Emma Zhu (she/her) is a sophomore in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, studying Regional and Comparative Studies with a focus on the United States, Asia, and the diaspora. Her research interests include transnational movements, historical memory, and migration, particularly how these forces shape contemporary political and cultural relations across Asia. At Georgetown, she serves on the SFS Academic Council’s Community Engagement Committee, where she teaches high school students about foreign policy, and edits for the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs.
Networked Harm, Networked Resistance: Intersectional Feminist Counterpublics in Chinese and East Asian Digital Spaces
This project examines how feminists in China and East Asia resist gendered harassment within digital environments shaped by state surveillance and platform capitalism. Focusing on movements such as #MeTooChina, #米兔, and the Jiangshanjiao menstrual protest, it investigates how feminist actors navigate censorship, trolling, and digital repression while cultivating transnational solidarities across China, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. The study conceptualizes online misogyny not as isolated hostility but as a structurally sustained and geopolitically embedded system. Through digital ethnography, content analysis, and interviews with feminist organizers and technologists, it explores how activists use digital tools to build community, counter harassment, and evade surveillance, while negotiating the affective and emotional labor of online resistance. By developing a comparative framework of feminist digital resistance under repression, this project advances understanding of how state power and platform politics co-produce both harm and empowerment in East Asian cyberspaces, and how feminists reconfigure digital infrastructures to subvert censorship and build intersectional solidarities across class and urban–rural divides.