Performing Female Agency: Digital Intimacy Among Chinese Otome Game Players

Existing research on otome games and digital intimacy has focused on virtual romance and affective labor. However, it has paid less attention to how female agency is performed and negotiated through these interactions. Addressing this gap, this study draws on the framework of gender performativity to examine how young Chinese women perform and negotiate female agency through engagement with otome games. Based on participant observation and 24 semi-structured interviews, the findings show that digital intimacy enables players to articulate sexual and emotional desires, challenge gender norms, and reconstruct self-understanding. Through repeated interactions with game narratives and fictional characters, participants rework femininity while reconstructing personal values and relational expectations. At the same time, these processes remain ambivalent, as otome games both provide spaces for self-expression and reproduce idealized and commercialized forms of heteronormative romance. The study argues that female agency emerges as a performative, ongoing process shaped by repeated practice rather than as a fixed outcome. By extending the application of gender performativity to digital intimacy, this research contributes to feminist media studies and advances understanding of gender and female agency in contemporary Chinese media culture.