Empathy as exoneration or resistance? The politics of male empathy in the Chinese #Metoo movement

ABSTRACT

Chinese digital feminism has attracted increasing public and scholarly attention, and yet men’s participation remains understudied. Drawing on interviews with male supporters and textual analysis of online archives, this paper examines how men empathize with women’s experiences and interact with the broader context of Chinese digital feminism. To map out male empathy, the article proposes a two-dimensional framework that differentiates emotional and cognitive empathy on the one hand and draws from Megan Boler’s view on passive and transformative empathy on the other. The political implications of male empathy in digital feminism are discussed. The author argues that although male empathy displays unarguable potentials to subvert patriarchal society, it also succumbs to the pitfall of exonerating men from the obligation to change, hence obscuring structural gender inequalities.

KEYWORDS:

• #Metoo
• digital feminism
• empathy
• masculinities
• connective actions

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Yang Chen, Yalan Huang, Chen Fan and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback and support that helped me finish this work.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This research was financially supported by National Social Science Fund of China [20BXW003].

Notes on contributors

Jiacheng Liu

Jiacheng Liu is a doctoral student at the Bellisario College of Communications, Penn State University. His work focuses on gender, sexuality, and media technologies. E-mail: [email protected]