Girlhood Feminism as Soft Resistance: Affective Counterpublics and Algorithmic Negotiation on RedNote

TL;DR

This paper examines how Chinese women use platform features and hashtags on RedNote to create a form of soft feminist resistance called girlhood feminism, which navigates algorithmic constraints through affective and cultural strategies.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of girlhood feminism as a culturally grounded, affective form of resistance that operates within algorithmic and cultural constraints in East Asia.

Findings

Users reappropriate platform features for feminist expression

Girlhood feminism emphasizes affect and symbolism over confrontation

The study offers a regionally grounded framework for digital gendered publics

Abstract

This article explores how Chinese female users tactically mobilise platform features and hashtag practices to construct vernacular forms and an exclusive space of feminist resistance under algorithmic and cultural constraints. Focusing on the reappropriation of the hashtag Baby Supplementary Food (BSF), a female-dominated lifestyle app with over 300 million users, we analyse how users create a female-centered counterpublic through self-infantilisation, algorithmic play, and aesthetic withdrawal. Using the Computer-Assisted Learning and Measurement (CALM) framework, we analysed 1580 posts and propose the concept of girlhood feminism: an affective, culturally grounded form of soft resistance that refuses patriarchal life scripts without seeking direct confrontation or visibility. Rather than challenging censorship and misogyny directly, users rework platform affordances and domestic idioms to carve out emotional and symbolic spaces of dissent. Situated within the broader dynamics of East Asia's compressed modernity, this essay challenges liberal feminist paradigms grounded in confrontation and transparency. It advances a regionally grounded framework for understanding how gendered publics are navigated, negotiated, and quietly reimagined in algorithmically governed spaces.