This research targets female fans from idol fandom and danmei (ACG realm) culture. It explores their collective power, women-dominated digital communities, and discursive engagements with Chinese gender politics, issues, and feminism. The study is set against the broad backdrop of significant social transformations, including neoliberalism, digitalisation, and the development of social media, which have shifted the construction of China’s gender discourse to new arenas. Increasingly rampant misogynistic and sexist discourses have found the internet to be a convenient platform for the invention of humiliating slang terms against women, while counter-discourses coexist to challenge not only the emerging online misogyny but also entrenched patriarchal norms and orders.
In this research, I focus specifically on one social group—female fans—who have been actively participating in this discursive struggle and examine how they generate gender and feminist discourses within and beyond their cultural and fan communities. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork involving immersion, observation, participation in these communities, and interviews with female fans engaged with Chinese gender issues on Weibo, one of the most popular social media platforms in China. I found that female fans, as a collective force, possess considerable consumer, intellectual, and mobilisational capital. These forms of power have laid the foundations for their political voices to be heard. More importantly, these fans demonstrate significant initiative in actively involving themselves in the knowledge production and discourse formation surrounding concrete gender issues and the definition of Chinese feminism. They employ various linguistic strategies to resist existing but long-neglected sexist discourses. In the course of this discursive struggle, they are able to disseminate their gender and feminist ideologies as widely as possible.
