The Hauntology of Chinese Cyberfeminism

This article proposes hauntology as a method for examining Chinese cyberfeminist histories beyond immediately accessible empirical evidence and documentation on event-based digital activism. By bringing Jen Liu’s performance piece GHOST__WORLD (2024) into conversation with the censored cyberfeminist project Feminist Voices (2010–18), it investigates how technosocial hauntings emerge through the complex relationship between feminist digital practices in China and the material conditions of technology production that enable them. While the spectral traces of Chinese women electronics workers drift through global networks of manufacturing, converging with ghostly traces of women workers across different times and places, their voices remain largely absent from the cyberfeminist histories their labor makes possible. By attending to these layered hauntings, the essay seeks new possibilities for writing Chinese cyberfeminist histories that acknowledge intricate entanglements between feminist movements, technological development, and gendered labor—connections that are visible only in ghostly shadows.