Investigating stress, appraisal, and coping in Chinese anti-sexual violence feminist activism on social media: A platform comparison of Weibo and Zhihu


Jinman Zhang, Western University

Feminist activists employ social media to advocate for various feminist causes and to foster solidarity (Mendes, Ringrose, Keller, 2019; Tan, 2017). Feminist activists have benefitted from the affordances of social media, yet research demonstrates that there are negative impacts resulting from trolling, hateful comments, and misogyny. These negative experiences together lead to high levels of stress, burnout, and emotional labor, which previous research has shown as prevalent among feminist activists on social media (Swanson and Szymanski, 2020; Blais, 2023). Past studies have examined feminist activists’ experiences of stress and their coping mechanisms in the Global North context. However, the stress resulting from feminist activism is not well understood in other regions of the world. Social, historical, religious, and political contexts shape the experiences of feminist activists, underscoring the need to expand research to encompass diverse perspectives. In China, paralleling the rise of anti-sexual violence activism globally, feminist activists have used social media to raise awareness of the pervasiveness of sexual violence in Chinse society and advocate for social change (Zeng, 2020). Their engagement has met resistance with platforms censoring activist-related posts and activists often targeted with misogynistic messages. Because of the range of negative experiences that Chinse feminist activists have on social media, there is a need to investigate the types of stressors, the appraisal of those stressors, and the coping strategies. The present study has several objectives. It proposes to develop a theoretical framework of how feminist activists appraise and experience stressors resulting from their feminist activism on social media. The framework builds on the transactional model of stress and coping (Lazarus and Folkman, 1984). Another objective is to understand stress in the historical and political context of feminist activism in China following calls to expand our understanding of feminist activism to non-Western contexts (Quan-Haase, et al., 2021). Finally, the study examines not only stress appraisal, but also the coping strategies activists develop. We conducted 19 in-depth interviews lasting 40 – 90 minutes with Chinese feminist activists. Activists were recruited from China’s two most popular social media platforms: Weibo and Zhihu. We also used a comparative approach that considers the nuanced characteristics and affordances of each social media platform (Matassi and Boczkowski, 2023). Data analysis consisted of qualitative content analysis of interview transcripts using NVivo 12. In alignment with the research objectives, we examined the range of stress experiences and stress appraisals. We found that feminist activists encounter an array of stressors. We found that activists’ appraisals of a stressor were not static, but rather adapt. In addition, we found that secondary appraisals played a crucial mediating role between identifying stressors and developing effective coping strategies. Feminist activists engaged in secondary appraisals, consisting of evaluating external conditions and self-efficacy. Lastly, we identified two main types of coping strategies: emotion focused coping and problem focused coping. Our comparative analysis showed that the number of participants reporting experiences of stress and developing coping strategies was greater on Weibo than on Zhihu. Our findings suggest that feminist activists may be adopting a more tempered advocacy approach to proactively mitigate the elevated risks of stressful encounters on Zhihu. This suggests that Zhihu is less conducive to feminist activism than Weibo. Our analysis identified platform-specific features that facilitate more effective coping strategies. In conclusion, the study shows agency is central to understanding how feminist activists cope with stress: spanning from how they appraise stressors, evaluate various coping options, to how they develop new coping strategies. In the interviews, there was an absence of collective coping strategies. We hypothesize that collective engagement is constrained due to the digital surveillance in China directed at identifying and suppressing collective action, wherein feminist collective action is a prime target.

Non-presenting author: Anabel Quan-Haase, University of Western Ontario

This paper will be presented at the following session: