The official **:
Summary:Digital platforms such as social networks have become spaces to raise gender awareness, promote women's solidarity, and call for social change. Through qualitative research methods such as in-depth interviews and participatory observations, this paper explores the process of gender consciousness awakening among young female users who are actively vocal on gender issues in the local digital spaceThe concept of "mediated emotional solidarity" is proposed to understand how individuals who have encountered emotional disorders, experienced consciousness awakening, and become emotional outliers can connect with each other, support each other, and collectively speak out on the basis of the connection and affordability of social networking, so as to form a sense of unity in the emotional community. The study argues that digital media such as social media reconstruct the relationship between the individual, the collective, and space, and shape the feminist transformation politics of contemporary China, in which emotions play an important role.
About the AuthorFeng Jianxia is an associate professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Southwest University for Nationalities.
**ProjectsThis paper is the interim result of the Ministry of Education's Humanities and Social Science Research Youth ** Project "Research on the Mobilization Mechanism and Response of Feminist Action in the Digital Environment" (Project No.: 20YJC860007) and the Special Fund of the School-level Innovation Team of Southwest University for Nationalities "Research on Network Social Emotional Governance" (Project No.: 2020STD06).
In recent years, gender issues have become hot on the Internet, and the controversy around "gender" has become increasingly intense. For example, is the beating incident at a barbecue restaurant in Tangshan a public security issue, a gender issue, or both?Even among sociological researchers, there are different views, which has caused considerable controversy. Behind the controversy, it is often reflected that the participants are strong or weak in terms of gender awareness. Gender consciousness, also known as gender consciousness, refers to "observing the socio-political, economic, cultural and environmental environment from a gender perspective, and conducting gender analysis and gender planning in order to prevent and overcome patterns and measures that are not conducive to gender development" (Li Huiying, 1996). With the development of modern democratic society, gender consciousness is to "study various problems in social life with a strong tendency for gender equality development on the premise of acknowledging the biological differences between the sexes" (Pan Zequan and Xie Yan, 2018), and strive to eliminate inequalities in social life.
Therefore, gender consciousness does not refer to the view of natural biological sex, but to be able to break away from the inertial thinking that the roles, division of labor, and norms of men and women are "natural" in a society of gender inequality, and to have "gender sensitivity" to perceive their social and cultural causes, and "gender consciousness" to "promote the coordinated development of both sexes" (Li Huiying, 1996). Gender consciousness, like class and race consciousness, is not innate, naturally formed, but "a consciousness that needs to be enlightened" (Ding Ning, 2002). Women must awaken from the "unconsciousness" of their own situation, what Marx called "false consciousness" (eyerman, 1981), into a conscious state of their situation. It is a process that requires formal or informal gender training. As a result, the Women's Games focus on gender awareness, such as many grassroots organizations that carry out "consciousness-raising" campaigns to help women understand the inequalities they experience in patriarchal societies (Bu Wei, 2021).
Since the establishment of "gender mainstreaming" and "gender awareness in decision-making" at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, gender researchers and actors in China have carried out gender training for key groups such as policymakers, managers and communicators to raise gender awareness (Liu Xiaohong, 2005). From the perspective of practical effectiveness, the effectiveness of gender awareness training in the field of media is more obvious (Shou Yuanjun, 2002;Ding Ning, 2002), but it is a cognitively oriented, top-down, and organized path to gender consciousness awakening. In the context of a globalized, digitized, and decentralized network society (Custer, 1996-2001:91), is it possible to have a non-cognitive, bottom-up, and unorganized awakening of gender consciousness?In other words, without formal gender training, is it possible, and under what conditions, is it possible?What happens after the "awakening"?
At present, most of the research on gender consciousness comes from the fields of sociology, demography, and education, and the social investigation and empirical research (such as Zhang Dan and Detehei, 2018) are less from the micro and dynamic perspectives. In response to the recent academic discussions on emotion, digital media and feminist politics of transformation in the foreign gender research community, this paper explores the awakening process of young female users who are actively speaking out on gender issues in the local digital space through qualitative research methods such as in-depth interviews and participatory observations.
one
Definition of concepts and literature review
(1) Emotions as the starting point of the awakening of gender consciousness
Feminist collective action is often seen as an identity politics that seeks recognition. Identity politics is an "identity-centered political form" (Tan Ankui, 2020), which is presented in the form of groups in socio-political practice, and is often closely related to recognition and difference. Identity is the process by which social actors self-identify and construct meaning (Custer, 1996-2001: 26), while collective identity provides shared loyalty, "no collective action can be accomplished without a sense of collective identity" (Crandallmans, 1992-2002: 95). Since identity is so important in the formation of collective action, it is worth asking how this identity is generatedWhy are they, and not other women with the same identity, who have such an identity?
Although feminism is the most powerful theoretical and social practice aimed at changing gender inequality and women's subordination, "womanhood does not automatically lead to feminism, and being a woman does not necessarily lead to being a feminist" (Hemmings, 2012). It can even be said that "women and feminists are different creatures" and that "the relationship between the two reflects the opposition between ontology and epistemology in feminist theory and politics, and emotions provide an interpretive framework that bridges the two" (Hemmings, 2012).
Man is a being of passion, and "passion, enthusiasm is the essential power of man to pursue his object intensely" (Marx, 1932 2000: 107). However, in the context of Western academic history, influenced by the dualistic idea of reason and emotion, emotions have long been despised and devalued as the "other" of reason (Prampel, 2012 2021:43). Rational, independent, self-interest-driven action is placed above emotional, collective, altruistic-driven action (Taylor, 2009:223-233). It was not until the 1970s, with the rise of the feminist movement, that "feminine" traits (such as emotionality) were re-evaluated, and then structuralism spread from the field of literary studies to other disciplines, "these two forces together undermined the assumption that gender and the self have a natural basis, shifting the focus to the way in which they are socially and historically constructed" (Plumpel, 2012-2021:181). Unlike rationalism's disparagement of emotions, "the appeal of feminism lies in its deep engagement with needs, feelings, and emotions," and without the emotional dimension, feminism is "merely a mind game with no expectations" (Stanley & Wise, 1993:66). Passion is at the center of feminist intellectual transformation, providing the basis for feminist critique and sustaining feminist politics (Braidotti, 1991: 270).
(2) From Emotional Dissonance to Emotional Solidarity: The Role of Media
The concept of "affective solidarity" offers the possibility of understanding the awakening of gender consciousness from an emotional, processual, and participatory perspective, but Clare Hemmings does not discuss the specific correlation mechanisms from the individual's experience of emotional dysregulation to the emergence of emotional solidarity. "Solidarity" was a concept that played a huge role in the second wave of the feminist movement but was also examined repeatedly (Hooks, 2015:44;mohanty，2003：7）。It is now being re-emphasized, as a result of neoliberalism's intensification of individualism and the dissolution of women's collective action (Vachhani & Lalen, 2019). Susan Douglas (2010:6) used "enlightened sexism" to criticize the "** illusion" of women's power in Europe and the United States - the status of women because feminism has made great progress - and even achieved equality - therefore, feminism is outdated. Women's self-actualization should rely on self-optimization, individual responsibility, and individual choice, as Cheryl Sandberg argues in One Step Forward, rather than collective political struggles and critiques of broader socio-economic structures, thus closing the possibility of unity (Keller & Ringrose, 2015).baer，2016；baxter，2021）。
Networked publics, reconstituted by network technology, not only reconstruct the concept of space, but also form imaginary collectives as "people, technology, and practice interact" (Boyd, 2010:39). Emotions play an important role in this. The digital age's "mediated feelings of connectedness" connects the political and online public through the storytelling infrastructure of social**, which is the internal logic of affective publics (Papacharissi, 2015:7). Research on digital feminism in Europe and the United States suggests that women's gender consciousness may be awakened at home, school, and workplace for different reasons, but hashtags such as beenrapedneverreported that focus on gender-based violence guide individual experiences and feelings into collective storytelling, building solidarity among participants (Mendes, Ringrose & Keller, 2019: 138). Relevant domestic studies have also found that women's empathy and mutual assistance are connected by social ** hashtags (Feng Jianxia, 2020), but what are the similarities and differences with feminist transformation politics in the European and American contexts?This needs to be further explored.
II. II. II
Research Questions and Research Methods
Based on the context of globalization and digitalization, this paper responds to the perspective shift of "affective turn" in humanities and social science research, and reveals and presents the subjective experience, mental journey and emotional feelings of young female users who actively speak out for gender issues in the local digital space. Young female users are the subjects of this paper because in the "fourth wave of feminism" fueled by social ** (Nie Lu, 2019), girls and young women are active participants (Chen Xiaoyun and Li Huishan, 2018;Mendes, Ringrose & Keller, 2018), reflecting generational differences in the women's movement (Song, 2019).
The research questions of this paper include: How do contemporary young women become gender conscious?How does the "awakening" of gender consciousness change their daily lives?Why do they want to participate in the "voice" of social **?Does and how does "speaking up" bring unity?What role do digital media, such as social media, play in this?Through the examination of these issues, this paper is committed to understanding the logic of action behind the production and dissemination of gender discourse on the Internet, and on the other hand, it is engaged in a dialogue with foreign gender scholars on the academic discussion of emotion, digital media and feminist transformation politics.
This paper is a feminist media study that aims to "reveal the structure of human interaction and meaning" (Zulun, 1994 2007:174), adopting interpretive research strategies and qualitative research methods such as in-depth interviews and participatory observations. First, the author carried out field observations on gender issues through social media such as Sina Weibo, WeChat***Zhihu, and podcasts, and tracked and recorded the topic distribution, discourse framework, communication chain, and typical texts of gender discourse in the digital space. At the same time, the author pays attention to active accounts that actively speak out, observes the gender concept and interactive network of the account, and takes field notes. During the long-term interaction, the author got to know 29 young female users who are actively spreading gender issues, and conducted one-on-one in-depth interviews with them through face-to-face and WeChat voices. Each interview lasted between 60-90 minutes, with some interviewees interviewed twice. When interviewed, they were all young people aged 17-35, 8 in the 80s, 19 in the 90s, and 2 in the 00s. Respondents have a variety of professional identities, including students, teachers, psychological counselors, public welfare practitioners, company employees, civil servants, self-employed people, and full-time housewives. The area is concentrated in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Wuhan, Chengdu and other first-tier and provincial capitals. Except for two high school students, all of the respondents have a bachelor's degree or above, and 40% of the respondents have a master's degree or above. To draw on their experiences, the author also interviewed three young men and two female users over the age of 35 who were also active voices on gender issues on social media.
In the analysis of textual data, this paper adopts the thematic analysis method used in quality to "identify, organize, and gain insight into the thematic type and meaning of the data" (Braun & Clarke, 2006). In the process of transcribing the interview records verbatim and reading the text repeatedly, the salient concepts in the marked materials are encoded, and then the similar or consistent codes are summarized as the themes according to the research questions, and the relationship between the topics is established, and the coding process echoes the theoretical concepts in a timely manner.
Three
"Doesn't feel right":
Emotional dissonance as a starting point for "awakening".
An exploratory study found that "gender consciousness is often not acquired by confinement in a room through contemplative meditation, but is often inspired and influenced by discourse (including books, speeches, social movements, films, etc.)" (Bi Hengda, 1999). Young women who have grown up with the Internet** have more opportunities to be exposed to a large number of feminist discourses in cyberspace through current affairs news, film and television works, and social movements, "People like me who are very addicted to the Internet often see discussions on women's issues online" (F16, 2020-04-11).
Women are human beings, and they have an independent personality and independent consciousness of "being a person", which is the call of the times that has been established during the May Fourth period. Women are liberated from the oppression of patriarchy, husband's power and ethnic power in traditional society, and devote themselves to the cause of nation-state liberation and social production and labor with an independent attitude, which is regarded by the advocates of the New Culture Movement as a symbol of social civilization and progress, and also a symbol of the nation-state's entry into modern society. This May Fourth spirit has been inherited and carried forward by the new democratic revolution and socialist construction under the leadership of the Communist Party of China. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, "equality between men and women" was written into the constitution and became a basic national policy. **'s famous sayings "Times are different, men and women are the same" and "Women can hold up half the sky" have become a well-known socialist call.
Regardless of gender or age, the interviewees who have grown up in this atmosphere have a deep-rooted belief in the equality of men and women. Since I was a child, I heard about my grandmother's glorious deeds of going out to follow the Communist Party in her teens (F06, 2019-03-30), and witnessed the gendered dress and work of female workers and technicians in state-owned enterprises, including my mother, "My parents fully believe in the equality of men and women, and believe that boys and girls are the same, and so is my education" (F11, 2019-04-13). "Since I was a child, there was no such thing as saying that if you are a girl, you can't do it, my dad has always said that you will learn mathematics, physics and chemistry well, and you will not be afraid to go all over the world" (F14, 2020-01-28). This gives them a sense of self-degendering. In addition, the one-child policy has made many families pour all their expectations and investment into the only child, "I hope I can rush as high as I want" (F16, 2020-04-11), which strengthens their self-perception as a "person". Once it is felt that society does not expect the same from women, this dissonance can create a strong emotional conflict.
Studies have shown that men may also develop gender consciousness as a result of personal experience, such as "being incompatible with hegemonic masculinity, unwilling to play traditional male roles, and being surrounded by significant others who are victims of the gender system or are gender-conscious" (Bi Hengda, 1999). But they can also experience emotional dysfunction. For example, the male respondent M02 "felt wrong" when he broke up with his ex-girlfriend. At that time, he felt very hurt and uncomfortable, which should have been a normal psychological state after a breakup. But the words of a male friend comforting him made him "very disgusted": "I was staying at a friend's house, and he and his father told me all day and night, 'Women are like clothes' and 'how can a husband be without a wife'. I knew they were helping me and doing it for my good, but when I heard it, I felt so disgusting and that something was wrong. They didn't comfort me, they made me feel more uncomfortable. He reflects on the objectification of the woman as an object, as an other, as an object of ownership, rather than as an equal person. It's a far cry from the kind of pure and equal relationship he wants. He gradually realized that "my understanding of the equality of men and women in the past was very narrow", and he and his friends have subtly accepted a lot of patriarchal concepts, "I am also in the process of reflection, and gradually changed from a wrong understanding and wrong practice in the past to a feminist" (M02, 2021-01-16).
Four
"Swallow the red pill":
Emotional heterogeneity's desire for "connection".
Reflecting on the experience of emotional dissonance that "doesn't feel right" is the embodiment of "feminist reflexivity," that is, through reflection, the recognition that "there is a profound difference between self-perception and societal expectations of gender" (Probyn, 1993:16). As a result, their gender consciousness began to awaken, and the way they saw the world changed, just like the red pill and the blue pill in the movie "The Matrix". Before taking the red pill, "everything is logical" (F15, 2020-03-13), it is unlikely that they have experienced gender inequality, especially for well-educated middle-class women in the city. Once you swallow the red pill of "feminism", it is like "opening the eyes of heaven", "opening the third eye", and "opening the door to a new world", and then "reviewing" and "recalling" your own experience, at that time, you did not feel gender inequality, and now you have found problems, "feminist work is often memory work, to recall what you have experienced and make people feel wrong wrong) to piece together fragmented bodily memories and understand how these disparate experiences are interconnected" (Ahmed, 2017:22).
Misogyny is seen as central to the gender binary gender order, with men manifesting as "feminine contempt" and women as "self-loathing", in which "misogyny pervades the system of order and is so taken for granted that people are barely aware of its existence" (Chizuruko Ueno, 2015:1). As a result, anyone who points out unpleasant facts such as sexism, gender-based violence, and misogyny is often seen as a trouble maker and a killjoy. Hence the term feminism is infiltrated with unhappy ......The feminist sinister landscape 'destroys' the happiness of others;She is a person who specializes in destroying the pleasures of others because she refuses to gather, meet, or meet in matters of happiness" (Ahmed, 2015:54).
The common experience of gender awareness awakening as an emotional outlier caused respondents to have a strong sense of loneliness. Loneliness is "a negative emotion that arises from social connections that do not meet one's own expectations" (Zhang Guanjian, Liu Hailong, 2022). The interviews found that respondents' loneliness was not due to "social isolation" due to a lack of connection with others, but rather a "emotional isolation" in which existing social ties could not provide identity support and create emotional connections (Weiss, 1973:33). At the same time, loneliness is also a strong and productive emotion, which has an stimulation effect on people using social media technology to strengthen existing connections and seek new ones (Valkenburg & Peter, 2007).nowland，necka & cacioppo，2018)。Especially for those respondents who realize that "this is a road of no return, once awakened, there is no going back" (F28, 2021-04-28), they are more eager to go beyond their existing social connections and go to the vast digital space to "sing their voices and find their voices". The role of socialization is highlighted, and "the connective affordances of socialization help to activate the connection, expression and sharing of information among the public, and liberate the imagination of individuals and collectives" (Papacharissi, 2015: 22). Therefore, the awakening of consciousness is often accompanied by a series of connected social uses: learning from social ** Xi, speaking out on social **, and generating digital communication and solidarity through social **.
Five
Connected with "vocalization":
The generative mechanism of mediated emotional solidarity
Speaking out is often seen as a feminist discursive action that makes gender issues visible and highlighted (Shaw, 2012).Feng Jianxia, 2019). This paper argues that "speaking up" is also a connected mode of action that opens up dialogue, participation, and collaboration. This connection may be diachronic, such as Xi learning the concepts and theories of feminism through social **, understanding the history and current situation of the feminist movement, and establishing a legacy relationship with the pioneers, "It turns out that they were doing these things when I didn't know it." Now that I know, I can't act as if this didn't happen, I have to take action, and I have to start speaking out" (F19, 2020-01-27).
The technical characteristics and business logic of social networking make it play a similar role as infrastructure in the connection of emotional heterogeneity (Papacharissi, 2015:15), through which the flow of emotions is generated, diffused, and reconstituted. Sina Weibo, in particular, as a social network that facilitates the co-creation and collaborative filtering of content, has often become a place where gender news or issues are generated and fermented, as well as a third place where individual awakened people can meet and meet—informal meeting places outside of home and work, constituted by dialogue, and indispensable for community life, social capital, and civic engagement" (Papacharissi, 2015:26). Its algorithmic recommendations and watchlists make it easy to find bloggers who share the same interests;The hashtag ( ) has the function of topic annotation and topic participation, so that users who do not follow each other can quickly find each other, "there is a feeling of finding a big army" (F04, 2018-12-09);Location-based services (LBS) make it easier for users to find partners in the same city and expand online interactions to offlineProduct designs such as the Content Entrepreneur's Ad Revenue Sharing Program encourage users to speak, comment, and discuss ......In short, the structures of feeling, supported by social networking technology, "allow emotions to be perceived and internalized in a collective, connected, and digitally imprinted way......."It can generate great power and help build up strong and intense feelings, maintaining an infinite cycle of action and inaction" (Papacharissi, 2015:28).
As a result, young women, who have become emotionally deviant due to the awakening of gender consciousness, actively "develop their social interactions" through the "domestication" of communication technologies such as social networking, and through this, connect different aspects of life and create their own life world" (Pan Zhongdang, 2014). "Speaking up" is the way they express themselves, find peers, connect, and support each other. This kind of community formed in the long-term interactive cultural practice is exactly what Mafesoli refers to as the "new tribe": "The core of the new tribe is collective emotion, and more emphasis is on a kind of 'diffuse emotion' and 'common emotion', and the group produces common emotions surrounded by diffuse emotions, feels the current atmosphere together, and shares the happiness brought by actions, which will inevitably sprout the psychology of the group 'together'" (Wang Qiannan, 2018). It is in this kind of emotional community that mediated emotional solidarity is born.
Six
"Emotions as currency":
The reality of mediating emotional solidarity
The interview found that the emotional outliers who have experienced emotional dissonance and consciousness awakening form an emotional community connecting online and offline through the mediated connection mechanism of social **, and through the recognition and exchange of gendered pain (suffering), the pain and anger stimulated by women as "shared victimization" (hooks, 2015:45) in a patriarchal society, as well as the derived frustration, sadness, Based on emotional feelings such as fear, they jointly create and maintain gendered and collective storytelling, which not only drives the visibility of gender issues in the digital space, but also forms a mediated emotional solidarity of "women are a community with a shared future" in the common voice.
Emotions are woven by the fusion of reality and fantasy, and exist in the fluidity of the fusion of reality and virtuality, while technology shows what is possible and what can be possible" (Papacharissi, 2015:15). Social networking serves as a platform for storytelling, allowing people who have not experienced these gendered traumas to empathize through the "imaginary" nature of tuning in affectively, "sensing events in which they are physically present by imagining what it might be like for someone experiencing these events directly" (Papacharissi, 2015:4).
In the local digital space, the phenomenon of pitting married and unmarried women against each other is particularly prominent (Chen Yaya, 2022). Some awakened women regard married women as "patriarchal **" and do not hesitate to "wake up" them by insulting and insulting, causing new antagonism and tears (Field Observation Notes, 2020-05-11). In addition, there are differences in the perception of gender issues between women and men, between academics and grassroots, and between older and younger generations of feminists. Although the reflection, discussion and tolerance of differences within the community can be observed in the field, when digital technology makes the aggregation and communication of groups extremely easy, and the communication is more fragmented and emotional, quarrels, misunderstandings, group withdrawals, and even online violence against those who disagree with the group occur from time to time, so that the mediated emotional solidarity becomes the mediated emotional harm.
Seven
Conclusions and discussions
Currently, digital platforms such as social networks provide space and avenues to raise gender awareness, foster women's solidarity, and call for social change, which is already a global phenomenon (Mendes, Ringrose & Keller, 2019:5). In the context of globalization and digitalization, this paper dialogues with the research results of the foreign gender research community on the politics of digital and feminist transformation through field observations on the production and dissemination of gender discourse in the local digital space, as well as in-depth interviews with young female active users, and the emotional and technological logic behind gender discourse on the Internet.
The findings of this paper are similar to the conclusions of foreign scholars, that the emotional dissonance between physical experience and daily feelings is the starting point for the "awakening" of gender consciousness among contemporary young women. The difference is that the roots of the emotional dissonance – the conflict between one's self-perception as one and society's expectations as a woman – bear the cultural imprint of the indigenous history of women's emancipation. It is precisely because of the strong belief in mainstream gender values such as "equality between men and women", "women can hold up half the sky", and "boys and girls are the same" that they will sensitively feel uncomfortable and wrong when encountering implicit or explicit discrimination, and feminist discourse from cyberspace explains their experience. However, swallowing the red pill of "feminism" and recognizing the emotional reactions of pain, anger, and frustration caused by gender injustice also make them emotional outliers in real life. Social** offers the possibility to transcend existing interpersonal relationships, achieve digital huddles, and shape emotional communities. Emotions are like currency, relying on the trauma of women as victims of patriarchy to flow and circulate on social **, through reading, **likes, comments and other collective vocal behaviors, the concentration and intensity of emotions continue to increase, shaping the sense of unity of "women are a community with a shared future", and driving the visibility of gender issues in recent years.
Finally, there are still some limitations to this study. On the one hand, the description and interpretation of the process of young women from consciousness awakening to emotional solidarity in this paper is based on the empirical materials collected from in-depth interviews with active users, which is not enough to explain the subjective experience of women who have experienced emotional dissonance or consciousness awakening but have not been able to move towards emotional solidarity. For example, in the face of the same sense of alienity and loneliness, what kind of external circumstances and internal considerations make these women choose not to speak up and not to connect?On the other hand, the mediated emotional solidarity of young women is mainly based on the connection affordability of social **, which is closely related to their proficient social use ability and highly digital lifestyle as highly educated urban young white-collar workers. So whether and how do people who awaken gender consciousness in different periods, generations, and classes construct emotional solidarity in different media environments?These issues need to be further studied.
This article is an abbreviated version with references omitted, and the original article was published in the 9th issue of International Press in 2023.
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