Digital lifelines, COVID-19 memories: Chinese lesbians reflecting on community and care in pandemic times

This paper examines how lesbians living in mainland China used intimate caregiving, digital testimony and archival labour during and after COVID-19 to rehearse survival, preserve collective memory, and navigate familial/state surveillance. Using a purposive corpus of RedNote posts (2020-2025) and thirteen interviews, I show that caregiving routines functioned as 'rehearsals for living' and that 'living-archive' practices (in the form of screenshots, encrypted notebooks, private backups) countered platform temporality and content removal. These practices were shaped by family pressure, health-code governance and platform moderation. The paper brings queer world-making into pandemic preparedness and treats archiving as a preparedness technology. Policy implications include the need for support for mutual-aid caregiving, data regimes that minimise involuntary disclosure, and investment in community archiving.