Performative Affective Vernaculars: Gendered Cultural Critique in Chinese Digital Screen Culture

Abstract

In contemporary Chinese digital screen culture, mass online commentary among audiences has become a primary arena of gendered cultural critique, producing grassroots vernacular terms that circulate rapidly across platforms and generate sustained public controversy. This thesis investigates how two such terms, “lao deng films” (老登电影) and “nüe nü” (虐女) in streaming television, acquire critical force and constitute sites of gender politics in contemporary Chinese screen culture. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of citational performativity, Zizi Papacharissi’s concept of affective publics, and Robert Glenn Howard’s account of vernacular discourse, I develop an analytical framework called “performative affective vernaculars,” which proposes that vernacular terms gain force through recursive cycles of affective circulation, citational iteration, and collective participation, and that their semantic instability is not a conceptual weakness but the structural condition of their critical mobility. The study employs qualitative platform-based discourse analysis of Weibo posts and Douban discussions. The analysis yields two major findings. The case of “lao deng films” shows that the term’s suppression on Douban resulted not from censorship alone but from the convergence of platform-specific infrastructure, commercial stakes in mainstream cinema, and misogynistic counter-discourse against feminist critique. Crucially, suppression transforms rather than extinguishes vernacular terms: keyword evasion, screenshot archiving, and cross-platform migration are themselves citational acts that sustain critical life under altered conditions. The case of “nüe nü” is examined through three streaming television genres: the period drama, the crime thriller, and the idol romance, taking Everything Is Born (生万物, 2025), Bleach (漂白, 2025), and Lost You Forever (长相思, 2023) as case texts respectively. Because genre conventions function as citation systems in their own right, invoking “nüe nü” against different generic contexts produces a different critical charge each time while drawing on the accumulated affective residue of prior uses. The streaming platform’s episode-release temporality further shapes the particular affective density of this discourse, aggregating dispersed viewer responses into a shared public conversation. This thesis concludes that vernacular gendered critique in contemporary Chinese digital culture operates not through the stabilization of meaning but through its ongoing contestation, and that state censorship, commercial strategies, and media infrastructure—including platform architecture, episode-release rhythms, and governance logics—are not merely contexts but constitutive conditions of what vernacular critique can say, how far it travels, and how long it survives.