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.

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