With the prevalence of feminism and related issues on social media in China in recent years, “Chinese pastoral feminism” has emerged as a buzzword, labelling a lot of opinions, propositions and even activities in place of the traditional term “feminism”. It is worth noting that the new one is not used to describe oneself but to criticize others with strong negative implication; though used frequently, “Chinese pastoral feminism” does not have a commonly admitted definition, as a result the signified is obliged to be comprehended in concrete social media contexts. For purpose of better understanding of Chinese digital feminism, it is necessary to study what “Chinese pastoral feminism” really refers to, with its denotation described on analysis of how it is used as well as the connotation clarified by excavating the cultural power behind it.
Text analysis is applied in Python on nearly 1.5K answers to two questions about the definition of “Chinese pastoral feminism” in Zhihu, the biggest online question-and-answer community in China. Initial topic models show that there are approximately three kinds of circumstances which can be criticized as “Chinese pastoral feminism”: when gender frame is forced into irrelevant issues, which increases the intension of gender hostility; when women only ask for rights but do not prepare to take responsibilities, whose claim is women’s interest, or namely female hegemony, rather than gender equality; when hatred, disgust and discrimination are expressed against the whole male group, which is misandry to some extent.
After dividing the denotation of “Chinese pastoral feminism” into these three aspects, this article also tries to illustrate its connotation correspondingly from a theoretical perspective of cultural studies. Firstly, “Chinese pastoral feminism” re-divides the boundary between gender issues and irrelevant ones, which used to be drawn by traditional ideology in which female is defined as the other of male so that gender issues, or the relation between men and women in other words, cannot be represented in this “masculine signifying economy”. Secondly, “Chinese pastoral feminism” re-defines the rights and responsibilities women should have, while both these new ones have been in linguistic absence for a long time from a hegemonic cultural discourse in which gender equality has been legalized and realized superficially neglecting the realistic gender structure. Thirdly, “Chinese pastoral feminism” shows consistent dissatisfaction at men cultivated in masculinist culture, in disagree with some self-proclaimed feminists.
On the one hand, as an abiding and foundational illusion of a masculinist discourse, the usage of “Chinese pastoral feminism” is distortion and stigmatization of Chinese feminism; on the other hand, the new discourse does work to announce the difference among kinds of feminism, and users, in this way, legitimize themselves as the “real” valid feminists. To be mentioned, there are also two assumptions based on the reason why “Chinese pastoral” can be a humiliating adjective: compared with western feminism, the Chinese edition is inferior in Chinese people’s own eyes; compared with urban lifestyle, the rural one is inferior in modern China.