Feminist Interventions through Podcast in Mainland China

Abstract: 

Podcast has gained increasing popularity in disseminating knowledge, which has become an effective tool to circulate liberal feminism in popular culture in mainland China. As a platform of social media, podcast is used by some independent hosts to launch their feminist programs in the forms of interviews, lectures and personal narratives. Among those feminist programs, Bitch-up (婊酱) and Youdian Tianyuan (有点田园) are most popular and successful. This article studies these two programs through analysis on their contents and reception, as well as interviews with their h osts. Comparative studies on these two programs reveal that they both legitimize their feminist stance by re-claiming the stigmatized terms such as Tianyuan and bitch. But they differ in their mainstreaming strategies, feminist agendas and negotiations with internet censorship. I argue that their feminist interventions with the public discourse fall into two main categories, that is, gender and sexuality, both of which are crucial components of liberal feminism. Youdian Tianyuan engages the current politics in China to criticize the conventional gender norms and institutional power dynamics. While Bitch-up exports female sexual adventures and autonomic expression from geopolitical context of the Netherlands to mainland China, which, to certain extent, liberates sexual fantasies and builds sexual subjectivity among its female audiences.