Girlhood Feminism as Soft Resistance: Affective Counterpublics and Algorithmic Negotiation on RedNote

2025-07-07

AI Summary

This study examines how Chinese women users construct localized feminist resistance spaces under algorithmic governance and cultural constraints through platform affordances and tagging practices. Focusing on the reappropriation of the “baby food” tag on Xiaohongshu, it introduces the concept of “girlhood-style feminism,” characterizing an affective counterpublic space mechanism grounded in self-infantilization, algorithmic play, and aesthetic withdrawal. Employing the CALM framework, the authors conduct text mining and sentiment analysis on 1,580 posts and supplement findings with digital ethnography. Results reveal how users negotiate everyday discourse and platform affordances to achieve covert symbolic expression, affective solidarity, and collective identity formation while evading censorship. The study challenges liberal feminist assumptions privileging visibility and overt confrontation, advancing a theory of gendered public space rooted in East Asia’s compressed modernity.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Natural Language Processing: Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
• Humans and AI: Crowd Sourcing and Human Computation

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data quality in the era of algorithmically-generated content
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy
• Social Networks and Social Media: Media and governance, opinion dynamics, filter bubbles, polarization

Abstract

This article explores how Chinese female users tactically mobilise platform features and hashtag practices to construct vernacular forms and an exclusive space of feminist resistance under algorithmic and cultural constraints. Focusing on the reappropriation of the hashtag Baby Supplementary Food (BSF), a female-dominated lifestyle app with over 300 million users, we analyse how users create a female-centered counterpublic through self-infantilisation, algorithmic play, and aesthetic withdrawal. Using the Computer-Assisted Learning and Measurement (CALM) framework, we analysed 1580 posts and propose the concept of girlhood feminism: an affective, culturally grounded form of soft resistance that refuses patriarchal life scripts without seeking direct confrontation or visibility. Rather than challenging censorship and misogyny directly, users rework platform affordances and domestic idioms to carve out emotional and symbolic spaces of dissent. Situated within the broader dynamics of East Asia's compressed modernity, this essay challenges liberal feminist paradigms grounded in confrontation and transparency. It advances a regionally grounded framework for understanding how gendered publics are navigated, negotiated, and quietly reimagined in algorithmically governed spaces.

Problem

• How Chinese female users construct feminist resistance under constraints
• Creating female-centered counterpublics via self-infantilisation and algorithmic play
• Understanding soft resistance in algorithmically governed digital spaces

Innovation

• Utilizes platform features for feminist resistance
• Employs self-infantilisation and algorithmic play
• Creates affective dissent via domestic idioms