Belongingness and Resistance in Platformed Play: Feminist Agency among Female Gamers in China

This study examines how female gamers in China negotiate belonging and feminist agency within platforms shaped by censorship, patriarchal norms, and market-driven algorithms. Rather than adopting purely oppositional politics, the authors argue that these women practice micro-resistance and strategic negotiation, constructing "digital belongingness" as a cultural-political practice. The work extends Western-centric belongingness theory, particularly Allen et al.'s four-dimensional framework, by grounding it in collectivist cultural contexts and in the structural constraints of the Chinese digital environment.

The analysis draws on qualitative netnography of 343 multimodal posts from Douban, Xiaohongshu, and Bilibili, collected from July to December 2024, supplemented by an online survey of 820 responses (752 complete). The platforms were selected because a preliminary survey showed they host far more female gamers than traditional gaming communities such as Steam, NGA, and Heybox. Analytical methods combined reflexive thematic analysis of text with multimodal discourse analysis of visual content.

Key findings indicate that women resist gender stereotypes through humor, memes, parody, and aesthetic critique, such as reinterpreting hypersexualized character designs and comparing gendered differences in Simplified and Traditional Chinese localizations. Because public feminist discourse is constrained by censorship, resistance often takes the form of irony and everyday collective practices, including mutual aid, coordinated harassment reporting, and boycotts. The Code: Kite controversy illustrates this dynamic: after collective criticism over the objectification of women, the game's revenue reportedly fell by half. The authors conclude that these practices form an adaptive feminist community, though they acknowledge limitations in platform scope and the absence of quantified impact measures. Source material has been anonymized under ethical approval due to the political and re-identification risks faced by participants.