War on women: interlocking conflicts within The Vagina Monologues in China

Abstract

Chinese university students’ promotion and performance of the feminist play The Vagina Monologues in 2013 triggered a heated debate and a strain of misogyny in social media, which demonstrate how people perceive feminism in China. Through quantitative content analysis and qualitative text analysis of 533 online comments on this feminist activity, this paper investigates the conflicts and contradictions within feminism in China and four frames (meaning packages) are identified. Three of them, namely the ‘public–private conflict’ frame, the ‘Western-Chinese conflict’ frame, the ‘class conflict’ frame, were employed to express opposition, whereas only one feminist frame held a supportive stance. Feminism in China is found to be perceived as morally deviant, foreign-rooted, and intertwined with issues like nationalism, social polarization, and a modernization-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.