Girlhood Feminism as Soft Resistance: Affective Counterpublics and Algorithmic Negotiation on RedNote

This article explores how Chinese female users tactically mobilise platform features and hashtag practices to construct vernacular forms and an exclusive space of feminist resistance under algorithmic and cultural constraints. Focusing on the reappropriation of the hashtag Baby Supplementary Food (BSF), a female-dominated lifestyle app with over 300 million users, we analyse how users create a female-centered counterpublic through self-infantilisation, algorithmic play, and aesthetic withdrawal. Using the Computer-Assisted Learning and Measurement (CALM) framework, we analysed 1580 posts and propose the concept of girlhood feminism: an affective, culturally grounded form of soft resistance that refuses patriarchal life scripts without seeking direct confrontation or visibility. Rather than challenging censorship and misogyny directly, users rework platform affordances and domestic idioms to carve out emotional and symbolic spaces of dissent. Situated within the broader dynamics of East Asia's compressed modernity, this essay challenges liberal feminist paradigms grounded in confrontation and transparency. It advances a regionally grounded framework for understanding how gendered publics are navigated, negotiated, and quietly reimagined in algorithmically governed spaces.