Queer life beyond major cities: Cross-platform digital practices among lesbian women in non-metropolitan China

While Chinese queer scholarship has long focused on LGBTQ + life in major cities, including digital media practices, less attention has been paid to how lesbian women living in smaller cities, towns, and rural areas navigate digital media in everyday life. Drawing on 30 in-depth interviews conducted with self-identified lesbian women living beyond major metropolitan centers in Jiangsu Province, this article examines how participants used different social media platforms to access lesbian-related knowledge, manage visibility, seek connection, and imagine possible futures. Rather than treating digital media as a general support tool, the article argues that participants navigated a differentiated platform ecology in which different media served different relational and practical functions. In contexts where locally available queer reference points were relatively limited, acquaintance networks were denser, and pressures around family and marriage remained strong, social media took on a more compensatory role. Participants pieced together knowledge, selective visibility, connection, cultural belonging, and future-oriented strategies across platforms such as WeChat, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, QQ, and lesbian-oriented apps, although these digital arrangements remained uneven and fragile. To conceptualize this pattern, the article proposes the notion of polymedia resilience: the strategic and uneven way in which lesbian women living in non-metropolitan settings navigate multiple platforms to make queer life more intelligible and more manageable. In doing so, the article contributes to Chinese queer studies by shifting attention beyond metropolitan-centred narratives, and to digital media scholarship by showing how platform use acquires distinct significance in non-metropolitan social worlds.