Living a dating life, rewriting romantic scripts: Young women’s dating diaries and popular feminism on Xiaohongshu

This article examines how young women narrate their dating experiences on Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social media platform centered on lifestyle blogging, to explore the platformization of cultural production and emerging feminist sensibilities around romance. Drawing on textual analysis and interviews, the article reveals that dating diaries constitute a unique cultural genre that foregrounds female-centered romantic narratives, offering an alternative to hegemonic patriarchal norms. Although these narratives emphasize female autonomy and agency, they are shaped by Xiaohongshu’s cultural scripts, resulting in individualized, aestheticized, and commercialized forms of storytelling that undercut their feminist potential. We argue that these practices exemplify a localized form of popular feminism in China, marked by its ambivalence as it negotiates visibility, commodification, and political sensitivity within a commercialized and regulated digital media ecosystem.