Making Sense of Nonsense: Queer(ing) Chouxiang Culture on China’s Social Media

Abstract

In China's social media ecology, chouxiang (抽象, “abstract”) has become a trending aesthetic. This culture initiated from a dramatification of nonsensical humor and evolved into a multimodal discourse that intermixes absurdity, opacity, and content deviated from mainstream expectations to provoke a cringy yet hilarious effect. Seeing its subversive potential under the entertaining form, queer influencers on Douyin (抖音) and RedNote (小红书) fully exploit the trend to navigate surveillance. Analyzing chouxiang celebrities and events between 2019 and 2025, I argue that chouxiang functions as a survival strategy through which queer female users resist and rewrite normative visibility regimes. My analysis centers on how chouxiang intersects with sound, body, and platform affordances to generate a queer discourse and a queering methodology. I first analyze Chen Tudou and Luozi to examine how cringe bodies in the #wlw community destabilize representational norms of sexuality. I then investigate how fanchuan, exemplified by Fang Touming’s impersonation of toxic masculinity, generates counter-cybertypes as both criticizing and commercially compromised narratives. Finally, I trace the queer-coded juejiang remix and analyze how its sonic constitution and decentralized circulation enable the hybrid to stand against platform capitalism as a vernacular queer infrastructure. Together, these cases reveal that chouxiang can be inherently political under the cover of laughter. Queer influencers utilizes this trend for a soft rebellion that satirizes, criticizes, and recreates a queer horizon in the digital sphere.