Rotten Girls as Killjoy Feminists? Unpacking Women’s Perception on Gender Inequalities in Post-Socialist China

Gender inequality and feminism are topics of increasing visibility in China’s increasingly digitized mass culture in recent years. Given the hype, successive research has attempted to bring forth the relationship between individuals’ affective engagement with online feminism and their challenge or consolidation of gender inequality. Nevertheless, how negative affects can serve as a methodological framework for assessing individuals’ role in promoting or hindering feminism is still underexplored. This article examines a particular population, namely the ‘rotten girls’ (female fans of male-male romance) as killjoy feminists in post-socialist Chinese patriarchy. It argues that rotten girls are at once killjoy feminists interrogating neoliberal gender normality and killjoys of their own feminist dreams, internalising the very norms. These nuances and paradoxes constitute a Deleuzian micropolitics, initiatives starting from bodily affect, that may nonetheless bring changes to public, collective life. Thus, this article complicates existing scholarship on negative affects in online feminism in the context of post-socialist China, providing insights into solidarity among feminist practitioners against the ostracization of feminism transnationally.