Dismantling Gender Blindness in Online Discussion of a Crime/Gender Dichotomy

TL;DR

The paper investigates how online discourse around a gender-related violence incident in China exhibits gender-blind sexism, limiting feminist expression on Weibo. It uses a mixed-methods approach—hashtag analysis, a fine-tuned Chinese BERT classifier, topic modeling with GSDMM, and feminist critical discourse analysis—to map trends, topics, and discursive patterns. The findings show dominant criminal framing that marginalizes gendered perspectives, alongside active counter-frames from grassroots feminists who face platformic and sociopolitical constraints. The work offers design and research implications to support digital feminist activism and cautions about the limitations of using hashtags as proxies in non-Western contexts, contributing to CSCW insights on non-Western online activism and platform design under censorship regimes.

Abstract

Contemporary feminists utilize social media for activism, while backlashes come along. The gender-related discourses are often diminished when addressing public events regarding sexism and gender inequality on social media platforms. The dichotomized debate around the Tangshan beating incident in China epitomized how criminal interpretations of gender-related violence became a backlash against feminist expressions. By analyzing posts on Weibo using mixed methods, we describe the emerging discursive patterns around crime and gender, uncovering the inherent gender-blind sexism that refutes feminist discourses on the social platform. We also highlight the critical restrictions facing grassroots feminist activism in Chinese cyberspace and propose implications for the design and research related to digital feminist activism.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: Temporal trend of post volume
• Figure 2: Distribution of Posts with the Top 20 Hashtags Per Content Class
• Figure 3: Average Semantic Relevance Between Hashtags and Text Content of Posts with the Top 20 Hashtags Per Content Class