“Women as an island”: Becoming a career girl on platforms

The figure of female content creators soared constantly over the past decade across the major video-sharing platforms in China. Statistics on female creators seem to validate the thesis that, the platforms of new media are friendly to women in their career building, freeing women from many constraints. With the popularity of ‘powerful girls’ on platforms, the post-feminist discourse is gaining scholarly attention. Gills argue that post-feminism is not a lens of study, but an emergent phenomenon, a critical object of study, a ‘discourse that has been created, expressed and circulated’, frequently through mainstream media. Drawn insights on critical studies on post-feminism, in particular the concepts of sensibility, neoliberal individualism and entrepreneurism, and visibility, this study prosed to delve deeper into the ambivalence of visibility and individualism of practising a powerful career girl on platforms. Whilst post-feminism culture advocates individual responsibility and individual career-making, platforms, nevertheless, requests intensive and extensive networking of female creators to build up their fan community and boost up and sustain their visibility. This study focuses on female video creators on Chinese platforms, who are in a purported transformation from traditional women to creative subjects. With cases on uploads on Bilibili, we will illustrate how these creators muddle through individualist production and community making.