“Pale, Young, and Slim” girls on red: a study of young femininities on social media in post-socialist China

ABSTRACT

RED (Xiaohongshu) is one of the most popular social media platforms in China. Through the act of sharing different lifestyles on this platform, young women users create and follow fashion trends that not only speak for their beauty aesthetics, but, more importantly, reveals their complex femininities. This article examines Chinese young femininities represented on RED, aiming to explore the complex interplay of social and cultural powers in the production of female subjectivities in the post-socialist context. With this point of departure, positioning RED as a culture genre to be analysed, the discussion focuses on two major female representations on this platform: “BM girls” and “Uniqlo-Sanrio girls.” Drawing on Foucault’s theory of “body as a site of power,” this article investigates how Chinese young women, positioned among multiple competing discourses, have been framed as the “docile body” through the collective pursuit of “pale, young, and slim” in post-socialist China.

KEYWORDS:

• Femininities
• docile body
• social media
• RED
• post-socialist China

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. By discussing the body as “a site of power,” this article does not follow the constructionist dichotomy of discourse/materiality, privileging the former over the latter. Instead, as Foucault’s discussion of biopower implied, “it is impossible to detach the discourse of bodies from the bodies we inhabit” (S. Hekman 2008, 101). Therefore, this article recognizes that materiality is on a par with discourses, and we are mainly looking at how corporeal bodies inhabit cultural space and how discourses and corporality become one in the bodily existence.

2. This article acknowledges the difference between the Western body concept and the Chinese one. There is no unified body in the Chinese conception, as the Chinese term “body (shenti)” is a conflation of shen and ti (Brownell 1995). However, to understand Chinese women’s bodies within a given set of power relations, this article engages “body (shenti)” as a whole notion of “body/self,” focusing primarily on how it is shaped in social and historical discourses.

3. In Chinese traditional culture, the promotion of a slender body shape has always been the mainstream beauty aesthetic. There was no awareness of ampleness and plumpness as beauty except in the Tang Dynasty where a fuller body shape was admired, but this trend waned significantly in the Song Dynasty (Cho 2012).

4. For example, G. Xu and S. Feiner (2007), and Zhang (2012) investigated how Western beauty standards influenced Chinese women’s pursuit of beauty through the proliferation of the “ideal body” image in mass media. More recently, A. Y. Peng (2021) and Xu (2020), through the examination of women’s representations on social media platforms such as WeChat and Weibo, discuss how the neoliberal feminist self-portrayal, alongside the pseudo-feminist discourses articulated, camouflage the revival of traditional patriarchy values in contemporary China.

5. As one of the major social media platforms in China, RED garnered 300 million users, with over 100 million monthly active users (X. Xiao 2021). Among active users who generate over 8 billion reshared posts on a daily basis, female users amount to over 90%, and the largest demographic group of these female users is between the ages of 18 and 34 (Wangyi Technology 2020; Statista 2021b; Statista 2021a).

6. Since RED does not provide application programming interface (API) to the individual user, this article turned to its authorized partner Xinhong (https://xh.newrank.cn/) to gain access of the data.

Additional information

Funding

The corresponding author is funded by International Training Project for Excellent Young Talents of Guangdong Province.