Feminist Reinterpretations of Intergenerational Experience in Family Photography on Xiaohongshu

Older women have often been less visible as photographic subjects within visual conventions that privilege youth and normative feminine beauty. On Xiaohongshu, however, photographic and family narratives about women include portraits of mothers and grandmothers and accounts of their work, care, aspirations, and hardship. This article asks how such posts make older women visible and connect their experiences to feminist meanings across generations. It combines an exploratory collection completed by 10 June 2026 with a second, bounded retrieval on 13 October 2026 using the same sixteen keyword combinations. The second retrieval recorded 450 search hits, representing 376 distinct posts; 255 had evidence of existence by the June cutoff, including twenty-five developed accounts of the poster’s own female relatives. Nine information-rich cases selected across the two collections are analysed through captions and ninety-two retained visual files. The cases show several ways of making intergenerational experience visible: collective portraits credit older women’s advice, archives reopen questions about family and gender, everyday activity gives material form to care, and constructed images picture opportunities an earlier generation could not pursue. Their feminist significance is not identical. Some posts explicitly challenge son preference, unequal opportunities, bodily ideals, or the assumption that a woman’s worth rests on service to others; others primarily offer affection, commemoration, or visual recognition. The article argues that photographing older women can broaden the available images of women and create a shareable language for intergenerational experience, while its political meaning depends on how particular gendered expectations are addressed.