Embodied counter discourse: negotiating the limits of pink feminism in chinese digital feminist resistance

This paper investigates how digital feminist actors in contemporary China strategically subvert and resignify nationalist and patriarchal discourses, repurposing state-sanctioned idioms to expose their gendered contradictions and carve out spaces for critique under authoritarian constraints. Employing a discourse—historical approach of two emblematic cases, the study traces discursive mechanisms such as intertextual irony, parody, and recontextualised appropriation that destabilise official narratives linking women’s sexuality and menstruation to national morality and legitimacy. These interventions position the female body as a discursive battleground: marginalized in regulatory frameworks yet symbolically overloaded with nationalist imperatives. While entangled with pink feminism’s adaptive alignments, such practices generate semantic ruptures that elevate embodied experiences as sites of dignity and justice. Conceptually, the paper introduces embodied counter-discourse to frame these subversive iterations, where corporeality serves as both analytical lens and resistive medium, extending beyond pink feminism’s conciliatory bounds to foster centrifugal critique.