“Platformed post-feminist negotiation:” decoding gender politics in Chinese female-orientated love simulation games

Abstract

ABSTRACT Adopting a walkthrough of the game application, participant observation of online fan communities, and a narrative analysis of storylines, this study seeks to understand how local female-orientated love simulation games re-calibrate Western feminist ideologies with/through constructions of romantic love. This study argues that with the development and backlash of feminist ideologies and neo-liberal economic restructuring in post-socialist China, female-oriented love simulation games now present what I coin “Platformed Post-Feminist Negotiation” (hereafter PPN). First, the PRP transplants Western post-feminism to veil the latent and toxic consumerism with the rhetoric of women’s empowerment. Second, the PPN inherits Chinese feminism’s dynamic negotiation with Confucian ideals and the conservative state ideology. While compromising with dominant ideologies to escape from China’s stringent digital censorship, game developers have aligned with players to carry out micro, covert, and indirect resistance to protecting female sexual freedom. Third, the PPN refers to how digital games are platformed as technical tools to manufacture a variant post-feminism that can be defined as empowering women, ignoring structural gender inequalities, and negotiating with state censorship. This study contributes to Chinese digital games’ post-feminist narrative patterns and how contemporary post-feminism appropriates technological affordances in an increasingly platformed society.