“SlutWalk” on connected screens: Multiple framings of a social media discussion

Abstract

This paper explores the discursive activities of the participants of a social media discussion triggered by Shanghai Metro's official “dress-code” warning to women passengers. Our primary data consists of a corpus of 541 messages collected from the comments on the warning message posted on the metro company's official microblog account. Drawing on the notions of face, frame and footing, we identify three prominent frames enacted by the participants of the discussion—campaigning, debating, and playing—and analyze how different groups and individuals have developed, changed, or disrupted the “SlutWalk” on China's Internet. We situate our analysis in the interactional, political, and social-economic context in China as well as the context of global feminist activism. Our findings suggest that, with the rise of capitalism in China, traditional patriarchal ideology has reinvented itself in part by appropriating the new communication technologies. Nevertheless, the increasing social media discussions have the potential of enlarging attention to discourses regarding sex and gender, mobilizing resources for the promotion of gender equity, and strengthening (trans)national feminist networks in the Chinese context.