Mediating menstrual discourse on Weibo: feminism, consumerism, and the politics of gender

In recent years, the convergence of feminism and consumerism on Chinese social media has fostered a “feminist consumer culture,” in which platform affordances — such as hashtags, multimedia posting, reposting, and threaded comments — mediate not only how menstruation (and women’s hygiene more broadly) is expressed, but also how it is interpreted. This article employs multimodal critical discourse analysis from a feminist perspective to examine two trending Weibo hashtag algorithms responding to sanitary napkin quality scandals. The study demonstrates that menstruation is increasingly framed not merely as a biological and individual matter, but as a contested and politicised topic intersecting public health, social morality, gender inequality, and national reproductive politics. Furthermore, the affordances of social media campaigns cultivate a “networked feminist community” that leverages digital visibility to advance social change and reform within the female hygiene industry. The study sheds light on how mediated contexts structure the meanings of menstruation and reshape cultural attitudes towards women’s bodies. It also extends feminist discourse to new areas of public life in China.