Queering Beauty Blogging: When Queerbeauty Meets Made-in-China Feminists

This study explores the intersection of queerbeauty styles (cross-speaking and cross-dressing) and feminist activism within China’s beauty blogging landscape, focusing on how queer beauty bloggers carve out queer spaces to make room for the unaccommodated and how they are questioned, if not excluded, by Chinese grassroots feminists. Drawing on interviews with 35 queer and feminist beauty bloggers and a multimodal discourse analysis of their beauty vlogs, this study endeavors to illuminate the nuanced dynamics of queer and feminist identity formation, and their (sometimes) cross-fertilization, (sometimes) mutual exclusion in China’s digital spaces, especially on the Chinese lifestyle platform Xiaohongshu. In doing so, this study attempts to demonstrate how the power of language and other semiotic tools can be transformed into collective and creative work of destablising existing power structures and fostering spaces for continuous conversations. As Sara Ahmed (2023) puts, conversation needs a space; conversation is a space.