Negotiated authenticity and sisterhood under platformed patriarchy: female rappers in Chinese hip-hop reality shows

Focusing on Girls Like Us (2021) and Rap Star Dream Maker (2024), this study examines how female rappers strategically navigate gender expression, affective alliances, and negotiated authenticity within the field of Chinese hip-hop reality shows. Drawing on hip-hop feminist theory and critical discourse analysis, the study offers a comprehensive interpretation of lyrics, visual aesthetics, mentors’ critiques, and audience danmu (bullet comments). The study reveals how female expression is simultaneously enabled and constrained by the intersecting pressures of patriarchal norms, platform logic, and state governance. Female rappers, through performative self-positioning and strategic discursive negotiation, challenge dominant expressive boundaries. Although expressions of “sisterhood” are rooted in genuine emotional and political solidarity, they are often repackaged as consumable “emotional moments” that obscure their structural significance. Meanwhile, the hip-hop ideal of “keeping it real” has been reshaped under the interplay of pressures from the state and platform into a form of “negotiated authenticity” that aligns with mainstream ideology and commercial demands. Taken together, these dynamics constitute a form of “instrumental empowerment,” in which the conditions enabling female rappers’ visibility simultaneously constrain its reach. This study aims to contribute to hip-hop feminist and media scholarship by theorizing female rappers’ visibility under techno-state capitalism.