“In the Name of Pro-Women”: Intra-Women Surveillance and Internalized Misogyny in Digital East Asia

Across East Asian digital platforms, “pro-women” discourse can become a site of intense intra-gender surveillance rather than durable solidarity. This article reconceptualizes “internalized misogyny” as a networked and platformed formation: not simply a private attitude, but a publicly enforced orientation continually produced through visibility, evaluation, and anticipated backlash. Drawing on multi-round interviews with young women in China and South Korea who participated in pro-women discussions in digital publics, I show how platform affordances including ranking, metrics, reposting, and comment cascades can translate feminist scripts of “refusal” into coercive tests of moral purity. The analysis identifies a dynamic of affective governance in which women who negotiate patriarchal bargains are cast as “compromising women” and disciplined through shame, disgust, and exclusion that travel and intensify via algorithmic circulation. These dynamics are further conditioned by platform governance regimes and state censorship environments, which constrain the outward expression of feminist critique and redirect its critical energy inward. By tracing the mechanisms through which moralizing affects attach to feminist objects and scale through platforms, the article clarifies how affective governance and attention-economy logics transmogrify feminist critique into a punitive apparatus which functions as an infrastructure for narrowing what women can say, desire, or endure without sanction. Solidarity, in this environment, emerges as a fragile, mediated achievement rather than a stable outcome of shared gendered interests.