Rotten Girls as Killjoy Feminists? Unpacking Women’s Perception on Gender Inequalities in Post-Socialist China

Abstract

Gender inequality and feminism are topics of increasing visibility in China’s increasingly digitized mass culture in recent years. Given the hype, successive research has attempted to bring forth the relationship between individuals’ affective engagement with online feminism and their challenge or consolidation of gender inequality. Nevertheless, how negative affects can serve as a methodological framework for assessing individuals’ role in promoting or hindering feminism is still underexplored. This article examines a particular population, namely the ‘rotten girls’ (female fans of male-male romance) as killjoy feminists in post-socialist Chinese patriarchy. It argues that rotten girls are at once killjoy feminists interrogating neoliberal gender normality and killjoys of their own feminist dreams, internalising the very norms. These nuances and paradoxes constitute a Deleuzian micropolitics, initiatives starting from bodily affect, that may nonetheless bring changes to public, collective life. Thus, this article complicates existing scholarship on negative affects in online feminism in the context of post-socialist China, providing insights into solidarity among feminist practitioners against the ostracization of feminism transnationally.

Keywords

Post-Socialist China, "rotten girls," feminist killjoys, Deleuzian micropolitics

Introduction

Gender inequality and feminism are topics of increasing visibility in China’s evermore digitized mass culture in recent years. From hashtag activisms to feminist podcasts, people share their gendered life experiences, reflecting on gender norms, and in so doing constituting communities of solidarity (Yang 2021, 2022; Yang and Hu 2023). Increased feminist consciousness is accompanied by rising antagonism, from top-down and bottom-up. In mainstream media reports and online discussions, feminism is often framed as a ‘foreign force’ aiming to destabilize China’s harmonious society, while those who advocate for women’s rights, regardless of genders, are addressed as ‘female boxers’ (女拳师) or ‘extremists, ’ emphasizing their irrationality other than letting off steam (BBC 2021; Beijing Evening News, 2022). These dynamics constitute an arena that is at once discursive and affective, attracting increasing scholarly attention. Successive research has attempted to bring forth the relationship between individuals’ affect and their challenge or consolidation of gender inequality (Yang 2021, 2022; Zhang 2022; Huang 2023; Yang and Hu 2023), as well as the structural disparities in contemporary Chinese patriarchy more broadly (Wu and Dong 2019; Yin 2022). Particularly, scholars highlight the important roles of negative affects (e.g., anger) people often feel in their engagement in feminist discussions or debates online. This raises the question of how we can conceptualise individuals’ negative affects as a methodological framework for assessing their role in promoting or hindering feminism, a question that remains unanswered.

This article explores the role of a particular population, namely the ‘rotten girls,’ as killjoy feminists who feel wronged amidst and thus interrogate gender inequalities in post-socialist China. Rotten girls¹ are female and woman fans of Boys’ Love (BL), a multimedia genre featuring male-male romance (Welker 2022). This article is part of my PhD project on the lived experiences of Chinese rotten girls.² In my individual, semi-structured interviews with the participants, I enquired about how they emotionally consume BL both commercially produced and fan-made, and how their everyday fan engagements inform their gender(ed) identities in post-socialist China. I discovered that the rotten girls’ consumption of BL is often accompanied by their exposure to and engagements in the broader feminist discussions across multiple social media. While BL incites predominantly positive affects such as joy and excitement, the rotten girls often report anger and powerlessness in reflections of their own lives as women. What these negative affects can do to the rotten girls and to feminism in China intrigues me deeply. As previously stated, rotten girls’ negativity is ambiguous and paradoxical. It raises feminist consciousness among these women, giving rise to a communal feminine identity and envisioning a better future. Yet the very negative affects also lead to their further subjugation to China’s patriarchal system. I propose understanding these nuances and paradoxes as a Deleuzian micropolitics (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), initiatives starting from bodily affect, that may nonetheless bring changes to public, collective life.

In the rest of this article, I firstly summarize gender inequalities in contemporary China’s patriarchy³ to contextualize the negative affects of the rotten girls in their everyday lives. This is followed by my theoretical considerations in interpreting the rotten girls’ perception of gender inequalities. I then set up the methodological framework of the killjoy as a way of uncovering rotten girls’ agency vis-à-vis China’s patriarchy. I draw on Ahmed’s (2010, 2017) concept of the killjoy and explore the insufficient application of this concept in scholarship on China’s feminist politics. My discussion discloses the need to establish a detailed model of the killjoy with Chinese characteristics. I show that the rotten girls are at once killjoys of neoliberal gender normality and their own feminist dreams. Finally, I elaborate on how rotten girls’ initiate micropolitics against post-socialist Chinese patriarchy.

Thus, this article complicates existing scholarship on negative affects in online feminism in post-socialist China. The significance of this attempt goes beyond the national border of China, as issues of gender have been framed as an ‘ideology’ threatening the stability of families and societies, serving as scapegoats for the precarity of life due to “neoliberalism and financialisation (the imperative to increase assets at the expense of securing fair wages)” on a global scale (Butler 2019, 1). Indeed, Wu and Dong (2019) propose that public frustration against class disparity upon China’s neoliberal transition is often appropriated and channeled to a containment of feminism as an external dividing force (e.g., ‘foreign force’). This resonates with Butler’s (2019) argument that gender is refuted to sustain Christian families amidst the neoliberal states’ outsourcing of social services to the Catholic churches in the Global North. In this sense, how individuals, particularly rotten girls, engage with (online) feminism and possibly forge solidarity in China provides insights into solidarity among feminist practitioners against the ostracization of feminism transnationally.

Gender Disparity in Post-Socialist China

Gender inequality in the Chinese patriarchal system needs to be understood in its current, post-socialist political economy. Post-socialism incorporates two interlocking trends, a neoliberal transition in national economy and a conservative turn in ideology (Rofel 2007; Bao 2020). For the former trend, since 1978, the communist party-state initiated marketization of national economy to counter the sociocultural and political economic chaos caused by the series of socialist revolutions (1949-1976). It took the form of privatization of enterprises, inflow of foreign capital (direct investment and im/material products), as well as an increase in international trade. Meanwhile, the state withdrew from its social welfare responsibilities, such as healthcare and housing, shifting these burdens to the private sector and individual households. This brought about social inequalities like class disparities and rural-urban divide as more labour force flushed to the cities for better income and accompanied sociocultural resources. Intensified social conflicts aroused a series of democratic protests, culminating as the governmental military crackdown on civilians at Tian’anmen Square in June 1989 (Rofel 2007). In the aftermath of the Tian’anmen movement, the state accelerated the economic reform. It is against this backdrop that the second trend towards conservative ideology came into play.

To advance the political-economic agenda, national ideology was meticulously managed, shaping gender relations in contemporary patriarchy. Specifically, neoliberal ethos saturated the public. Individualistic values such as romance, sexuality, and possession of im/material goods were increasingly seen in mass media (e.g., magazines, TV, the internet). The satisfaction of these desires, often through consumption, was seen as a way for individuals to assert their identity autonomy (Lee 2007; Song and Lee 2010; Meng and Huang 2017). Indeed, Rofel (2007) argues that marketisation in post-socialist China has given rise to a ‘desiring subject’—“the individual who operates through sexual, material, and affective self-interest” (3).

Meanwhile, these values and desires are highly gendered. Especially in recent years, the state sees the urgency to promote reproductive nuclear families in the aftermath of the single-child policy (1979-2015) and to boost China’s market economy. Through multiple rhetorics, it emphasizes the domestic sphere as women’s rightful place (Leung 2003). For instance, the state promotes gender-essentialist discourse in multiple governmental documents, highlighting women’s physical and intellectual inferiority to men, rendering them less of a competent labor force than men (Leung 2003). Meanwhile, ridiculing vocabulary like ‘leftover women’ (剩女) to describe well-educated single women over 27 years of age has been invented by the Ministry of Education and promoted across China’s mainstream media, condemning those who fail to align with the feminine ideal (Fincher 2016). Thus, under neoliberalism, Chinese women are autonomous and independent, but only as consumers: “consumers in chief” of self-grooming products that could highlight their femininity, or of daily supplies for the household “in their designated roles of wife and mother” (Meng and Huang 2017, 667).

This general background explains some demographic features of the rotten girls in this article. Born in the 1990s along with China’s neoliberal transition, they enjoy increasing material and immaterial wellbeing, more so as they are members of the single-child generation with no siblings to share their parental resources with. All of the rotten girls are of urban upbringing. They have received tertiary education and above. Many have studied and settled down overseas. Their digital and physical mobility have exposed them to international media productions among which BL is a typical genre. Likewise, they have been exposed to different ideas on femininity and gender. These ideas, coming from diverse sources both digital and physical, are ambiguous and often contradictory, simultaneously advancing and impeding feminism. This article attempts to uncover these nuances.

Theoretical Concerns

Three concepts require further elaboration. First, despite its complex connotations, throughout the article I follow the rotten girls’ idiomatic understanding of feminism⁴ as a cause to promote equal rights between men and women by interrogating the gender inequalities women experience in everyday life.

Second, the rotten girls’ understanding of the concept of gender oscillates between nature and nurture, as both biological differences between men and women and imposition of gendered cultural norms. While following the rotten girls’ reasoning, I interpret gender through Butlerian performativity. Gender is individuals’ “compulsory performances” that starts at the bodily level (Butler 2011, 181). One is assigned a sex as male or female based (solely) on their sex organs (penis/vagina) and is expected to display, or ‘cite’ acceptable masculinity or femininity throughout their life as a man or woman. The citation of norms by individuals is compulsory as it defines their (sexed) bodies and gives them (gendered) identities through which they become and remain viable subjects. Yet this compulsion overregulates itself when the citation is hyperbolic, or the sexed bodies and gendered performances do not quite match, such as in drag, or in cases where a rotten girl argues that girls “can be handsome as well” (Carrie). This is where individuals’ agency comes in. This dialectic between constraints and freedom helps understand the rotten girls’ simultaneous rebuttal and internalisation of patriarchal norms.

Third, by affect I mean a general motivational force impelling or inhibiting individuals’ bodily actions, often ineffable but intuitively felt as a ‘hunch’ (Gibbs 2010; Hickey-Moody 2013, 79; Zhang 2021). It unfolds in certain concrete social forms and structures (institutions, formations, beliefs, etc.), yet being a motivational force, is excessive to these static social discourses, updating them, thus sustaining the vitality of culture (Grossberg in Seigworth and Gregg 2010; Williams 2015). While extensive research has addressed the nuanced overlaps and distinctions between emotion, affection, and feeling (e.g., Massumi 2002; Shouse 2005), in this article I see them as “the entire gamut of words of affect” (Lee 2007, 20). It is because affect, affection, emotion, and feeling are in nature non-separable, manifest often in the everyday, lived experience as what Stewart (2007) calls ‘ordinary affect’: “public feelings that begin and end in broad circulation” and “stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of” (2). In the context of rotten girls’ feminist engagement, these ordinary affects are often negative. They are individually felt but form points of resonance. These negative affects constitute rotten girls’ (albeit ambiguous) agency in Chinese patriarchy.

The Killjoy

When it comes to their engagement with feminist issues online, the rotten girls are best represented by the icon of a killjoy. The killjoy is theorized by Ahmed (2010, 17; 2017, 22) as a “feminist killjoy,” one who feels “something is wrong” in terms of gender or race among other dimensions in what should be promising (e.g., a polite conversation during a joyous family dinner). The killjoy speaks up about this feeling of wrongness and the cause(s) of it (e.g., sexism, racism) but feels “wound up” in her speaking-up, as she has ruined the atmosphere and killed the joy of others (Ahmed 2010, 65). In turn, the killjoy is condemned (usually in affective terms) as in-/over-sensitive for making claims of sexism or racism, which is her own hysteria or paranoia, a problem to be solved at her individual level. This false attribution of unhappiness adds another layer of unhappiness to the killjoy, circumventing her in a vicious circle, stopping her “from getting through” (Ahmed 2010, 68). In other words, the killjoy is a figure who is unhappy about gender, racial, and other societal structural disparities, yet whose unhappiness has been trivialized and dismissed by others as her own sensationalism. The purpose is to ostracize the killjoy to reestablish the veneer of happiness in a certain socio-cultural environment and the multiple relations of power underneath.

Starting with Ahmed (2010, 2017), the concept of the killjoy has been developed by scholars studying feminist politics in China. Zhang (2022) and Yin (2022) acknowledge that women in post-socialist China often act as feminist killjoys on social media like Weibo (Chinese Twitter) and Wexin (a mega instant messaging platform), where feminist discussions proliferate. These women point out gender injustice muted in the dominant narrative of a socialist “harmonious society” (和谐社会) (Chen and Wang 2019, 211), “get[ting] in the way” of others’ happiness (Ahmed 2017, 37) Similar to Ahmed’s (2017) analysis of how the killjoy is charged as sensationalist, Chinese feminist killjoys are stigmatised as “angry troublemakers” and are stripped of their “political commitment” (Yin 2022, 990).

Should joy-killing and joy-being-killed often be the case in one’s engagement with feminism?⁵ What should we make of these negative feelings? What is their significance (if any) in alleviating gender inequality and patriarchal system? Ahmed (2017) argues that unhappiness may lead to a strategy of “compromise” among the killjoys whereby one “shrugs [the unhappiness] off” by not naming its source(s) or taking it for granted, “making that fatalism [their] fate” (36). Indeed, Yin (2022) also points out that the stigmatisation of feminists in China has led to some women becoming “discouraged,” where they “step back, and refuse to identify with feminism” as a way of shrugging off the unease (990). For Ahmed (2010, 2017), it is a survival mechanism for living with injustice especially when no easy resolution is available.

Yet this unhappiness may also lead to a feminist consciousness. The sense of unease dislocates the killjoy from the “happiness scripts” of what should make people happy and who is entitled to be happy (Ahmed 2010, 59). The very alienation motivates her to ponder over the cause of her unhappiness and look at the happiness script from a distance. Thus, she uncovers “the violence and power that are concealed under the language of civility and love [as a false consciousness]” (Ahmed 2010, 86). These power relations are the structural dispositions sustaining the society in which the feminist killjoy lives. By disclosing structural issues, further personal and even social change towards equality may be initiated. Meanwhile, in these “moments of self-estrangement” (Ahmed 2010, 86) from her quotidian, another world/horizon is opened for the killjoy, beyond, and very likely broader than the one that is finely, thus narrowly tuned as a happy life. In this new horizon, as beautiful as it might be precarious, an alternative sense of solidarity is established through affective connections with other killjoys. A world has been built (Ahmed 2017).

This scholarship informs my usage of the killjoy to understand rotten girls’ lived experiences in contemporary China’s patriarchy. As I show in the rest of the article, the women report frustrations of multiple shapes and forms, and demonstrate complicated ways of coping with these frustrations that simultaneously consolidate and subvert the gender hierarchy in post-socialist Chinese patriarchy. By uncovering this complexity, my analysis goes beyond Ahmed’s (2010, 2017) theorisation of the killjoy in Anglophone societies. Meanwhile, it also complicates scholarship on the Chinese feminist killjoy, which mentions women’s position as killjoys as opposed to China’s post-socialist patriarchal system only in passing⁶ (e.g., Yin 2022; Zhang 2022). My aim is to uncover the rotten girls’ agency in interrogating China’s gender inequality and patriarchy.

Rotten Girls as the Killjoy of Gender Normality

Feminist Awakening in the Neoliberal Patriarchy

As it turns out, the rotten girls are firstly killjoys voicing discontent for gender inequality itself. For example, Momo spoke about her own experience of discrimination during job-seeking, where she had been asked repeatedly about her marital status and her plan for childbirth, lest these arrangements sacrifice her work efficiency. Awareness and experiences of the hardship a married, yet childless woman endures in the Chinese labour market prompted Momo to think over the overall “double standard” in the socialization of men and women, confining women to roles of the maternal and sexual objects:

You see judgments on girls’ bodies, appearances etc., especially their postpartum body shapes. They are encouraged to focus on only those very superficial stuff. For boys, people would say talent matters, career matters, capability [to support yourself and your family] matters. They would pay attention to his all-round development [into a capable and independent being]. But for girls, it’s only appearance and body shapes that matter. You lose weight and you are successful. You know how to cultivate your appearance, how to do make-up and you are successful. I think it is this double standard that I despise utterly.

The rotten girls’ lived experiences and recognition of the limitations of their life prospects based largely, if not solely, on gender lead to their unhappiness. Resonating with Momo’s indignation, Bamei expressed her frustration amidst gender inequalities in China as a 25-year-old single woman from a “third-tier city,” freshly graduated and trying to seek for a job in Beijing:

It’s stressful for girls, either finding a partner or finding a job…Single men are popular in the marriage market even in their mid-30s. But no one wants to marry a thirty-year-old woman. No matter how we talk about gender equality, it is what it is. As I still haven’t gotten a job yet, this feminine identity gives me a lot of anxiety.

Alternatively, Bamei’s frustration is exacerbated by the hardship of setting up a family in Beijing:

The working environment [in Beijing] is very toxic. I think if I were to settle down here, the only way out for me would be to marry a local, or a rich guy. But I don’t want to gamble my future and aspirations on another person.

These comments touch upon the rural-urban divide in contemporary Chinese patriarchy, which requires more specification. Since the late 1950s, the party-state established a hukou (户口, household registration) system as a way of controlling internal migration, managing social service and maintaining social stability. Divided generally into the rural and the urban, and specifically as per each city, hukou provides legitimate residents of each region social welfare like pension, housing fund, unemployment and health insurance, childcare, etc. The increasing population of college graduates and other migrant workers in recent years renders the possibility of acquiring a hukou in large cities like Beijing increasingly bleak. Rare exceptions are employment (limited quota in state-owned enterprises), marriage (to a native Beijinger or someone with Beijing hukou), and education (extremely high-achieving overseas students) (Liu and Shi 2021). This leads to Bamei’s somewhat disillusioned statement that there is little left she could do except marrying/relying on a local.

The gender (cum demographic) disparity that Momo and Bamei highlighted is to be understood in the overarching neoliberal transformation in post-socialist China. Indeed, the women I interviewed reported feeling a sense of disparity, born out of their encounter with multiplied discussions of gender issues online versus the status of feminist politic…

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