#girls help girls#: feminist discussions and affective heterotopia in patriarchal China

ABSTRACT

In June 2021, a girl named Du Meizhu revealed on Weibo (Chinese Twitter) of having been emotionally and sexually abused by the top-tier idol Kris Wu. The incident gained publicity over the month and climaxed in mid-July, when netizens started the hashtag #girls help girls# on Weibo. Rapidly topping the trending list, this incident led to heated discussions around the case and women’s social status in contemporary Chinese patriarchy. Yet unlike its #MeToo counterpart, the hashtag had been taken down hastily within hours, cutting its practitioners off from further engagements. In this paper we nonetheless propose a more positive interpretation of the incident. Combining Massumi’s affect theory with Foucault’s heterotopia, we argue that Weibo users constructed themselves an affective heterotopia in the hashtag #girls help girls#. Through an affective textual analysis of the posts in the hashtag, we argue that while vulnerable to censorship, the affective force in this heterotopia is ultimately untameable to the discursive regime, potentially leading to concrete feminist ends. In so doing, we offer methodological insight for understanding online feminist discussions in the particular context of contemporary China, adding to scholarship that transcends the global North orientation in feminist theory and politics.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• Weibo
• affective heterotopia
• feminism
• methodology

Introduction

In June 2021, Weibo (Chinese Twitter) user @Du Meizhu (都美竹) revealed in a series of posts to have been emotionally and sexually abused by the top-tier, Chinese-Canadian idol Kris Wu while she was still a minor. The hype around the case was quickly built up and kept brewing, as Wu accused Du of “slandering,” while Du disclosing evidence (photos and videos), and declaring that multiple other minors and young women who had similar experience with Wu had approached her¹ (Koreaboo 2021). On the night of July 18 Du posted a “ultimatum (决战),” urging Wu to issue a formal apology to his victims and to relinquish from Chinese show business. Otherwise, she would publicize the materials she had collected, which could get Wu “a sentence for no less than ten years.” Du claimed that she was determined to fight against Wu on behalf of other survivors whose personal information she had no intention to publicize, saying that “[o]nce I publish any of such information, their life would be ruined … I am well aware that my life is already ruined … I am already a slut in public’s eye … I will not see them fall into the same fate” (Koreaboo 2021).

This ultimatum had escalated the intensity of the incident to a new level. Like #MeToo of Hollywood, Du’s effort had prompted other public figures (idols or cyber-celebrities) who had been abused by Wu in multiple forms and shapes to stand out and publicize their experiences. Within hours, 24 celebrities had posted on Weibo about their encounters with Wu as a support for Du (Global Times 2021).

Meanwhile, the public, feeling either enraged or inspired, started to share their thoughts and feelings on Weibo, and created a hashtag #girls help girls#. By 10 am July 19, 13 hours after Du posted her ultimatum, #girls help girls# had become an “explosive” topic and topped the trending list on Weibo [See Figure 1]. In the hashtag netizens expressed their frustrations over the event, exchanged their thoughts on the case and women’s living circumstances in China generally, shared their own experiences of sexual violence, and managed a community of support for Du and each other. In less than half an hour, however, the hashtag started tumbling down the list, and disappeared altogether around noon. Realizing the hashtag had been taken down by the censors, Weibo users rephrased their tags to #girls helping girls#, #girls help girl#, among others as an attempt to reclaim the trending list and maintain a common ground to continue their discussions and communal therapy. Yet the variants had never again gained the same explosive publicity as the original tag, nor had they appeared on the trending topic list on Weibo. The civic discussions, while not completely died out, became segmented and sporadic.

Figure 1. Trending of #girls help girls# on Weibo. Screenshot taken on 09: 47 am, July 19, 2021.

Despite the ephemerality of #girls help girls#, which is also a trait widely acknowledged in global scholarship on hashtag feminism (Rosemary Clark-Parsons 2021, Sara Liao 2019, Jinman Zhang 2022), this article provides a more positive interpretation of social media feminism in contemporary China. We take the episodic explosion and censorship of #girls help girls# on Weibo as a case study, and explore in details how feminist discussions unfold in China’s patriarchal system and media ecology. We showcase that discussions in the hashtag are highly emotional, manifest as anger, fear, solidarity, and excitement. These emotions resonate to constitute an empathetic community with the potentiality of evading censorship, as in the re-naming of #girls help girls#. Combining Brian Massumi’s (2002) affect and Michel Foucault’s (1986, 2005) heterotopia, we name this space an “affective heterotopia,” a place of constant contact and contestation with the dominating patriarchal norms initiated by affect, which may lead to concrete feminist ends. In so doing, we set up an affective methodological framework for understanding online feminist discussions in the particular context of contemporary China, contributing to feminist theories and politics beyond the scope of the global North.

In what follows we first position this article in existing scholarship, explicating its rationale and research significance. Then, we set up a methodological framework of an affective heterotopia to interpret the vigor of this hashtag event. This is followed by an elaboration on data sampling and analysis methods. Having laid out the background, we stage how discussions in the online space of #girls help girls# had constructed an affective heterotopia for the practitioners, and in what sense they had interrogated multiple patriarchal norms and public discourses. These dynamics, we argue, constitute the political significance of the affective heterotopia in hashtag feminism of contemporary China. We discuss the advantages and limits of this research at the end.

Literature review: affective place-making in feminist discourses on Chinese social media

The dynamics of #girls help girls# are to be understood in the global hype of #MeToo movement. Indeed, this incident is commonly regarded as a part and prime example of Chinese #MeToo (Wayne Chang 2022). In their synthesis review on Anglophone studies of #MeToo (from 2016–2019) Quan-Haase et al., (2021) identify insufficiencies in 1) qualitative exploration of participants’ experience in the social media feminist movement; and 2) examination of societies other than the Global North. Through a qualitative interpretation of #girls help girls# as an affective heterotopia in the socio-cultural context of post-socialist China, this article alleviates these academic lacks in scope and methodology.

The case of #girls help girls# sits at the intersection of two major scholarships, affect and feminist discourses in Chinese social media, and social media engagements and spatiality as heterotopia. Admittedly, any form of online discussions needs to be considered within the infrastructure of China’s social media censorship. Not a new mechanism itself, censorship in China has become more stringent under the Xi Jinping (2012–) regime. The official censoring bodies National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA) and Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) supervise over private internet companies. The latter conduct “proactive industry-professional self-regulation” to assure that the content produced or held on their platforms align with China’s dominating ideology of post-socialist (1978–) nation-building, where citizens follow “core socialist values”² and cultivate “positive energy” to fulfil their “Chinese dream”. To do so internet platforms apply algorithmic filtering of ever-growing list of keywords, and/or hire human censors to take down controversial content manually (Jeffreys and Jian, 2022, 9; Jian Xu, Lina Qu and Ge Zhang 2022, 531; Fan Yang 2022). In the scope of this article, the controversial content incorporates non-normative discourses on gender (e.g., feminism) and sexuality (e.g., LGBTQI+ issues). These discourses are deemed detrimental to the familial structure that is at the core of China’s market economy—the dominating economic agenda in post-socialism and the nation’s rejuvenation (Lin Song 2020). This technological-cum-staffing infrastructure notwithstanding, the actual performance of censorship is often ambiguous and flexible. This is due partly to the differences in keywords identified by various platforms and/or the specificities of events or situations (e.g., censorship is generally tighter around State Congress) that lead to inconsistencies in the application of censorship by institutions and corporates (Emily Quan 2022). More importantly, it is also an outcome of the netizens’ bargaining with the system. Indeed, Chinese netizens adopt multiple tactics, including rephrasing sensitive words with homophonic characters or deliberate typos, replacing texts with pictures (e.g., screen shot of a passage), and/or reversing pictures to dodge keyword filtering or image detection (Yang 2022, Jing Zeng 2020). These measures and counter-measures shape the dynamics of #girls help girls# on Weibo, and it is our aim to highlight the agency of netizens behind the multiple feminist discourses in the hashtag.

Media and cultural studies scholars have noticed increasingly the “agency, connection, scope and mode of knowledge” in “mediated lives and media-oriented practices” of the everyday in online feminist discussions or social media engagement generally (Haiqing Yu 2011, 71). In line with the global “affective turn” in feminist research (Nau et al., 2022, 3), this scholarship explores how women, or civilians in general, use new media to achieve multiple civic ends (Yixuan Liu and Wei Wang 2022, Chengting Mao 2020, Jia Tan 2017, Shirley Xue Yang and Bowen Zhang 2021), with increasing emphasis on the emotive dimension in digital engagement and its political significance (H. Bao 2020, Liao 2019, Yue Yang 2021, Yang 2022, Zhang 2022).

Yang (2021), for instance, examines Weibo hashtag feminism #JiangshanjiaoDoYouGetYourPeriod#. The hashtag is a satire to a female cartoon figure Jiangshanjiao (literally “gorgeous homeland”) invented by the Chinese Communist Party Youth League to promote “positive energy” during COVID-19 outbreak, which backfired in the public frustration with governmental erasure of frontline female medical workers in media reports and denial of their physiological needs such as sanitary supplies (Yang 2021, 2). While incompetent in pushing actual policy change, the hashtag carves out a space for netizens where personal narratives constitute a network of meanings and of “multilayered grievances against misogyny, state propaganda, and censorship”, promoting a “collective identity construction of oppressed women” and an albeit ambiguous collective resistance (Yang 2021, 1, 17). Similarly, Zhang (2022) explores the significance of emotions and affect in feminist responses to COVID-19 outbreak on Weibo and how platform affordances facilitate the affective flow. As it turns out, hashtag and commentfunctions of Weibo “stick” together netizens’ emotions to constitute an “intimate public”. These dynamics rewrite a “‘herstory’ and [construct] a digital archive of feelings”, problematizing and reshaping the dominant discriminatory narratives of women (Zhang 2022, 12). Alternatively, Yang (2022) examines the affective flow in dodging censorship itself in netizens’ engagements with online feminist discourses. Conducting case studies of the trans-platform dynamics of multiple feminist podcasts in China, Yang (2022, 11) argues that by adopting the above-mentioned, and many other tactics, listeners and podcasters creatively circumvent the state’s “random and ambiguous censorship on feminist podcasts”. In so doing they acquire pleasure, consolidating a “podcaster-audience alliance” around a “confrontational imaginary of dissident resistance to hegemony”.

This article is built upon the research on affect in feminist discourses in social media of post-socialist China. It goes further by making more prominent the sense of spatiality and community in online feminist affective engagements that is already hinted at in existing studies (Liao 2019, Yang 2021, Yang 2022, Zhang 2022). To this end Sinophone fan studies provide a point of reference, where fan-media dynamism is perceived as constituting a heterotopia (Zhen Troy Chen 2018, Cheuk-Yin Li 2012, Ying Xiao 2021, Jing Jamie Zhao, Ling Yang, and Maud Lavin 2017). As a Foucauldian concept, heterotopia denotes a “real” place that is paradoxically “outside of all places.” It is “a space of otherness” that is related to “all the other sites” in the society and their “set of relations,” yet in a way that suspects, neutralizes, or inverts them (Chen 2018, Foucault 1986). Following this line of arguments, scholars propose that online fandom is heterotopic as fans of different times and geographical locations gather on social media to consume their objects of interests, and come up with multiple “tactics” to accommodate the various norms in mainstream society and culture, which may potentially lead to cultural or social transformation (Chen 2018, Zhao, Yang, and Lavin 2017).

These analyses are in multiple ways applicable to feminist discourses on Weibo. Each hashtag and each bypassing of censorship constitutes a community where users tell their personal stories and let out their emotions, constantly referring to, but also interrogating gender norms in China’s public discourses and control of public opinions, carving out multiple heterotopias. Hence, this article considers #girls help girls# as an affective heterotopia, meaning that the heterotopia of the Weibo hashtag is initiated by users’ affect. Its aim is to dig out the nuanced emotions and feelings of individuals and their political significance in interrogating dominating gender norms in contemporary China.

Affective heterotopia as methodology

In this paper we set up a methodology to interpret hashtag feminism in post-socialist China, namely #girls help girls# as an affective heterotopia. To draw out the intricate parallel between affect and heterotopia we first follow Massumi’s (2002) detailed and layered theorization of affect as a pre-individual intensity. It is a quantifying force that circulates among entities as they encounter (affect and are affected by) each other in a certain environment, motivating their actions and interactions by way of a change in the bodily capacity. Borrowing from quantum mechanics and chaos theory, Massumi (2002, 73) considers the environment as a “force-field,” while the entities temporary gathering of affect-driven particles (quanta) that move at certain (ratios of) “speed and slowness,” which can therefore be organic and inorganic (Ada Smailbegović 2015, 26). In the scope of this study, this means that one is affected and motivated by Du’s Weibo posts to share her own experiences, which in turn affect others, contributing to the vigour of #girls help girls#.

For individuals, affect often occurs as a hunch that is felt but ineffable, distinguishing itself from conscious thinking and behaving (Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg 2010). Indeed, Massumi (2002, 27) proposes that affect and cognition “follow different logics and pertain to different orders.” The pre-individual affect works in a super-linear logic and temporality, motivating particles which orchestrate (resonance and dissonance) to form the biography of a human body. Once within the threshold of the body, affect takes physiological terms (e.g., tension of the skin) that may be perceived. Cognitions may thus be formed in/through movements of the brain and other organs, organized and exported in linguistic forms (spoken or written). Here, cognition and affect are related in terms either of resonation or of interference. When the cognitive resonates with the affective and follows the same super-linear logic, it appears as “emotional tenor[s]” or paradoxes (e.g., feeling pleasant watching a sad film), playing up and amplifying the intensity of affect (Massumi 2002, 41). Or else, the cognitive interferes with the super-linear affect by playing out and organizing itself in terms of linear syntax and progressive temporality. While dampening the intensity, it pertains to the logic of the socio-linguistic, thus becomes intelligible and meaningful among individuals as social beings. It signifies.

While the pre-individual affect feeds forward to become perceptible to the body, leading to cognitions, cognitions of “‘higher’ modes of organization” (Massumi 2002, 34) also feed back into the affective/intensity, completing a continuous “feedback loop” (26). Cognitions and affect thus work as “a conscious-autonomic mix” (25) in an individual body as their “point of co-conversion” (94). While the former/afterward distinction is of no importance in the super-linear force-field of affect-driven particles, within the linear human cognitive system it is fair to say that sensations and cognitions catch only retrospectively what has already happened in the affective, and that they catch it only as a loss—of the part of the super-linear intensity that never feeds forward until it is perceptible, let alone intelligible. The affective is autonomic because of its super-lineality that is incompatible with the linear logic of the semantics. It does intrude in the realm of language, but only as emotional exclaimers or semantic paradoxes, leading to a “suspense” (26) in the linear narrative. While participating in each other, the super-linear affect/intensity remains untamed to the linear consciousness, constituting its “autonomic remainder” (25) that leaves a bodily feeling of “something more” (223), a potentiality not yet, and can never be fully actualized.

A few interlocking, yet distinct concepts in this theorization require further clarification, namely affect, feeling and emotion. For Massumi (2002), affect marks the change in bodily capacity, which is prepersonal, hence beyond consciousness. Feelings, by contrast, can be perceived through sensory modes (e.g., goosebumps) in each individual body, and are therefore personal and biographical. Finally, emotions are the part of affect that come into consciousness and can therefore be made sense of, “the intensity owned and recognized.” They are narrated in language, hence social in nature (Massumi 2002, Eric Shouse 2005). In this paper, we analysed the emotions in the posts as we ourselves felt throughout the incident and the writing up of this article, while acknowledging the imperceptible in the pre-personal affect of netizens and ourselves. As we show below, it was exactly the imperceptibility, hence uncontrollability in our affect that constituted the heterotopic nature of #girls help girls#.

Meanwhile, in line with studies on digital fandom, we consider #girls help girls# as a heterotopia, “a social and communal space that has been in constant exchange and contestation with mainstream society and cultures” (Zhao, Yang, and Lavin 2017, xiv). We emphasize that this heterotopic space is in nature affective, not only because emotions pervaded users’ posts, but that there exists a theoretical linkage between affect and heterotopia that deserves close examination.

In Foucault’s (2005, xviii) original definition, heterotopia is epitomized by Jorge Borges’ imagery of a Chinese encyclopaedia, in which animals are classified by a set of overlapping and paradoxical terms that are nonetheless reconciled as an inventory, occupying an “unthinkable space” in language —a tome holding itself together, but is inconsistent in meaning. Kelvin T. Knight (2017, 147) furthers this line of argument, proposing that heterotopia refers not necessarily to real geographical spaces, “but rather to fictional representations of those sites, and of their simultaneously mythic and real dimensions”. Heterotopia can therefore be understood as a real discursive space (the list of items in an encyclopaedia, or the online space of #girls help girls# with its various narratives) that is simultaneously mythical, sprinkled with semantic paradoxes.

The heterotopic feature of a (discursive) space, for Foucault (2005), is manifest exactly in the paradox of representation-without-making-sense. It is an oddity that de-naturalizes the logic of language itself—the common ground (tabula) on which any representation is based—and puts it in suspense. Indeed, Foucault proposes that heterotopias “destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences, but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to ‘hold together’” (xviii). They “desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences” (xix). In short, heterotopia arises in a suspense that disrupts the logic of language.

This, we argue, parallels Massumi’s (2002, 26) conceptualization of affect as “a state of suspense, potentially of disruption. It’s like a temporal sink, a hole in time, as we conceive of it and narrativize it”. Therefore, we propose an affective heterotopia in our case study, and argue that practitioners’ “exchange and contestation” with patriarchal norms in #girls help girls# that marked its heterotopic nature were driven by their affect. In other words, what put the linear, hetero-patriarchal discourses in suspense was the superlinear intensity. The political significance of this affective heterotopia, as we elaborate more in Section 5, laid exactly in this force, especially that “autonomic remainder” (25) which always attempts to escape the control of discourse.

Methods

We collected Weibo posts with the hashtag #girls help girls# on July 19 2021, which covered the span of its formation, popularization, and censorship. Data sampling consists of two stages. Stage one, on July 19 2021, we witnessed the proceeding of the hashtag feminism. Out of our media and cultural studies training we sensed the significance of this online movement. We managed to stay in the scene as (online) ethnographers by re/posting Weibo ourselves, and carried out participant observation by favoriting and taking screenshots of posts as much as we could, which constituted our archive of fieldnotes (Alan Bryman 2012). These screenshot-takings in situ are also habitual and ritual behaviors in Chinese digital ecology, where netizens live through censorship and the ephemerality of online discussions of “sensitive” topics like gender/sexuality and civil rights, and with which they nontheless negotiate and bargain as “agent[s] of memory” (Di Wang and Sida Liu 2021, Yang 2021). We collected 92 original, extended posts, i.e., original posts with the hashtag #girls help girls# that also contain any form (texts, memes and emoticons) of discussions.

Stage two, In March 2022 we collected posts retrospectively as we researched on this article. As discussed in Section 1, the hashtag had been censored shortly after its popularization. For data collection, this means that 1) while posts with “#girls help girls#” are not necessarily deleted, the hashtag no longer indexes posts; 2) Using “#girls help girls#” as key word search shows no results. To tackle these algorithms, we searched “girls help girls” instead, then picking manually those with the front and end number signs (#) to simulate a hashtag retrieval. Excluding duplicates, we ended up collecting 294 extra original, extended posts. Weibo enables two-level commentsystem, where users could commenton original posts, and reply to others’ comments. As Zhang (2022, 9) proposes, “vernacular practices” on Weibo like reposts, likes, multi-level comments also testify to the intensity of affect. To counter the censorship/deletion/unavailability³ of original posts by the time of second-stage sampling, we collected the top 50 comments by hotness (according to number of likes and sub-comments) under the top ten most commented on (ranging from over 600 to over 14,000 comments) original posts in our data pool as a set of supplementary data.

We carried out an affective textual analysis of the 386 original posts and 500 comments with the facilitation of NVivo 12.0. Methodologically, this means digging out the affective dimension in Weibo narratives and examining how it invokes conscious thinking and practices. Analysis thus incorporates two dimensions. First, instead of sticking to any index of categorical affects, we inductively coded affect as it appeared in language, as either emotions expressed by users in words, emojis and/or pictures, or paradoxes, interjections and other affective overflows suspending the narratives. This is due to 1) the complexity of (human) emotions that often rejects categorization, as indicated even in research adopting a structural framework (Nau, Zhang, Quan-Haase & Mendes 2022, Zhang 2022); and 2) the social nature of emotions that requires consideration of (and “feeling for” in online ethnography) contexts, rather than a literal translation (e.g., a smiley emoji may be used as satire and actually conveys anger, which is often the case in Chinese online culture) (Echo Huang 2017, Shouse 2005). Second, we conducted thematic analysis on the data, recognizing emerging themes in users’ statements and (collective) engagements as an exploration of the political significance of affect in the hashtag activism #girls help girls# (Bryman 2012). Coding had been done by the two authors separately, following this two-dimensional scheme. Inconsistencies and disagreements were discussed and reconciled in a second round, collaborative coding.

For ethical concerns, we anonymized the posts quoted in this article except for Kris Wu and Du Meizhu who had been covered in multiple news outlets. All the posts are originally in Chinese and translated by ourselves to prevent retrieval through keyword search. We consider these measures necessary as hashtag feminism is known to be personal, even traumatic, despite the default openness of social media (Clark-Parsons 2021). Alternatively, China’s ambiguous censorship of “sensitive” topics like feminist discourses may expose participants of #girls help girls# to extra risks (Liao 2019, Yang 2021, Zhang 2022). Having said this, we now proceed to the dynamic negotiations between intensity/affect with discourses/social norms in the discursive arena of Weibo.

Intensive negotiations of discourses in an affective heterotopia

Having participated in the incident, its most direct impression as we perceive it is the affective force of anger. The intensity in the narratives of the harassment survivors thrashed us, which, feeding forward into the level of the perceptible and intelligible, manifested as the sensation (as far as we are concerned) and emotion (among participants as in the Weibo posts) of anger. This anger was most evidently a reaction towards the incident itself, an indignation at the mishaps of others:

Sample 1: … #girls help girls# I went bananas over this

Sample 2: #girls help girls#…#girls helping girls# [what Wu has done is] not just infuriating, it’s utterly heinous.

Aside from anger, the changes in intensity among participants in the encounter with this social media event had prompted other cognitive activities, namely a reflection on women’s situation in the society:

Sample 3: #girls help girls# Just feel angry and sad. Women have always been in an oppressed position, and it’s always themselves to shoulder the shame of being harassed. The society is just too tolerant of men.

Sample 4: For most of the time it’s really #girls help girls#. [I can] feel increasingly that gender is the barrier for empathy. Surely things will be resolved through legal process. But what’s the gender ratio in the judicial system⁴? For this reason, I think it’s necessary to pick a side, and I choose to stand with the girls. Call me irrational or what. I won’t suspect any sister who “stands out,” because “standing out” is so hard, while “slut shaming” so easy …

(emphases added)

Sample 5: … #girls help girls#…Something I’ve ignored for so long is that boys and girls are raised differently. Most of the parents think that to raise their daughters into chaste, beautiful, and naïve little princesses and they’ll live a happy life ever after. Not that the parents don’t love their children, it is just how the society functions …

Most directly, these posts testify to women’s general status in contemporary China. Indeed, scholars point out that the post-socialist era has witnessed a resurgence of patriarchy. The state adopts gender-essentialist discourses, advocating for women’s irreducible difference from, and inferiority (in both physical and intellectual terms) to men, and disciplining those who fails to align. This is evident in popular discourses like “leftover women,” well-educated single women over 27 years of age, or female PhDs as “the third sex” outside of the male/female dualism (Leta Hong Fincher 2016, chap. Introduction; Alicia Leung 2003; Bingchun Meng and Yanning Huang 2017; Alex Zhao 2014). Discriminatory discourses are accompanied by multiple institutional measures, including gender disparity in university admission and job market in favour of men,⁵ among others (Joy Dong 2021, Dandan Zhang 2021). The purpose is to bound women in the domestic sphere and reproductive marriage, accelerating China’s neoliberal economic transformation, while countering the nation’s aging population due to the former single-child policy (1979–2015) (BBC 2015). Arguably, the double standards in morality (slut-shaming and chastity) and other cultural norms (beauty and naivety), as well as the imbalanced gender ratio in the civil service system brought up by the netizens are manifestations of the gender essentialist and patriarchal discourses in contemporary China that frame women as objects of men’s desire and their inferior Other, constituting the barrier in cross-gendered empathy (James Farrer 2015).

Meanwhile, these gendered social roles and moral codes invoked by Du and several others who spoke up resonated among the participants who had felt them and lived them through. In other words, as ways of living, these norms embody certain intensities, certain ratios of speed and slowness that were shared among individuals who followed and were affected by them, resulting in an attunement and constituting points of connection, at least within the life course of the hashtag (Anna Gibbs 2010, Susanna Paasonen 2020). This resonation/attunement of intensity, feeding forward into the perceptive and cognitive, constituted a community of shared feelings and emotions among the participants. These consensuses were often negative, as in anger and fear that what Du and others had endured might fall onto themselves:

Sample 6: “Endurance is not a virtue … it’s how the hypocritic world maintain its twisted order. Anger is.” … If people still think that slut-shaming is the best way to destroy a girl, I don’t mind joining her. Volunteered to be a whore

(emphases added)

Sample 7: I am so afraid … I started to ask myself, if what happened to Du happened to myself, how long can I stand in my fight against those who have power?

Yet they could also be positive, as in solidarity and even excitement:

Sample 8: … other matters aside, the girls who stand out and speak up are so fucking amazing! …Somehow I can feel my blood boiling, hope things will work out properly

(heart emoji)

Sample 9: #girls help girls# is the only way for women to improve their social status, have more choices in life, and grasp their own fate! Say no to female competition! Stand with other women, and demand and fight for the equality, justice, freedom and respect for all women!

(heart emoji)

To us, this affective community was politically significant. Participants, driven by affect, touched upon and interrogated the asymmetrical power relations shaping issues of gender in a way that was consistent with post-structuralist identity politics. Drawn from Michel Foucault (1978) and J. Butler (2006), this scholarship considers identities as subject positions at the intersection of multiple axes of power/discourse (e.g., gender, sexuality, race, class, etc.) and their inter-implications, which are organized by logics of exclusion and hierarchical valuation (e.g., the white over the coloured, the middle class over the working class, the heterosexual over the homosexual etc.). Politics arise as the mechanism of power/discourse weaving together the identities are questioned/de-naturalized, opening up possibilities for “parodic proliferation,” or alternative ways of identification (Butler 2006, 46).

Indeed, as we have explicated above, participants discussed and questioned the gender norms that they had “ignored for so long” (Sample 5), those which constructed their shared identities in an arbitrary manner, but also dialectically enabled the formation of the “empath[etic]” (Sample 4) community. More importantly, they also went beyond the axis of gender, allowing for the intervention of other relations of power. For instance, within the hashtag, participants reminded the public of another sexual harassment case that started to gain hype concurrent with Wu’s incident,⁶ whose survivor sought help on Weibo:

Sample 10: … How come Wu’s case has been trending for so many days but the speaking up of ordinary girls gets ignored? #girls help girls# borrow the traffic #farewell world [Weibo handle of the victim]#

Sample 11: #girls help girls##girls help girls##farewell world# Girls please help this sister. She has been raped, but the police ruled her consent to sex on the ground that she had accepted a cup of milk tea offered by the man.

By indexing the victim in the #girls help girls# hashtag, the participants exploited the platform algorithm that bounds up publicity with “traffic data” measured by the rates of hits, likes, comments and (re)posts etc (Yiyi Yin 2020, 478). and made use of the hype of this discursive space to attract more attention for those with less public resources (social, cultural, and economic capital concerned), enabling the reflections on the disparate resource distribution among different social classes. This intersection of class and sex/gender, we argue, was explicitly political in the post-structuralist epistemology.

In the most direct sense, this staging of identity politics in #girls help girls# let out the voice of individuals living through their concrete, everyday lives (e.g., experiences of growing up as a woman). Here, we address this voice as “a feminine voice.” In line with post-structuralist feminism and queer studies, the term “feminine” is adopted rhetorically as a subject position. It denotes not necessarily “women” or “the female,” but the opted-out (feminine) in China’s contemporary discursive system (the masculine), to wit, women as for men, the working as for the middle class, the disabled as for the abled, and/or the queer as for the heterosexual… the list goes on and on. Following Qian Wang (2015, 153), we argue that these people are “trouble-makers and noise-makers in China’s otherwise harmonious society.” They questioned the legitimacy of institutions (carrying out of the legal process and gender disparity in legal system) and ideology (the necessary chastity, beauty, and naivety of women), threatening to constitute a collective, “blood boiling” (Sample 8) force against (though not necessarily be) the discursive system that left the censors/government no choice but to take down the hashtag hastily.

Yet the measure of censorship in general is and can only be applied to the perceptible and intelligible at what Massumi (2002) and Shouse (2005) perceive as the individual and social levels, i.e, the multiple feelings expressed by the participants in their posts. However responsive it may be (taking down the hashtag within hours), there is always already something being left out—the part of the super-linear intensity that has not fed forward into the individual/perceptive, much less social/cognitive; the pre-individual bodily capacity that is affect in its full term. The measure of censorship, therefore, is but a retrospection of or a remedy for what has already happened or is underway. It is, to use a popular analogy in Chinese cyberspace, a cat-and-mouse game where censorship is the cat and the affect-driven netizens the mouse, who always tries to find a way to escape. This finding-a-way is the contingent feeding forward of the imperceptible intensity into the perceptive and cognitive that one form being cut off, can always take another. Thus the #girls help girls# tag had been rephrased into #girls helping girls#, #girlshelpgirls#, among countless others:

Sample 12: #girls helping girls# I will keep posting despite your taking the topic down. #girls help girls#, no way can you ever divide us.

It was this same intensity that rendered the hashtag #girls help girls#, together with its relevant others, a Foucauldian heterotopia par excellence. Like the boat analogy that Foucault (1986, 27) refers to, each hashtag was “a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exist[ed] by itself, that [was] closed in on itself and at the same time [was] given over to the infinity of the sea.” Its heterotopic nature was manifest in its being “a space of otherness” that let out a feminine voice, a voice that recollected the (collective) past, told stories of harassment, called for help, and questioned not only sex and gender norms, but also class disparity and its accompanied disparate social, cultural and economic capitals (Chen 2018, 7). It had everything to do with “all the other sites” in the society and their “set of relations,” but only as their suspension, neutralization and/or inversion (Foucault 1986, 24).

More importantly, we emphasize that this heterotopia was motivated by and brimmed with affect, wherein laid also its political significance. The sense of anger, fear, solidarity, and excitement that constituted and consolidated the virtual community for those who “[stood] with the girls” (Sample 4) and “volunteered to be a whore” (Sample 6) were born out of an intensity in the discursive arena that resonated among various entities in multiple encounters, forming affective ties that bounded individuals together regardless of their geo-temporal locations (Paasonen 2020). It was a lurking force that could not but be felt (blood-boiling) and invisible unless as a pause in words and narrations [“don’t know what to say” (Sample 12) or the exclamation of “fucking amazing” (Sample 8)] which, again, indicated only a loss. The “don’t know what to say” in Sample 12 would be this disruption in cognition and crack in the societal discursive system that let in (contingently and temporarily) what was lost—affect in its full term, escaping and over-filling the discursive arena controlled by the censors/authority/social institution which, with #girls help girls# dying out, arose #girls helping girls#, among others—a becoming-boat in the sea of infinite possibilities (Foucault 1986, Massumi 2002). Departing prior to and through individuals, affect constituted the agency of the participants in the heterotopia of the hashtags which together, embodied the potential for things to always turn out differently and turn out more, negotiating with multiple relations of power. What forms will it take next?

Coda

Shortly after this episode, the police stated on July 31 2021 that Kris Wu had been detained for suspicion of rape. In November 2022, a Beijing court sentenced Wu to 13 years of imprisonment for rape amongst other crimes (Chang 2022).

In this paper we take an initial episode in the Kris Wu sexual scandal, namely the trending and censorship of the hashtag #girls help girls# on Weibo as an example, to examine how feminist quests are carried out on social media in the authoritarian cultural landscape of contemporary China. Combining Massumi’s (2002) affect theory with Foucault’s (1986, 2005) heterotopia, we argue that practitioners constructed themselves an affective heterotopia—a space carved out by affect that is entwined with all other sites and sets of relations in the society, only to suspend and invert them—in (and around) the hashtag #girls help girls#. This affective heterotopia manifested as an empathetic community that let out a feminine voice, which not only commented on this particular incident, but also, and perhaps more importantly, interrogated the dominating discourses and relations of power in terms of asymmetrical gender norms, class disparity and beyond. While vulnerable to censorship, the affective force in this heterotopia was ultimately untameable to the discursive regime, which may, and did in the current case, lead to concrete feminist ends.

Before drawing any general conclusion, several issues await further consideration. First, data in this article focuses on one particular case, that of the sexual scandal of Kris Wu, and is limited in quantity due to censorship. We invite future scholarly examination on the affective and heterotopic features of multiple hashtag activisms (e.g., #JiangshanjiaoDoYouGetYourPeriod#) in Chinese social media that would give this methodological framework more generalizability. Second, despite our commitment to netizens’ agency, we acknowledge the ephemerality of hashtag activism, as well as the close entwinements of social norms with individuals’ affect in China’s cultural ecology and politics. Our argument of #girls help girls# as a Foucauldian (1986, 2005) heterotopia and explications of Weibo users’ multiple references to dominating discourses showcase exactly that the political significance of Weibo hashtags (i.e., the staging of identity politics) is, as with poststructuralist theorists, deeply embedded in the societal relations of power (Butler 2006, Foucault 1978).

Our stance is that the difficulty in data sampling, the relatively small sampling size, as well as the ephemerality, hence overarching power of censorship should not downplay the affective agency of individuals in their quotidian media engagements. By tracing the momentum of #girls help girls# through the combined framework of affective heterotopia we hope to highlight a sense of potentiality (for things to turn out differently). In so doing, we provide methodological insight for understanding online feminist discussions in a socio-cultural context outside of the Global North, and in ways that are more nuanced, empathetic, and ethical, complicating what counts as gender/feminist politics and the how in its initiation.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their efforts and feedbacks on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Shortly after this scandal Wu and his studio’s accounts had been cancelled by Weibo, and Du had deleted all her posts involving Wu. We therefore resorted to other outlets that have documented the development of the incident.

2. These include prosperity, democracy, civility, harmony, freedom, equality, justice, the rule of law, patriotism, dedication, integrity and friendliness (D. China 2017).

3. Aside from censorship, Liao (2019) indicates that netizens often voluntarily delete their own posts post-hashtag activism as a way of avoiding controversy for themselves or others around them. Alternatively, Weibo enables selective display of Weibo, in terms either of time range (all visible/half a year) or of demography of audience (available to all, only to followers, among [selective] friends [mutually following], private).

4. Research shows that while unlikely to claim high-rank positions, Chinese judicial system witnesses an increasing population of female judges in recent years. This is a phenomenon that needs to be assessed with other socio-cultural factors beyond the scope if this paper (e.g., Nikhil Venkatesa 2015). Sample 4 can be understood as interrogating the general gender disparity against women in wage and occupation of high-rank positions, see ChinaPower (2018) for more data.

5. In university admission, science or engineering programs tend to either accept male students only, or cap the number of female students. Meanwhile, multiple literal arts programs maintain a certain arbitrary gender ratio to curtail the growing number of female students, who often need to score (much) higher than their male counterparts in college entrance exam to get into the same program (Dong 2021). In labor market, women endure lower employment rate and wage, especially in times of uncertainty. In 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, 19.2% of working women had experienced unemployment compared to 13% among men, with more difficulty in re-employment due to heavier burden in domestic work (China Women’s News 2013, Zhang 2021).

6. According to the victim, the male suspect had been detained by the police on suspicion of rape, but was later on demanded release by the local procuratorate on the basis of having offered a cup of milk tea to the victim, which indicated the latter’s sexual consent, rendering the accusation for rape invalid. The victim, who had already indicated suicidal tendency, resorted to Weibo for justice. However, it had also been reported that the victim had made certain biased statements that provoked misunderstandings among the public (e.g., Xiangbianchenghudie 2021). In this paper we focus only on the practice of attention-calling for the disparate resource distribution between different social classes.