Chinese Radical Feminist Discourse on Twitter/X: Linguistic Innovation, Patriarchal Resistance, and Boundary-Making

Abstract

This study examines how Chinese radical feminist discourse on Twitter/X constructs power relations, collective identities, and political Others through language. It draws on 200 Chinese-language post units collected manually through inductive keyword-based sampling. The data were coded in NVivo 15 through two cycles of coding and analyzed through Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis. The findings show that users create a shared political vocabulary through homophonic and graphic rewriting, productive morphemes, and new word formation. These linguistic practices challenge male-centred meanings and denaturalize beauty servitude, sexual-romantic relationships, marriage, reproduction, and traditional femininity. They also construct an ideal radical feminist subject defined by strength, autonomy, political awakening, and separation from men, while imagining sisterhood and women’s mutual aid. At the same time, derogatory naming, identity screening, and biological essentialism are used to produce hierarchies among women and dehumanize political Others. Future-oriented discussions envision a women-centred society that reorganizes care, healthcare, and reproduction, yet some also reproduce eugenic logic through the exclusion of male-associated reproductive possibilities. The study therefore argues that Chinese radical feminist discourse on Twitter/X is simultaneously resistant and regulatory: it disrupts patriarchal power while creating new standards of feminist legitimacy and exclusion. By centring Chinese-language discourse on a Western platform, this study extends digital feminism research and highlights how counter-discourse can both resist and reproduce inequality.