Anti-Marriage Feminism on Weibo

The 2010s saw the increasing popularity of anti-marriage and anti-reproduction discourses on Chinese social media. Far different from the discourse of “leftover women,” which depicts women postponing marriage entry, the sentiment of anti-marriage is about women who angrily denounce marriage and reproduction. In 2020, the sentiment developed into batches of attacks on Chinese social media aimed at marriage and married women. In comparison with the pro-marriage mainstream, how does this anti-marriage sentiment find its ground in China in the past decade? Who is spreading these discourses? How does this sentiment connect with the fact and the vision of gender (in)equality in China? The study collects widespread anti-marriage texts on Weibo, a major social media platform in China, and analyzes them through critical discourse analysis. This chapter borrows the concept of structures of feeling from Raymond Williams and takes an affective approach to analyze anti-marriage feminism. It attempts to make young Chinese urban women’s incomprehensible anger comprehensible by contextualizing the inequality young Chinese urban women perceive in China’s widening social gaps. This chapter sheds light on the limitations of the anti-marriage sentiment for its roots in neoliberal feminism which emphasizes self-reliance and individualism, which broadens rather than bridges such social gaps.