Gender Discourse on Chinese Social Media: Douban Feminism to PUA Tutorial

The Manchester China Institute (MCI)promotes excellence in China studies at the University of Manchester. MCI hosts in-person talks, workshops, and roundtables, and well as webinars with a global reach. Our public events are free and open to all. The University of Manchester is committed to academic independence and thefreedom of speech. The views speakers present are entirely their own, and do not represent those of the University of Manchester or the Manchester China Institute and its directors.

Manchester China Institute

A multi-faceted exploration of the ever-changing landscape of gender discourse on Chinese social media, featuring LSE's Prof Bingchun Meng.

The past decade has witnessed an ascendance of feminist discourse on the Chinese Internet. Not only is the spectrum of feminist views expanding, but clashes and confrontations on gender issues are also on the rise- often triggering an anti-feminist backlash among netizens or political sanctions from the state. The cacophony online is mutually constitutive with the social transformation taking place in the offline life-world. While the concept of digital feminism usefully highlights the importance of technological affordance, it sometimes runs the risk of isolating the digital from the social.In this talk, Prof. Meng will make some preliminary attempts to develop a typology of online discourses related to gender issues in the Chinese context. Bearing in mind the dialectics of visibility/invisibility in mediated feminism, Prof Meng will tease out a few prominent themes from both feminist and anti-feminist camps and then contextualise those in relation to the broader structural change and cultural shifts in contemporary China.Cover image source: WHYNOT.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER Prof Bingchun Meng is a Professor in the Department for Media and Communications at LSE, where she also co-directs the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Research Centre. Prof Meng is currently the Director of LSE PhD Academy and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP).Prof Meng has a Bachelor's in Chinese Language and Literature (1997) and a Master's in Comparative Literature (2000) from Nanjing University, China. She obtained a PhD in Mass Communication (2006) from the Pennsylvania State University, USA. Before joining the LSE, she was a post-doc fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, where she worked at the Centre for Global Communication Studies and also taught courses on Chinese media.Prof Meng’s research interests include gender and the media, political economy of media industries, communication governance, and comparative media studies. She has published widely in these topic areas on leading academic journals. From 2020 to 2021, she served as a Senior Fellow of Global Governance Futures 2035 organized by Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin under the sponsorship with Bosch Foundation. Her book The Politics of Chinese Media: Consensus and Contestation was published by Palgrave in early 2018. She is currently working on another monograph under contract with Columbia University Press about AI industries in China.

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Gender Discourse on Chinese Social Media: Douban Feminism to PUA Tutorial

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