Description
Abstract:
Lifestyle influencers often construct aspirational online identities through aestheticised self-branding, entrepreneurial femininity, and narratives of personal agency (Duffy and Hund, 2015; Guo, 2024). Yet these identities are not fixed; they evolve alongside influencers’ life trajectories and remain subject to continuous audience evaluation and negotiation. This paper examines audience responses to influencer identity transformation through the case of Danggui, a Chinese lifestyle influencer whose content shifted from an aesthetically curated portrayal of independent urban living to a family-oriented representation centred on marriage and motherhood. Drawing on the concepts of postfeminist sensibility (Gill, 2007) and girlfriend gaze (Winch, 2013), the paper examines how female audiences engage with influencers as aspirational peers and evaluate changes in their online identities.
This research adopts a reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2019) of audience comments alongside observations of Danggui’s content production to explore how audience evaluations of influencer transformation reveal broader gender politics in China’s digital culture. The findings show that when influencers deviate from the feminine identities audiences have come to value, followers engage in various forms of policing through comment practices.
The analysis identifies three dimensions through which audiences police postfeminist femininity: aestheticised lifestyles, gendered selfhood, and aspirational mobility. Audience criticism focused on the perceived erosion of a feminine subjectivity grounded in autonomy, self-development, and individual aspiration. In this sense, followers were less concerned with Danggui’s changing life circumstances than with whether her online persona continued to embody the values that had made her aspirational in the first place.
These responses demonstrate how audiences actively participate in defining the boundaries of legitimate femininity in contemporary digital culture. By foregrounding audience reactions, this paper demonstrates how aspirational identification between women can become a mechanism of gendered regulation, through which audiences police the boundaries of desirable female subjectivity in Chinese influencer culture. In doing so, the paper contributes to debates on influencer culture, fan practices, and postfeminist media by showing how the girlfriend gaze operates not only as a mode of identification and aspiration, but also as a site of discipline and negotiation.
References:
Braun, V. and Clarke, V. 2019. Reflecting on reflexive thematic analysis. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health. 11(4), pp.589–597.
Duffy, B.E. and Hund, E. 2015. “Having it All” on Social Media: Entrepreneurial Femininity and Self-Branding Among Fashion Bloggers. Social Media + Society. 1(2), p.2056305115604337.
Gill, R. 2007. Postfeminist media culture: Elements of a sensibility. European Journal of Cultural Studies. 10(2), pp.147–166.
Guo, J. 2024. ‘Living-alone’ wanghong: Women’s singleness as a wanghong genre and the configuration of Chinese postfeminist wanghong culture. Global Media and China., p.20594364241278101.
Winch, A. 2013. Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood. Springer.