Travelling Feminism: Understanding the Circulation and Reproduction of Online Feminist Knowledge Between the West and China

This study is a critical enquiry into the circulation and reproduction of feminist knowledge travelling online between the West and China, and the underlying social implications brought about by social media platforms. By using the theoretical framework of Edward Said’s travelling theory and the perspective of postcolonial feminism, this study charts how Western feminist ideas have been received, reshaped and resisted on Chinese social media platforms, in order to understand the dynamics and dialectical process of travelling feminism in this context. Guided by feminist qualitative methodology and netnography, the study collected two subsets of data: 1) online data from 31 social media accounts focusing on feminist and women’s issues; and 2) 10 semi-structured interviews with participants who engaged in online feminist knowledge production. From these, three modes – and associated representative cases – of travelling feminism have been identified: feminist ideas travelling from the West to China (the #MeToo movement); feminist issues circulating in China that are seldom discussed by feminists in the West (leftover women and gay men’s wives); and popular feminist ideas that have not travelled from the West to China (intersectionality). Importantly, the anti-feminist backlash and online misogyny are also discussed as crucial aspects of travelling feminism. This study substantiates the dynamics of travelling feminism’s ability to produce knowledge, and the agency of the new location in reproducing knowledge in a transnational context. The study also illuminates the complicated and nuanced limitations and risks that social media poses to travelling feminism; in particular, the challenge of censorship, the middle-class-orientated content, the consumer logic of social media platforms and online anti-feminist discourse significantly constrain this process. Finally, this study theorises the travelling process of feminism online as a transnational feminist practice, which breaks the centre–periphery binary that has characterised the relationship between the West and China.