Gender and China's Online Censorship Protest Culture

Abstract

This article offers a feminist critique of three user-generated texts designed to protest Internet censorship in China: the “Song of the Grass-Mud Horse,” the “Green Dam Girl,” and “My Elder Brother Works for SARFT.” These have been widely celebrated as offering democratic potential in a highly regulated political environment, yet what has been overlooked is how all three deploy a masculinist discourse and visual style that position the female body and the feminine as the site of subordination, penetration, and insult. Utilizing Harriet Evans' notion of the “limits of gender” as an analytical tool, I argue that while these texts' subversive character challenges the state's ideological and technological dominance, their language and visual style reinstantiate structural gender inequality that is pervasive in China. Their reinscription of patriarchal constructions of gender thus ultimately diminishes their truly emancipatory potential. Moreover, the uncritical celebration of these media—the way visible gender essentialism is invisible in public discourse around them—reveals the limits of gender in China and the tendency to fetishize any form of resistance in authoritarian contexts.

Keywords::

• China
• “limits of gender”
• censorship
• e'gao
• resistance

Acknowledgements

I thank Xi Cui for his assistance with some research for this paper. Thanks also to Anne Balsamo, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Jenny Chio, Ashley Currier, Wendy Larson, Rebecca Gill, Rui Shen, Joan Wolf, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback.

Notes

^1. See http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2008/12/china-detains-prominent-dissident-ahead-of-human-rights-day/. Liu Xiaobo was subsequently arrested and sentenced to eleven years in jail. In October 2010 he was awarded the Nobel Peace prize.

^2. Other important anniversaries included the May Fourth (student) Movement of 1919, the Tibetan uprising of 1959, the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, and the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic on October 1.

^3. Although blocked, Twitter could be accessed via VPN. China's domestic microblogging platforms were not yet developed.

^4. For an English translation, see http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/03/cui-weiping-%E5%B4%94%E5%8D%AB%E5%B9%B3-i-am-a-grass-mud-horse.

^5. Although I heard that some Chinese feminist scholars critiqued this meme, I was not able to find any published critiques.

^6. See, for example, Salam Al-Mahadin (2003). There isn't space for an in-depth discussion of this point, but one salient example concerns a twist on the CCP slogan, “One central task, two basic points” (yige zhongxin, liangge jibendian), where the “central task” means economic construction and the two basic points are adhering to the Four Cardinal Principles and persevering in reform and opening up. A colloquial joke is that the one central task is a woman's vagina and the two basic points are her breasts.

^7. See http://rjfwys.miit.gov.cn/n11293472/n11295227/n11298103/12397944.html

^8. The software was also the target of a foreign lawsuit accusing its designers of stealing code.

^9. The soy sauce has been interpreted as either a disinfectant or a reference to a phrase, “da jiangyou” (buy soy sauce), which went viral after a passer-by was interviewed by a news reporter about a sex scandal. He used an expletive to convey his lack of interest and said he was just out buying soy sauce. After this, “da jiangyou” became a sarcastic way to express not getting involved in sensitive topics.

^10. See http://www.danwei.org/net_nanny_follies/green_dam_girl.php.

^11. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-tan.

^12. See http://baike.baidu.com/view/2338870.htm?fr = ala0_1_1.

^13. For background on the meme, see http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/downfall-hitler-meme.

^14. See http://www.sarft.gov.cn/articles/2009/03/30/20090330171107690049.html.

^15. See http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/01/music-video-%E2%80%9Cmy-brother%E2%80%99s-at-the-bare-bottom/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cara Wallis

Cara Wallis is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Texas A&M University. E-mail: [email protected]