Keywords:
Chinese Female Gamers, Digital Belongingness, Feminist Digital Culture, Digital Gaming Culture, Mediatized Gaming, Cross-Platform Practices, gamevironments
Abstract
This study investigates how Chinese female gamers navigate persistent gendered inequalities within a deeply mediatized digital environment shaped by platform governance, algorithmic and local patriarchal structures. Addressing the Western-centric focus of existing scholarship, it integrates belongingness theory with feminist perspectives to conceptualize belongingness as a cultural–political practice under constraints. Using qualitative netnography, the study analyses 343 multimodal posts from Chinese platforms Douban, Xiaohongshu and Bilibili. Findings show that female gamers mobilize adaptive feminist agency by employing strategies, including decoding discrimination through humor and aesthetic critique, engaging in everyday digital activism, and reshaping gaming authority through emotional ties and value renegotiation. By examining Chinese cases, this study extends belongingness theory to geopolitical dimensions, providing a context-sensitive perspective on the agency of marginalized groups in a deeply mediatized society. Rather than being specific to gaming environments, these practices demonstrate how belongingness operates as a broader feminist agency across platformed cultures. This study identifies the infrastructural and relational conditions of feminist agency, offering concrete insights for gender-inclusive platform governance through play and feminist media studies.
Author Biographies
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Weijie Huang, Utrecht University
Weijie Huang is a PhD candidate in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University and affiliated with the Inclusive AI Lab. Her research focuses on the intersections of gender, gaming cultures, and artificial intelligence, particularly examining female players’ experiences and digital participation within Chinese gaming environments. Her recent work includes the report Gender Data: What Is It and Why Is It Important for the Future of AI Systems? published by Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, as well as the article Geographies of Hope: Rethinking Deepfake Harms and Gender AI Safety in the Global South, published in Media and Communication.
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Payal Arora, Utrecht University
Payal Arora is a Professor of Inclusive AI Cultures at Utrecht University and co-founder of FemLab, a Feminist Futures of Work initiative, and Inclusive AI Lab, a Global South-centred debiasing data initiative. She is a digital anthropologist with two decades of user experience in the Global South. She is the author of several award-winning books, including The Next Billion Users (Harvard Press) and From Pessimism to Promise: Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech (MIT Press). Forbes called her the “next billion champion” and the “right kind of person to reform tech”.
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Mara Yerkes , Utrecht University
Mara Yerkes is full Professor of Comparative Social Policy in relation to Social Inequalities at the Department of Interdisciplinary Social Science, Utrecht University. She is also Research Associate at the Center for Social Development in Africa at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa and the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality”, University of Konstanz, Germany. Her research centers on comparative social policy (including national and local welfare state policy and industrial relations), social inequalities (related to work, care, communities and families, in particular relating to gender, generations, and sexual orientation) and their interplays.
