Things to Worry About When Researching Sapphic Online Slang in China

Gloria Bao is one of our 2025 Human Rights Summer Research Grant winners and a featured guest blogger. She is spending a month in Shanghai conducting surveys and interviews to explore how queerness, specifically sapphic identity, is expressed through online language in autocratic contexts. Grant winners will be sharing an inside look into their experiences on the Duke Human Rights Blog this summer and fall as part of our Student Stories: Summer Research Series.

When I first started researching the topic of how sapphic slang is used to create community on Chinese social media, I was stumped by the sheer magnitude of the project I was undertaking. Not only was the literature much more expansive than I had expected (although still not nearly representative of the size of the community considering the 1.4 billion population on mainland China), but the number of social media influencers that I wanted to interview numbered in the hundreds. In my most naïve moments, I stayed up at night worrying about how I was going to interview hundreds of people. Don’t even get me started on the cleaning or the coding of the transcripts. I shuddered to think about the amount of time I would be spending on Zoom and Microsoft Word.

Then I actually got started. Right before Pride Month, I sent out, with much trepidation, my very first invites. I trembled with anticipation. I shook in my boots. I held my breath. I waited. I sent out a second round of invites. I waited some more. I sent out my third, and final, round of invites.

A total of three participants responded. Two of them responded to say, “Sorry, no.”

Well.

I received a total of 1 positive response out of 50 invites. All in all, that’s not bad. A 2% acceptance rate means I only need to get to 500 invites, and I’d get 10 interviewees! (Never let them tell you that the social sciences don’t do math.) That’s when I started staying up at night worrying, because what if I don’t get any more interviewees? What if I had to write this blog post about how I had exactly one interviewee who gave me exactly one hour of content? DURING PRIDE MONTH? Oh, the shame.

Luckily, at the time of this writing, I have had more than one person per 50 invites respond. In fact, I am writing this after my 7th interview, and I have 4 interviews lined up for the next week, even if I did have to reach out to over 200 accounts for this to happen. It would appear that the most solid conclusion I can draw from this experience so far is that I need to stop worrying late at night.

The process of recruiting my participants has been interesting. One participant asked me, point blank, “How do I know you are who you say you are?” I sent them an email from my duke.edu email and my advisor, Professor Tony Cheng’s Duke Scholars website (Thank you, Tony). Another asked if we gave out certificates of participation, which is a lovely idea but unfortunately clashes with our rules as per IRB. Since there is no direct translation in Chinese for the word ‘sapphic’ and for fear of censorship from the social media platforms I was working on, I had to use ‘le’ when recruiting, which is a slang term for lesbian in Chinese, so many of the participants asked if it was okay that they were also into men. Absolutely yes, I responded. There will be no bisexuality erasure in this house. The most painful of all responses was when one of the people I reached out to responded with, “Thank you for your perseverance. But no.”

But for all of the precautions that I took and all of the careful tiptoeing around certain words and phrases during this process of recruitment, it was difficult to ignore the looming threat of censorship that lingered behind every interaction I had. On one of my accounts, I sent so many invitations that I was told my account was blocked, and the only way it would be unblocked is if I verify who I am and why I am using my account. I then had a very interesting back and forth with customer service, because while research wasn’t a valid answer to why I was using my account the way I was, 追星 (or participating in fandom activities) was. In a way, that’s not a lie. Before starting this research process, I deleted all of my posts from the social media accounts I would be using to recruit. Still, just today I was scrolling through my old comments and I found a comment I made on a post from one of the participants that I reached out to. I will spare you the details of the comment. Let’s just say I understand why they didn’t respond to my DM. Researching your own community is all fun and games until you remember you used to be a teenager and you’ve left a digital trail.

The actual interviews have been delightful. I had worried before starting (as I am wont to do). The last time I’d conducted interviews in Chinese, I was a high schooler trying to get people to respond to me via email. It’s not a dissimilar feeling to the way that I feel now, sending out a recruiting email and praying that they recognize Duke and care enough to give me the time of day. But there are stakes now. For one, I’ve got funding. For another, I’m at least three years older and a good two years of college wiser (-ish), and this is a topic that I’ve only become more passionate about since coming to college. I’ve conducted interviews with strangers in English about similar topics (shout out to my What is Hope BASS Connections team), but I haven’t spoken formal/non-colloquial/academic Chinese since sixth grade. I can’t pull out “bro,” “girl,” and “queen” during a serious academic interview.

Starting the interviews, though, put my fears to bed. I can hear myself stumbling over trying to express myself correctly when I listen to the audio files to clean the transcripts, but my participants do understand me. The more interviews I’ve done, the more confident I feel in my ability to ask questions and follow-ups, even though sometimes I still want to scream that, “I promise I’m more articulate in English!” I’ve learned so much about so many things that I hadn’t even thought of before, and I keep having to stop myself from marveling during the interviews at the raw passion that these influencers put into their community.

On that note, though, if you know the correct Chinese translation for the word ‘community’, please contact me. I keep saying 团体, which is a literal translation of the word, but this word doesn’t capture the nuances of what ‘community’ means in English, especially within queer spaces.

I’m so grateful to the Duke Human Rights Center for the funding that has allowed me to conduct my research on the ground in China. The people that I’ve been able to meet, the places that I’ve been able to see, and the stories that I have been able to hear are beyond anything I could have imagined. I’m excited to see what other interesting things might happen in the next few months. Until then, I’m going to clean all of my transcripts and keep recruiting (putting this out there to keep myself accountable).

Happy Pride, everyone. Be safe, be proud.

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