Manufacturing Racialised Misogyny in China’s Digital Manosphere

This article examines the consumption of WNBA (Women’s National Basketball Association) games within China’s sports fandom through a dual gender-racial lens, using celebrity basketball player Caitlin Clark as a case study. Drawing on a dialectical-relational approach to critical discourse studies, complemented by an intersectional lens on gender and racial injustices, we unpack how Chinese fans co-construct Clark as an ideal sportswoman on Hupu, a popular Chinese-language sports forum, based not on her career accomplishments but on her sexuality, her perceived gender identity as a heterosexual woman, and her racial categorisation as white Caucasian. Accordingly, the manifestly aggressive sporting tactics employed against Clark by her competitors of African heritage are reframed as being driven by gendered and racialised motives. In this context, misogyny and racism not only intersect but are also dialectically linked to distinctly Chinese (re)interpretations of global racial and geopolitical orders. The findings illustrate the context-specific manifestations of gender-racial entanglements in China’s sports fandom and their dynamics with global reactionary currents.