Speaking Softly: Feminist Digital Citizenship in Campus-Based Social Media Practice

Abstract

VWSM (Voice of Women’s Studies Majors) is a WeChat public account founded and run by women’s studies undergraduates at a Chinese women’s university. Drawing on the framework of digital citizenship of young people, this study conducts a thematic analysis of 312 VWSM original articles and two semi-structured interviews to examine how feminist digital citizenship is formed through the mutual reinforcement of disciplinary training and sustained writing practice. The findings identify three dimensions of this formation: knowledge translation, engagement with sensitive topics, and reflexive practice and feminist subjectivity formation, offering empirical grounding for the framework of digital citizenship of young people in the specific context of campus-based media. The depth and continuity of VWSM points to institutional embeddedness as a significant driver of feminist digital citizenship formation, one that spontaneous online participation alone is unlikely to generate.