Mingxin Lou she/her

Working title of PhD: Digital and Cultural Feminisms: Lived Experiences of Young Chinese Women and the Influence of Feminist Discourses on Marriage and Contemporary Womanhood.

Institution: University of Glasgow

Year commenced: 2024

Full or part-time: Full time

Supervisors: Kelly Johnson

Funding source: Self-funded

Synopsis:

My doctoral research, Digital and Cultural Feminisms: Lived Experiences of Young Chinese Women and the Influence of Feminist Discourses on Marriage and Contemporary Womanhood, examines how Generation-Z Chinese women engage with feminist ideas circulating across digital platforms and transnational contexts. It investigates how online feminist discourses intersect with enduring Confucian gender norms, state ideologies, and global feminist narratives to shape young women’s understandings of womanhood, marriage, and agency.

The study addresses three interrelated research questions:

1. What feminist discourses do young Chinese women encounter online?
2. How do these discourses influence their perceptions of gender, marriage, and everyday life?
3. How are global feminist narratives reinterpreted across different cultural and educational settings?

Guided by feminist phenomenology, digital feminism, intersectionality, and transnational feminism, the research adopts a qualitative, critical feminist paradigm. It employs semi-structured interviews and participant-led digital scrapbooking with scroll-through elicitation to capture affective and visual dimensions of feminist engagement that are often absent from text-based inquiry. Participants include Chinese female university students studying both in mainland China and in Western countries, recruited through purposive stratified sampling to ensure diversity across class, region, and educational background.
Thematic and axial coding, supported by NVivo, will be integrated with critical discourse analysis of social media and policy texts to trace how feminist ideas are articulated, negotiated, and censored. The research advances feminist sociology by theorising transnational intersectional autonomy, how young women rework feminist subjectivities across digital and cultural borders under shifting ideological and technological conditions.

Keywords: Digital Feminism Intersectionality Transnational Chinese Womanhood.