Women engaging with huangwen: Women-oriented huangwen as an intimate counterpublic sphere

This article focuses on women-oriented huangwen—sexually explicit online fiction created and circulated by women in China. While Chinese obscenity laws and state-led campaigns have increasingly targeted huangwen for its explicit content, this category remains a vital space where women explore desire, pleasure, and bodily autonomy beyond the constraints of mainstream sexual discourse. Drawing on virtual ethnography and semi-structured interviews, this paper traces how fans use both textual and paratextual practices to negotiate sexual meanings, challenge stigmas, and develop sexual knowledge around women’s sexuality, body and desire. The article conceptualizes these practices as part of an “intimate counterpublic,” a space of gendered and affective solidarity through which marginalized sexual experiences become visible and discussable.