Migrant women, hooliganism, and online social visibility in Chinese personal blogs

Young, country women living as migrant workers in cities in mainland China have been using social media as a place and space for active social participation. This paper focuses particularly on the gendered performance of women in Chinese personal blogs. Drawing upon the performative perspective, this chapter will examine a Chinese personal blog authored by a female migrant worker. Data were collected from Liumang Yan blog at the Tianya Blog Service Provider from February 2004 until June 2005. The data include Liumang Yan's blogsite and the blog entries updated during that period as well as media reports and commentaries and other blogs. This ethnographic inquiry will provide an examination of Liumang Yan's gendered performances in relation to context, topicalization, and readership. Linguistic and non-linguistic features of the blog will be examined. The analysis reveals that Liumang Yan's blog, a personal blog as it is, is representative of the emergence of cyber feminism in China with particularized characteristics given the blogger's living experience. It is argued that the femininity represented in the blog is not only a hybridity of sexualities composed of macho femininity and emphasized femininity created in response to changes in mediation, increased social mobility, and deepened social networking and participation in China, but also that such blogs, in turn, have the capacity to create changes in Chinese society in general.