Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-30-2026

Abstract

This article examines the rise of herstory content on Douyin to explore how feminist resistance takes shape within China’s platform environment. Drawing on digital ethnography, we develop the concept of popular resistance, a form of platform-mediated resistance whose popularity serves both as a condition of political traction and as a mechanism of containment. To clarify this duality, we identify two dimensions: (a) popularity on the platform, driven by trends, aestheticization, and commodification; and (b) popularity within orthodoxy, shaped by state-sanctioned values that render certain forms of feminist expression politically permissible. Popular resistance retains a critical, if slippery, edge. It gives voice to gendered injustices while remaining entangled with the algorithmic, commercial, and political infrastructures that simultaneously enable and discipline it. We conclude by proposing popular resistance as a transferable analytic for understanding how political expression in the digital age gains visibility, negotiates power, and persists within the very systems that constrain it.

This article was published Open Access through the CCU Libraries Open Access Publishing Fund. The article was first published in the journal Social Media + Society: https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051261472347

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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