When feminists became ‘extremists’: A corpus-based study of representations of feminism on Weibo

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of the evolving representations of feminism on Weibo, China’s foremost microblogging platform, employing a corpus-based methodology. The self-compiled corpus comprised 334,871 feminism-related posts from 2019 to 2022. Using the Sketch Engine corpus analysis tool, noun bigrams containing 女权 (feminism) were extracted, categorized, and compared to discern the portrayals and their transformations. The findings revealed a significant shift in feminism’s depiction, with an increased emphasis on its radical and aggressive aspects, and a decline in its portrayal as a quest for female privilege. During this period, the perception of feminism as an emerging social movement expanded, and the distinction between various forms of feminism and feminists based on different attributes became more prevalent, resulting in a marginally reduced representation of them as a unified entity. This research enriches the existing literature by emphasizing the dynamic portrayals of feminism on China’s social media and offering novel insights into its assessment.