Revisiting Feminism in the Era of the Internet.doc

Revisiting Feminism in the Era of the Internet Dai Jinhua In the year 2000, at the start of the new millennium, a round of debate about gender and feminism, “It is all the fault of beauties”, broke out in one of the main Chinese websites, the 163.com. This started with Li Fang, journalist of China Youth Journal, writing a long article “Are you a beauty? Then go and be a writer!” which was posted on 163.com, and within a short period, over 2,000 comments responded to this article, and the number of visits to the website quickly climbed. With all the characteristics of “incendiary wars” on the web, this debate around the new book Shanghai Baby by a young woman writer Wei Wei was, from the very beginning, full of the heat and hostility of verbal wars on the web. If this debate enabled the surfacing of the many gender prejudices and discriminations that have for long resurged and consolidated, it at the same time inadvertently exposed the many dimensions of issues of web and gender, and society and culture in today’s China. The internet that staged its general landing in China in 1997 was undoubtedly a spectacular social and cultural spectacle at the turn of the century. It was first of all a miracle for capital and a dream for the nouveau riche, and then it became a goldmine and treasure for the mass media industry which was rapidly expanding but was lacking in contents. At the same time, it inevitably, though under many constraints, became the social discursive space for urban China. In the recent two decades around the turn of the century, many social hot topics and almost all cultural events were first and foremost internet events before they moved on to become social events in the conventional mass media. Relying on the internet, many gray areas gradually emerged against the news and speech censorships, and the gender themes were undoubtedly one of the most significant realities. When “It is all the fault of beauties” stirred up a heated wave on 163.com, web debate