War on Women: Interlocking Conflicts Within the Vagina Monologues in China

• In Event: ICA Plenary Interactive Paper/Poster Session I
  In Interactive Paper Session: Feminist Scholarship Interactive Poster Session

Abstract

Chinese university students’ promotion and performance of feminist play The Vagina Monologues in 2013 evinced a heated debate and a strain of misogyny in social media, which demonstrates how feminism is conceived and understood in China. Through quantitative content analysis and qualitative text analysis of 533 online comments on the feminist activity, this paper investigates the conflicts and contradictions within feminism and four frames (meaning packages) were identified. Three of them, namely public-private conflict frame, western-Chinese conflict frame, class conflict frame, were employed to show opposed attitude. Only one feminist frame was adopted to show support. Feminism in China is found to be conceived as morally deviant, foreign-rooted, and intertwined with issues like nationalism, social polarization, and modern-tradition contradiction. In this event, social media facilitated the diffusion of misogyny as well as served as public sphere wherein diverse and deliberative discussion was allowed.

Author

• Yalan Huang, Tsinghua University