Lifestyle Feminism on RedNote: Digital Platforms, Mediated Intimacy, and the Duality of an Enclaved Feminist Public Sphere

This article examines everyday feminism on RedNote (Xiaohongshu) through the lens of affective politics, exploring how feminists repurpose a consumerist digital platform to cultivate feminist publics within a socio-political environment that is largely unreceptive. The analysis reveals that mediated intimacy underpins the everyday practices of RedNote feminists, facilitating the formation of intimate publics. These practices strategically engage the platform’s vernacular to articulate a “lifestyle feminism,” framing feminist politics as a non-confrontational, identity-based lifestyle rather than an overt ideological stance. While this approach nurtures a popularized feminist enclave, it is accompanied by inherent tensions: limited intersectionality, insularity, and susceptibility to platform co-optation may transform this ostensibly empowering mode of feminist politics into its opposite, inadvertently contributing to the depoliticization and censorship it seeks to resist.