Beyond disguise: performative tactics and gender navigation among Chinese women

This study examines how Chinese women employ online gender-swapping as an everyday means of negotiating patriarchal hostility and platform constraints. By integrating de Certeau’s theory of tactics, Butler’s theory of gender performativity, and platform affordance theory, this study conceptualizes online gender-swapping as a repertoire of performative tactics. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 19 women, it identifies three situated tactics, namely gender disguise, gender mimicry, and gender invocation, as well as a cross-contextual mode of coordination termed gender navigation. These practices reveal how women tactically cite and coordinate socially recognizable gender norms to reduce risks, establish credibility, expand the space for self-expression, and manage platform visibility and algorithmic classification. Moreover, these performative tactics may heighten practitioners’ awareness of gender as constructed, citational, and reiterative, while simultaneously reproducing associations between masculinity and authority, rationality, and safety. By shifting attention from discrete acts and bounded platforms to interconnected digital ecologies, this study demonstrates how tactical agency is enabled, constrained, and continuously recalibrated across digital platforms.