“I’m not a feminist, but … ”: Hegemonic femininities and women’s autonomy revisited in a Chinese university

ABSTRACT In recent years, much academic and public attention has been drawn to a “feminist awakening” in China and its domestic backlashes, especially in popular media and internet forums. Moving from the online waves of women’s agitation to real-world interactions, how do young women in urban China today understand feminism in their everyday lives? To what extent are they scrutinizing their personal experiences with what they understand as “feminist principles,” and how do they reconcile expectations and challenges from the family, school, and workplace? As my interlocutors’ experiences and narratives indicate, urban Chinese women with high educational attainments are less likely to identify with submissive female roles as daughters, wives, and mothers. However, their attitudes toward the new motto of women’s autonomy are at least equally ambivalent. Situating individual life experiences within a broader theoretical discussion on hegemonic femininities, I seek to provide a nuanced look into such ambivalence by illustrating how my interlocutors approximate multiple, sometimes contradicting, frameworks of “ideal womanhood” in narrating their hopes and dilemmas. Moreover, I suggest the “sidestepping feminism” narrative deserves more serious scholarly attention as it may open up new possibilities for enriching and theorizing women’s studies in the Chinese context.