The Pink Flaneur

Feminist Studies 47, no. 3. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 813 Ka-ming Wu The Pink Flaneur: Feminist Public Citizenship and Urban Infrastructure in China For eighteen days in May 2017, twenty-five-year-old Zhang Leilei transformed herself into a walking billboard in Guangzhou, wearing a poster reading “no to sexual harassment” as part of her daily routine, after a plan to buy billboard space in a subway station failed. To attract attention, she cycled, walked, and rode the subway with her poster, pink hair, pink outfit, and pink plastic shower slippers (Figure 1). Zhang Leilei’s action was soon followed by hundreds of others, who printed out the same poster, held it up in different cities, and posted their pictures on the microblogging website Weibo with the hashtags #IAmABillboard and #WalkingAgainstSexualHarassment. While media reports rightly focused on the feminist message of this protest, little has been said about the spectacular urban landmarks, many of them new transit infrastructure hubs, where citizens took these pictures. The act of posting oneself with a slogan in front of urban landmarks seems self-evident. Citizens wanted to show their protest pictures in public spaces and, by posting them online, they shared their locations to demonstrate the wide dissemination of this slogan. The assumption within this reasoning, however, is that urban landmarks are merely physical spaces with little meaning. In this paper, I show that they are not neutral, random backdrops. Instead, I argue that urban landscapes and environments in today’s China, especially new transit hubs and the ways these are connected to digital media and technology, belong to a 814 Ka-ming Wu larger materialist network in which citizens’ civic ideas and identities are shaped. In this paper, I have two objectives. First, I hope to sketch a complex “assemblage of mediation” by describing performative feminist bodies, digital technology, and urban infrastructure landmarks where the forces of ubiquitous social media, surveillance, consumption, and gendered public citizenship come together. Second, I hope to complicate the binary oppositions often assumed in viewing social movements, in which the authoritarian state is considered all-powerful while activists are under siege. Such assumptions are especially dominant among Western journalists’ representations of protests in China, implying that little has changed in the last few decades except for the rise of new media. My interest in the recent feminist movement in China developed as part of a broader ethnographic examination of gender, nationalism, and citizen-making. In the process of conducting fieldwork, I found that the feminist movement that has flourished in recent years has been very powerful in shaping civic ideas and engagements. Its creative activism subverts any easy conclusion about China as an all-encompassing authoritarian state with only conforming citizens. This essay attempts Figure 1. Zhang Leilei in front of Canton Tower in Guangzhou. Courtesy of Zhang Leilei. Ka-ming Wu 815 to find a way of understanding gender, politics, and capitalism under the Chinese authoritarian regime. This approach differs from representations of Chinese women as mere victims of government suppression, as is common in journalistic media reports. Such representations too-easily separate out activists’ ethical selves from their wider material networks .1 While this paper agrees with existing research that new media is crucial in feminist advocacy, it extends inquiry to the backgrounds, “things,” and infrastructural networks as well as their connections to ideas of activism and citizenship. These things include subways, city landmarks, and cell phone digital infrastructure, which are usually seen as having little relevance to feminist discourse and actions. By following activists in their engagements with the fabric of urban infrastructure, I aim to show how newly built developments are facilitating the creation of gendered public citizenship. This essay joins a broader discussion on urban infrastructure, its materialist role in exciting people’s imaginations, and its techno-bureaucratic role in redefining the political.2 In China, this discussion is especially timely, as the state has emerged as the biggest investor in and builder of infrastructure projects in the world. The Chinese state sees infrastructure as being at the heart of the nation’s global and domestic political, economic, and cultural capacities.3 By “infrastructure,” I am referring to the definition used

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