Becomings beyond the ideal: women's fitness and digital subjectivities in the Douban women's fitness community

As women's fitness gains cultural visibility in China, it has become a key site for contesting dominant baishouyou beauty ideals (fair-skinned, slim, youthful). Grounded in Feminist New Materialism (FNM), this paper examines Women Fitness, a women-only Douban community, as a feminist counterpublic that reconfigures fitness from a neoliberal “self as project” into a collective infrastructure of care and resistance. Using a mixed-methods design that combines digital ethnography, topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and engagement metrics, the findings reveal how participatory governance, affective circulation, and embodied multiplicity collectively enable feminist becomings. It formalizes moderation practices to support grassroots resistance to pseudoscience, body ideals, and influencer logics, while its affective metabolism transforms negative affect into collective affirmation. By centering lived materiality, the community fosters an embodied multiplicity that disrupts normative narratives of progress. While entangled in structural inequalities, it materializes posthuman feminist subjectivities, offering a blueprint for digital health activism by prioritizing relational becoming over individualistic self-optimization.