Forging Relatability Through Identity Bricolage: Solo Lady Influencers on RedNote
2026-03-31
This article offers an updated account of the media portrayals of China’s growing cohort of single women through an analysis of “solo lady influencers” on RedNote. Drawing on netnography, it identifies three archetypes that articulate distinct modes of living single, namely glamorous go-getters, struggling proletariats, and lying-flat nomads. To craft commercially viable personae, solo lady influencers engage in what I term identity bricolage , an affective practice of assembling identity-based resources into curated self-presentations that cultivate relatability. In this process, singlehood functions as a form of identity capital that becomes monetizable when it is braided with class position, gendered selfhood, and lifestyle orientations, producing personae that are both distinctive and resonant. Filtered through postfeminist sensibilities for affective calibration, these strategically differentiated personae speak to segmented audiences within China’s expanding single economy, yet they also idealize singlehood in exclusionary ways that reproduce inequalities and narrow the imaginaries of women’s life possibilities. Identity bricolage thus offers an intersectional lens for understanding influencer self-fashioning on RedNote, revealing the entanglement of cultural expression and market logics under China’s platform capitalism, where monetization increasingly rewards relatability over visibility.