her M.Phil. in History from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.