Message on the Body in the Chinese Netsphere

Abstract

This chapter focuses on naked bodies and bodily writing as online activism in mainland China—how artists and activists stage nakedness as a sensual yet engaged medium to challenge conservative family planning and acts of sexual abuse. Leta Hong-Fincher in her study of “leftover women” tells of a new wave of state propaganda against sexual enjoyment and eroticism that has emerged alongside a compulsive call for women to get married and procreate before the age of 25. This rhetoric aims to attract a highly educated pool of urban women who are needed to upgrade the quality of the population and who would otherwise be inclined to focus on their careers (Hong-Fincher 2014).