Sisterhood construction through commenting by Chinese women

Abstract This paper takes the form of a case study which examines to what extent a comment can be analyzed as a type of speech action. This study analyzed 507 replies to a post on a popular Chinese social media application, Xiaohongshu, which concerns feminist issues. A speech act analysis of these replies offers new insights on comments as a type of speech act by showing their constructive functions across intra-utterance, inter-utterance, and extra-textual contexts. Comments can facilitate the securing of hearer’s uptake of an illocutionary act, may modify the actual hearer’s uptake of another illocutionary act, and may ultimately contribute to the construction of sisterhood within a redefined context. The performance of comments in this study is grounded in a particular circumstance and is highly context-dependent. Nevertheless, this finding leaves open the possibility that comments may display other effects in different contexts.