The second speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is Cara Wallis, whose interest is in feminist fansubbing (or femsubbing) in China. Young women in China who identify as feminists attempt to educate and encourage others in part through such fansubbing practices; some but not all of them identify as activists, and they form a loose online network pushing back against misogyny and male domination.
Fansubbing is one part of their practices: fandom is well understood as having the potential to lead to political participation since it is part of an active, agentive, and potentially resistant participatory culture. In the Chinese context, fandom as such is perhaps unlikely to lead to activist practices, even if it subverts western copyright laws and domestic state censorship, but it can be understood as civic action. Some fansubbing also focusses especially on representing marginalised groups, including LGBTIQ+ communities, and thereby engages in queer world making, interpretation, and community formation.
Feminism in China emerged more explicitly outside the official state realm in the 2010s, challenging sexism and misogyny in public spaces (e.g. by occupying men’s public toilets, and protesting against domestic violence); this changed after the 2015 arrest of five prominent feminist activists, however, after which there was considerably more censorship and state suppression. Feminists now face social, economic, and political marginalisation in China.
The feminists Cara studied are college-educated, middle-class, mid-twenties women who do not necessarily identify as fans, but focus on a variety of international media where they could find feminist messages; they started during the grim times of COVID-19, and wanted to help themselves and inspire others. While they initially sought to create their own videos, fansubbing turned out to be a more straightforward and accessible practice, and they identified TED talks, brews reports, comedy sketches, ads, and other videos from YouTube and Twitter that had a specific feminist focus.
They translated and subtitled 15 videos of 2 to 30 minutes, gaining between 80 and 48,000 views and in some cases several hundred comments. The subtitles did not just translate verbatim, but sometimes strengthened the implicit message of these videos; in some cases they also explicitly connected them to the history of Chinese feminism.
These videos did not go unchallenged, however; they had to avoid censorship and trolling, and also had to grapple with the definition, meaning, and practice of feminism, and fell out over the level of radicalism they wanted their feminist practices to adopt. Overall, this femsubbing is perhaps a small disruption, but such practices exist all over China and deserve more attention.
