In recent years, Hanfu 汉服, the revival of traditional Han Chinese clothing, has moved from niche subculture to a visible presence across China’s urban and digital landscapes. Once dismissed as cosplay or fringe nostalgia, it appears at heritage festivals, museums, scenic sites and across platform-based media. This shift has renewed interest in its political significance, especially its relationship to Chinese nationalism. Existing studies approach Hanfu’s meanings in different ways. Some foreground explicit ethnonationalist currents, particularly in the movement’s early online scenes.Footnote 1 Other work, especially in Chinese-language scholarship, emphasizes cultural revival and experiential practice, focusing on participation, affect and historical narration while paying less attention to ethnonationalism.Footnote 2 More recent scholarship complicates these approaches by showing how Han-ness can operate implicitly and reflexively, articulated through moral language and etiquette-centred claims about proper culture and proper personhood.Footnote 3 Taken together, this literature shifts attention from what Hanfu symbolizes to how nationalist meanings are made and evaluated through cultural practice.
Building on this insight, I examine how nationalist meanings are generated through gendered everyday participation in the Hanfu field.Footnote 4 The warrant for foregrounding gender is empirical. Hanfu is a feminized arena in which women constitute the majority of participants and are treated as arbiters of style, etiquette and cultural competence. Men participate as a visible minority whose legitimacy is more often questioned. These dynamics recombine, rather than mirror, familiar gender relations in Chinese public life. The research question is: in Hanfu’s mainstream revival, how do gendered dynamics shape the everyday production and negotiation of nationalist meanings? I argue that gender organizes how cultural nationalism is enacted, evaluated and made publicly credible. Han-ness remains a structuring element of the movement, while gender relations condition its everyday enactment, shaping who is recognized as a legitimate cultural bearer, how moral and etiquette-centred claims about proper culture are performed, and which forms of nationalist expression become publicly acceptable.
To advance this argument, I develop the framework of gendered everyday nationhood. It builds on everyday nationalism scholarship, which shows how ordinary, habitual practices become sites where national identity is lived and felt.Footnote 5 It also draws on feminist theory on gender and nation, which treats gender as a structuring logic of nationalist practice.Footnote 6 Nationalism here is not only expressed through explicit political claims; it is also enacted through practices that make shared national imagery publicly recognizable and render the boundaries of “proper culture” actionable in everyday interactions. Through this lens, styling outfits, teaching etiquette, organizing events and sharing images online are moments of “nation-work” shaped by gendered expectations and roles, through which national identity is negotiated and embodied in daily life.Footnote 7
Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted across six sites in China, including Hangzhou, Shanghai, Nanjing, Suzhou 苏州, Guangzhou and the manufacturing hub of Caoxian 曹县, I trace how women and men occupy different positions in the Hanfu field. Women, who routinely set standards of taste and etiquette in community settings, enact a banal yet assertive nationalism through aesthetic and organizational labour. Men, by contrast, operate under structural marginality in this feminized space and often develop defensive, overt nationalist discourses to assert legitimacy. These asymmetries echo broader gender hierarchies in Chinese society; however, Hanfu recombines them by placing women at the centre of everyday cultural authority.
This article begins by tracing Hanfu’s trajectory and reviewing the scholarship on the movement’s relationship with nationalism, highlighting the need to attend to contextual shifts and gendered practices. It then outlines the ethnographic methods underpinning the analysis before examining the gendered nation-work among women and men. The discussion theorizes two asymmetric modes of nationalist practice: an assertive banal nationalism among women and a defensive overt nationalism among men. The conclusion reflects on what Hanfu reveals about the gendered production of nationhood in contemporary China.
From Fringe Extremism to Mainstream Revival: Hanfu’s Trajectory
The Hanfu movement began in the early 2000s as an online fringe scene, led largely by young Han Chinese seeking to reclaim an “authentic” Han identity.Footnote 8 Its early articulation carried clear Han-centric ethnonationalist overtones. Advocates contrasted the elegance and moral purity of Han traditions with what they framed as the barbarism of the Manchu-ruled Qing dynasty, and some promoted conspiratorial and exclusionary narratives.Footnote 9 Scholarship documents rhetoric denigrating ethnic minorities in the name of restoring a lost civilizational essence;Footnote 10 Kevin Carrico depicts a marginal but vocal cohort combining Han supremacy with patriarchal nostalgia.Footnote 11 Although later critics argue that such portrayals overstate the ethnonationalist fringe and underplay cultural and aesthetic motivations,Footnote 12 Hanfu’s early public image was, nonetheless, shaped by its association with hyper-nationalist youth subcultures.
During the 2010s, Hanfu moved from the margins to gain a wider public visibility. Digital platforms such as Weibo 微博, Bilibili 哔哩哔哩 and Xiaohongshu 小红书 connected enthusiasts across cities, while online retail made garments more accessible.Footnote 13 Participation rapidly increased, and by the late 2010s, Hanfu was a familiar sight among urban youth.Footnote 14 Clubs and informal groups appeared in universities, schools and neighbourhoods, and wearing Hanfu in public spaces became increasingly common. This shift reflected broader changes in China’s digital and cultural landscape that made lifestyle-oriented cultural practices more visible and socially legible.Footnote 15 Commercial infrastructures also developed, including design studios, photography services and localized production networks centred in places such as Caoxian, embedding Hanfu within the wider cultural economy without producing a single orientation across participants.Footnote 16
Mainstreaming coincided with a shift in Hanfu’s public framing. In the 2000s, authorities largely kept their distance, partly because its promotion at that time was linked to a grassroots Han ethnicist current and occasional exclusionary rhetoric, making endorsement politically sensitive.Footnote 17 Calls to elevate Hanfu as a national dress for the 2008 Olympics or university graduation gowns received no official response.Footnote 18 By the late 2010s, official attitudes moved towards selective accommodation, as Hanfu could be folded into a broader emphasis on “cultural confidence” and the revival of traditional culture.Footnote 19 Government-linked festivals and state media increasingly framed Hanfu as a benign emblem of heritage and youth interest in tradition.Footnote 20 In the same period, Hanfu consolidated as a platform-visible lifestyle and consumer scene. Participation became feminized, with women dominating everyday involvement and the governance of taste and etiquette. This acceptance was conditional. To circulate as a publicly acceptable cultural practice, overt ethnopolitical rhetoric receded from public-facing spaces. Explicit references to ethnic hierarchy and contention became less visible as aesthetic, historical and moral languages gained prominence.Footnote 21
This reframing altered how nationalist claims were articulated and evaluated while retaining Han-centric meaning. In many public and semi-public contexts, Hanfu was presented as a non-confrontational celebration of history and culture that aligned with official narratives of national pride and cultural strength. Nationalism was expressed less through explicit political statements than through costume, craft, affect and claims about cultural refinement. Such forms allowed Hanfu to remain compatible with state narratives while sustaining a sense of hierarchical cultural distinction that was less spelled out in ethnic terms.
In the mid-2020s, Hanfu operates as a state-tolerated cultural field, balancing grassroots enthusiasm with official approval, and national pride with everyday leisure. Enthusiasts gather openly as long as these practices are framed in inclusive and culturally mediated ways. Hanfu today is a negotiated, mutable formation, shaped by changing conditions of visibility, governance and participation, rather than a static ideology. The movement’s trajectory from the contentious fringe to mainstream visibility thus highlights shifting modes of public expression and provides context for reassessing debates about the gendered organization of authority, aesthetics and national expression.
Hanfu Nationalism in Scholarship: Approaches and Remaining Questions
Academic debates on Hanfu reflect its complex positioning as both a nationalist resurgence and a cultural practice. Early studies focus on explicit ethnonationalist discourses, particularly in online spaces where Hanfu is articulated as a project of Han revival shaped by grievance, exclusion and historical resentment. Online forums are associated with Han supremacist and conspiracy rhetoric,Footnote 22 while the revival is described as a youth-led movement drawing state ambivalence and social criticism.Footnote 23 Carrico’s influential ethnography portrays devotees performing a “Great Han” sensibility that romanticizes racial purity and imperial nostalgia and sustains exclusionary worldviews.Footnote 24 This scholarship remains crucial for identifying extremist currents, especially in the movement’s early years.
A growing body of work, however, approaches Hanfu through cultural nationalism, identity play and urban youth culture. From this perspective, Hanfu appears less as an overt political crusade and more as a multifaceted practice through which participants navigate modern pressures, including anxieties about rootlessness, moral decline and self-cultivation.Footnote 25 Studies emphasize heterogeneous motivations, ranging from fashion and historical curiosity to spiritual yearning and social belonging.Footnote 26 Other accounts trace how Hanfu has gradually shed stigma and gained mainstream visibility, crystallizing into a form of soft nationalism marked by affective pride and quiet attachment to tradition, and largely decoupled from explicit ethnopolitical claims.Footnote 27 Enthusiasts, in this view, practise Hanfu as one facet of a broader revival of Chinese culture rather than as a statement against ethnic others.Footnote 28
More recent scholarship further refines these perspectives by examining how Han-ness is expressed without overt ideological language. Andrew Law and Qianqian Qin, in particular, show that Han-ness often operates in largely implicit and reflexive ways, articulated through narratives of moral decline and renewal, and sustained through standards of propriety, civility and etiquette.Footnote 29 In their account, Han-ness is not a fixed or essentialist identity but rather emerges through interactions and evaluation in concrete settings. This work has been instrumental in shifting attention away from explicit political positioning towards the mundane practices through which national belonging becomes meaningful and socially recognizable.
Taken together, this literature shows that Hanfu cannot be reduced to either extremist ideology or politically neutral cultural play.Footnote 30 Yet it offers less sustained attention to how these processes are organized through everyday interactions and the distribution of roles and authority within Hanfu communities. Gender is a notable gap. Although studies acknowledge that women constitute the majority of participants and often occupy leadership positions,Footnote 31 gender is usually treated as a background rather than a structuring condition of practice. Some studies remark on Hanfu’s feminine aesthetic but stop short of analysing how gender organizes practice and authority.Footnote 32 Even when ethnographies note gender nonconformity or effeminate male figures, they say little about how gendered positioning shapes participation, recognition and expression.Footnote 33
As a result, we know relatively little about how women’s organizational labour, aesthetic coordination and affective work shape the tone and credibility of Hanfu nationalism, or how men’s minority status within a feminized field conditions strategies of participation and self-presentation. This article builds on cultural nationalism and reflexive Han-ness scholarship by foregrounding gendered everyday nationhood as an analytic lens. It specifies how gender relations organize everyday participation and condition the enactment of nationalist meaning, bringing into focus how authority, legitimacy and national sentiment are negotiated within a shared but uneven cultural field.
Gendered Everyday Nationhood: A Theoretical Framework
I analyse Hanfu’s embodied nationalism through gendered everyday nationhood, bringing together everyday nationalism and feminist sociology. Everyday nationalism traces nationhood in mundane routines beyond official discourse or protest.Footnote 34 Dress and everyday talk can invoke belonging and naturalize nationalist claims.Footnote 35 In this view, banal nationalism captures the implicit and often unnoticed reminders embedded in routine life.Footnote 36 Nationhood is also actively enacted in the here-and-now through interaction and practical choice.Footnote 37 In Hanfu, wearing historical clothing in a park or teaching a hairpin technique performs heritage. These micro-practices ground everyday nationalism in affect, aesthetics and routine.Footnote 38
These practices are gendered. Feminist scholarship shows that women are often seen as visible embodiments and bearers of the nation, while men are imagined as defenders or political representatives.Footnote 39 These archetypes reproduce unequal relations yet are negotiated in practice.Footnote 40 In Hanfu, gender is especially salient because clothing, beauty, etiquette and community coordination are feminized terrains. The resulting distribution of aesthetic and cultural authority structures how nation-work is performed, recognized and evaluated. Women’s disproportionate involvement is constitutive, shaping the movement’s standards and everyday governance. Gendered everyday nationhood insists that who does the everyday work matters: Hanfu’s nationalism largely reflects young women’s labour of setting expectations, while men participate under different constraints.
This research employs a framework that incorporates Kristin Surak’s concept of “nation-work” – that is, the social labour through which groups objectify the nation as a lived cultural reality, through both articulation and routinized embodied enactment – and extends it by foregrounding how this labour is organized through gender.Footnote 41 In Hanfu, much nation-work takes the form of women’s organizational and aesthetic labour: producing content, managing associations, instructing on correct attire and styling, and staging group photographs and performances. Integrating nation-work into everyday nationalism adds a meso-level view, linking habitual routines to the collective arrangements and infrastructures that sustain them.Footnote 42
This lens yields specific analytic expectations. Because women routinely set standards of taste, styling and etiquette, they are more likely to embed nationalist sentiment in normalized, taken-for-granted forms. Through leadership, they define what looks and feels authentically Chinese and socialize others into these standards. Men, fewer in number and more scrutinized, often need to claim legitimacy more overtly. Therefore, I expect men to rely on demonstrative performances, such as didactic history talk or moralized heritage claims. These patterns reflect uneven access to cultural authority, not individual disposition.
Gendered everyday nationhood links micro-activity to macro-identity by showing how small acts accumulate into shared understandings of the nation. It clarifies why a hairstyle tutorial, a courteous pose or a well-run gathering can carry nationalist weight without slogans, and how gender positions shape which forms of nationalist expression can plausibly take hold. In Hanfu, women’s authority makes quieter, aestheticized nationalism persuasive and durable, while men’s marginality encourages more declarative and pedagogical styles. Throughout the article, I treat cultural nationalism as an umbrella for nationalist meaning made persuasive through cultural markers and embodied standards of “proper culture.” Under this umbrella, soft nationalism names a publicly acceptable register through which such meanings circulate, while banal nationalism highlights backgrounded, routinized cues that continuously flag belonging in everyday interaction. I use everyday practices to denote recurrent micro-routines and the routine organizational work that sustains them, and enactment to foreground their embodied, performative contour.Footnote 43 Taken together, these gendered modes constitute situated forms of nation-work under contemporary conditions of public visibility and political caution.
Methods and Data
This article draws on 18 months of ethnographic research (May 2023 to October 2024), combining participant observation, semi-structured interviews and systematic analysis of online content to capture both offline and digital dimensions of the Hanfu revival as a gendered cultural field.
Hangzhou was the primary base, given its active Hanfu scene. I embedded myself in four volunteer-run Hanfu communities and joined weekly activities and chat channels. To widen variation, I undertook shorter stints in Shanghai, Nanjing, Suzhou and Guangzhou, and spent time in Caoxian in Shandong province, a major Hanfu manufacturing hub. There, I visited factories, wholesale markets and design studios, and attended the 2024 Hanfu Activity Week. Across sites, I observed outings and city events (parades, temple fairs and fashion shows) and attended two major gatherings in August 2024: the International Hanfu Festival in Suzhou and the Hanfu Activity Week in Caoxian. I alternated between roles as a volunteer, workshop assistant and attired participant, gaining access to both backstage and frontstage settings. In total, I documented more than 30 events, producing detailed fieldnotes on scenes, dialogues and the aesthetic and organizational labour through which participants enacted cultural authority.
I conducted 33 semi-structured interviews with participants and organizers (17 women and 16 men), mostly aged 18–35, with some organizers and community leaders in their late 30s and early 40s. Of these interviewees, 25 identified as Han (including two with one ethnic-minority parent) and eight as ethnic minorities (one Manchu; three Zhuang; one Miao; two Hui; one Korean Chinese). Interviews covered entry trajectories, motivations, gender dynamics and views of tradition and the nation. Interviewees included community leaders and event organizers, veteran enthusiasts, regular participants and newcomers, as well as participants with roles in the Hanfu economy (for example, photography, tailoring, retail and content production). To add institutional perspectives, I also interviewed four local cultural officials in Hangzhou and Caoxian and ten Hanfu business owners. Further details of the interviewees cited in the findings are provided in the supplementary appendix. When possible, interviews were audio-recorded with consent; otherwise, they were documented in contemporaneous notes. Online materials complemented in-person research. I followed leading accounts and hashtags on Bilibili and Xiaohongshu, joined WeChat 微信 groups connecting local scenes nationwide, and archived posts on authenticity debates, viral incidents, tutorials and organizing repertoires.
Analysis proceeded with a practice-oriented and feminist sensibility. I coded fieldnotes, interview transcripts and online archives for themes of aesthetic labour, leadership, legitimacy-seeking, nationalist expression, boundary work and interactions with officials and sponsors, combining inductive and deductive attention to gendered nation-work. Where relevant, I triangulated narratives with publicly available reports and media coverage.
Reflexivity guided interpretation. As a Han Chinese woman from one of the research sites, I benefited from insider empathy, particularly among women organizers; in encounters involving exclusionary rhetoric, I treated such rhetoric as an object of analysis rather than a basis for rapport. I addressed these challenges through sustained observation, cross-checking accounts across genders and roles, and attention to counter-cases. Ethical practice includes using pseudonyms for all personal names and removing identifying details. Unless otherwise noted, quotations derive from interviews or contemporaneous fieldnotes.
This corpus underpins the findings on women’s assertive banal nationalism, men’s defensive overt nationalism, and the negotiations that bind them into a shared yet contested field of everyday nationhood.
The Feminized Field of Hanfu: Women’s Authority and Banal Nationalism
The contemporary Hanfu community is profoundly feminized in participation and everyday forms of authority. Women form the majority and occupy key roles in organizing, online governance and the setting of aesthetic standards. As Xu Hui (local cultural official) observed, “In Hanfu spaces, women are the ones who keep everything running.”Footnote 44 This feminization does not displace an implicit Han cultural grammar. Rather, it channels soft Han-ness into everyday practices of etiquette, taste and proper self-presentation, making national belonging appear ordinary and publicly appealing.
Across Hangzhou, Suzhou and Shanghai, my fieldwork repeatedly placed women at the forefront. Young women initiated gatherings, led planning discussions, managed social media pages and taught newcomers the finer points of dress. Li Na (community leader) ran one of Hangzhou’s largest Hanfu WeChat groups, with more than 450 members. She welcomed newcomers, posted announcements and enforced norms for respectful discussion and authentic garments. Her authority was not uncontested, but she exercised it in subtle, effective ways. When a male member questioned a reminder about “proper styling” as unnecessary, Li Na replied that “Hanfu is all about details,” adding that “details are what show respect for the culture.” The discussion ended quickly, and the reminder remained pinned in the group. For an outing to a city park with about 40 attendees, two university students set the schedule, brought spare accessories and patiently coached several first-time participants on how to pose for photos. Wang Yun (newcomer) later commented that “they knew what looked right.” This aesthetic and organizational labour was a widely recognized mode of female leadership.
Through these roles, women perform nation-work by embedding national meaning in small, repeated acts rather than explicit ideological claims.Footnote 45 At the Hangzhou gathering, women styled one another’s outfits, adjusting collars with care and explaining why a sleeve should fall a certain way or a hairpin should sit higher, insisting it should “look right.” Chen Guo (veteran enthusiast) explained that helping a friend wear Hanfu felt like “passing on culture in the small things,” while Yao Xinxin (participant) added that “if you wear it carelessly, it doesn’t feel proper.” In such moments, women assert themselves as guardians of tradition and naturalize the idea that cultural continuity resides in historical attire and everyday etiquette. The atmosphere was social and playful, yet participants emphasized that the activity “wasn’t just for fun” but “something cultural.” I term this combination assertive banal nationalism: banal because it unfolds through familiar routines, assertive because it claims cultural authority and gives contemporary life to national tradition. The nation is thus woven into everyday interactions and aesthetic choices rather than articulated as explicit ideology.
Women’s prominence also shapes the industry that sustains the revival. In Caoxian’s garment workshops and factories, the workforce was overwhelmingly female. Most seamstresses, designers, quality inspectors and livestream hosts were women. As Shi Qin (factory owner) put it bluntly, “Without women, there would be no Hanfu industry,” explaining that “they have the patience and the eye for it.”Footnote 46 In everyday production, women exercised substantial discretion over design and presentation. During factory visits, female designers debated whether a new batch should follow late-Ming or early-Tang silhouettes, comparing reference images on their phones and rejecting patterns that looked “too stiff” or “not elegant enough.” Zhu Ke (designer) recalled scrapping an entire colourway because “it didn’t feel refined.”Footnote 47 Others adjusted fabric choices, insisting that certain textures “photograph better” under studio lighting. Livestream hosts rehearsed poses and camera angles, checking whether a sleeve or collar looked “soft enough” on screen. As Wang Yu (designer) explained, she wanted “each piece to feel like wearing history while making women feel beautiful and proud.”Footnote 48 Through these routine decisions, women curated the visual narrative of the revival at scale, aligning national symbolism with feminine aesthetics of elegance and emotional resonance.
Media representations reinforce this image and feed back into how participants understand their roles. Mainstream coverage of Hanfu almost always features young women in ornate silk robes, as icons of traditional beauty. On Douyin 抖音, the most-viewed Hanfu clips feature graceful female presenters who dance, pose or offer styling tips. Many women internalize this framing as both empowerment and responsibility. Chen Jing (content creator) described this awareness explicitly. “When I wear Hanfu outside, I know people are watching,” she explained. “They don’t just see me, they see Chinese culture.” This perception shaped how she carried herself. “I feel I should behave properly, stand straight, and look confident,” she said, because “I’m showing a good side of China.”Footnote 49 Here, personal deportment becomes a form of national representation. Small gestures, such as a careful pose or a coordinated outfit, are treated as culturally consequential. Through these mediated expectations, women come to embody an ideal of modern Chinese femininity that is cosmopolitan and self-assured yet grounded in historical elegance and moral self-discipline.Footnote 50
Local authorities and state-linked institutions have quietly bolstered this feminization. During the Hanfu Activity Week in Caoxian, county officials sponsored showcases and contests that spotlighted women. Embroidery workshops taught by women, a Hanfu lady pageant and mother-and-daughter fashion shows received extensive publicity, while male-centred activities were relegated to supporting roles. As Wu Xu (local cultural official) explained, women in Hanfu present “a harmonious and beautiful image that is more publicly palatable.”Footnote 51 Yang Wenhe (organizer) emphasized that these activities felt “gentle and festive,” rather than contentious.Footnote 52 In privileging female participation, local authorities framed Hanfu as a celebratory cultural practice aligned with a soft, ornamental vision of tradition suitable for public display.Footnote 53
For women themselves, leading the revival was both empowering and constraining. Many reported gaining confidence and organizational skills by running clubs or small businesses. Wang Yi (entrepreneur), who co-founded a Hanfu styling studio in Guangzhou, articulated this sense of agency clearly. “In the Hanfu world, women are in charge,” she said. “We’re showing that tradition isn’t only for older men to decide.” For her, managing designs, clients and public image was not only commercial work but a way of “taking culture into our own hands.”Footnote 54 By claiming interpretive authority over tradition, these women challenged assumptions that cultural legitimacy belongs to men or to the state, with femininity itself becoming a source of credibility grounded in care and aesthetic judgement.
That visibility also invites scrutiny and expectation. Communities and audiences readily celebrated women who embodied an ideal of elegant devotion to culture, yet criticism arose quickly when they stepped outside conservative norms. At a festival in Suzhou, controversy erupted when several women paired dresses with sneakers and bold, glittery make-up. They described the look as “just playful fusion,” but peers muttered that it was “not authentic” and “not proper Hanfu.” By contrast, men who incorporated modern elements into their outfits did not attract comparable criticism. As Luo Ming (community leader) observed, “When men mix styles, people say it’s creative. When women do it, it’s wrong.”Footnote 55 Policing centred on women’s appearance, reflecting expectations that they must display a virtuous style to remain credible standard-bearers of tradition. Several women leaders also reported pressure to appear modest and helpful, warning that those who stood out risked being accused of “chasing fame.” As He Lan (organiser) put it, “If you’re too visible, people say you’re not sincere.”Footnote 56 Neo-traditional femininity thus both enabled women’s prominence and constrained the forms of agency Hanfu otherwise afforded.
Taken together, these observations show how women’s authority in the Hanfu field is enacted through routine practices rather than explicit claims. By organizing activities, curating styles and managing visibility, women embed national meaning in everyday cultural labour. What emerges is a form of assertive banal nationalism that operates through shared judgements of propriety, refinement and historical reference. These judgements reproduce an implicit Han cultural grammar while remaining embedded in ordinary interaction, aesthetic coordination and community life.
Men’s Marginality and Compensatory Nationalism
In contrast to women’s authority in Hanfu spaces, men occupy a tenuous position. In a feminized field, male participants were frequently treated as “visitors” or “exceptions,” and their presence could elicit ambivalence both within the community and in the public sphere. This positioning shaped participation. To gain acceptance and assert belonging, many foregrounded patriotism, historical knowledge and moral rhetoric in ways that were more explicit and didactic than the women’s routine, aestheticized mode of participation. These performances did not simply express personal preference; they both arose from and responded to the feminized character of the field.
Demographically, men remained a minority. By 2023, they were estimated to account for 30 per cent of Hanfu consumers,Footnote 57 and in the local groups I observed, their active share was often lower. A single man in ornate historical dress could still draw stares. Online comments regularly derided men in Hanfu as effeminate or “unmanly,” and some posters insisted that “Hanfu isn’t for men.” The 2024 Bilibili Hanfu Gala made this stigma visible when male models in flowing robes and light make-up were attacked as “sissy” (niang 娘) and “weak.” Several interviewees described their early discomfort when wearing Hanfu in public. Lin Wen (participant) used to change clothes before taking the subway home to avoid ridicule. “I’d bring a jacket and change before I got on,” he recalled, because strangers would “keep staring” and “snigger,” as if his outfit were “ridiculous for a man.” Such reactions signalled a social penalty attached to a feminized practice and made male participation feel, in Lin’s words, “like you have to explain yourself.”Footnote 58
Despite the stigma, participation among men was rising with the mainstreaming of Hanfu. Many were drawn by a search for cultural roots, an aesthetic interest and dissatisfaction with what they described as a “too commercial” everyday life. Yet the hurdles they faced pushed them to develop strategies that justified involvement. A common approach was to emphasize nationalism in explicit and didactic ways, presenting Hanfu less as “dressing up” and more as a serious cultural task. Several men framed their Hanfu work as a patriotic duty. Chen Hao (participant) in Nanjing curated a personal exhibition on Han dynasty clothing for community centres. He repeatedly distinguished what he was doing from “women’s fashion” or “cosplay.” “This is about history,” he told me, “and about pride.” He described his goal as “teaching people what we lost,” positioning himself as an educator and guardian of cultural essence. This insistence on seriousness, history and national pride worked as a defensive claim to legitimacy, marking Hanfu as a proper male pursuit rather than “a woman’s hobby.”Footnote 59
Another tactic is performing historical masculinity. Some men invoke venerated masculine ideals to legitimize their presence.Footnote 60 At a 2023 gathering in Shanghai, Zhou Cheng (participant) wore a plain scholar-official robe in dark navy, carried a scroll, recited Tang poetry and dispensed historical trivia. The display evoked the learned Confucian gentleman and distanced him from any hint of frivolity. In Hangzhou, Bo Keli (veteran enthusiast) presented the image of a cultured master through sombre, high-quality outfits, classical quotations and calligraphy. Younger members gave him the nickname of “master” (fuzi 夫子). Such performances drew on familiar masculine archetypes associated with learning, restraint and cultural authority, helping to frame Hanfu as a legitimate form of male self-cultivation.
Some men took a different path by rejecting the hypermasculinity promoted in official discourse. A few interviewees claimed that Hanfu allowed them to be “gentle,” “artistic” and “emotionally expressive,” without feeling judged. Wang Qun (participant) described Hanfu circles as a “refuge” from what he called “toxic masculinity” at work. In Hanfu spaces, he said, “being vulnerable doesn’t get you laughed at.”Footnote 61 At one small gathering, several men openly shared stories of being mocked by colleagues or misunderstood by family members, nodding in recognition and joking that Hanfu was the only place they did not have to “act tough.” Several men described forming a “brotherhood” of cultural patriots who favoured “scholarly” and “peaceable” manhood. As Dong Ping (participant) put it, this was about “being cultured, not loud.” They contrasted this ideal with what they called “crass materialism” and “aggressive patriotism,” imagining a gentlemanly nation grounded in civility and cultural refinement. This, too, is nationalism, articulated as internal critique and moral aspiration.
Across these variants, the unifying pattern is a felt need to perform legitimacy. Women’s participation is presumed to be natural in this domain. Men feel they must earn their place. I describe the result as defensive overt nationalism: defensive because it compensates for marginality and suspect gender status, and overt because it is vocal and instructive. During the 2024 International Hanfu Festival in Suzhou, this pattern was especially visible. Male participants frequently delivered mini-lectures to visitors about history. At one exhibition hall, a group of male enthusiasts volunteered as docents. Liu Yang (participant) guided audiences through displays of Han and Song garments. “Hanfu was interrupted by foreign conquest,” he explained, “and now it is being restored.” He repeatedly emphasized dynastic timelines and civilizational continuity. Female guides, by contrast, tended to focus on fabric, craft and styling details. Liu’s didactic performance educated the audience, but it also worked to establish his credibility. As he later put it, “If you don’t speak seriously about history, people won’t take you seriously as a man wearing Hanfu.”Footnote 62
Sometimes these overt performances edged into hard-line rhetoric. While many men challenge narrow gender norms through gentle practices, others overcompensate, reproducing exclusionary or patriarchal logics that have been reframed in softer, cultural-national idioms. A few male online opinion leaders cast themselves as guardians of authenticity and deride the largely female mainstream as “just fashion.” They call for recentring Han ethnocentrism or reviving Confucian hierarchy. During my fieldwork, I observed a mild offline example of this shift. Zhou Han (participant) complained that Hanfu had become “only about looking pretty” and had lost what he called its “original mission to revive the Han nation.” In response, he organized a small men-only outing in what participants described as “proper ancient style.” The group wore plain, dark robes, avoided photography and performed bows before an image of the Yellow Emperor. Li Xin (participant) explained that the point was to be “serious” and “correct,” rather than “showy.” The gathering remained small and inward-looking, but it made visible how hyper-traditional practices could be mobilized to reclaim male authority within a movement otherwise led by women.
Most of the men I met were not drawn to extreme ideology.Footnote 63 They wanted to participate in the cultural revival and worked through obstacles in pragmatic ways. Their contributions often enriched community life through organizing, creative collaboration and valued knowledge. Women leaders frequently acknowledged these efforts, even as they managed what several described as men’s greater tendency to “lecture.” In some groups, I observed deliberate gestures of solidarity. Zhang Yang (community leader) in Hangzhou publicly thanked the men for attending and for “breaking stereotypes.” As she put it, “If they’re willing to come, we should support that.”Footnote 64 Such recognition both validated male participation and reaffirmed the group’s commitment to inclusion.
Overall, men in Hanfu navigate a constant balancing act. They negotiate identity and legitimacy in a feminized national space where participation cannot be taken for granted. Their strategies of teaching history, invoking patriotic duty and embodying scholarly ideals reflect their structural marginality. These strategies produce a nationalist style that is more declarative and instructional than women’s everyday, aestheticized mode of participation. The two styles are asymmetrical but intertwined. Men’s vocal performances often supply historical narration and moral framing. Women’s authority sets the aesthetic and interactional standards within which those performances are received. Together, they constitute a gendered repertoire of national expression through which the nation is alternately embodied, explained and contested in everyday practice.
Negotiating Nationhood: Gendered Tensions and Solidarities
The interplay of women’s dominance and men’s marginality generates both friction and collaboration. Rather than producing a fixed hierarchy, these asymmetries are worked through everyday interactions that shape leadership, support roles and the exercise of cultural authority. Hanfu thus operates as a space of gendered everyday nationhood, where national belonging is enacted through coordination, mutual adjustment and negotiation over legitimacy and social boundaries.
One negotiation concerns the limits of women’s empowerment. Women hold the authority to define Hanfu culture, which many experience as liberating. Chen Yuxin (community leader) described her involvement as “finally being able to choose my own way of doing tradition,” adding that “for the first time, women decide what counts.” Yet this authority also came with expectations. “Once you’re in that position,” she explained, “there’s pressure to embody it properly, to look pretty for the nation.”Footnote 65 This tension surfaced clearly at Caoxian’s embroidery workshops. Participants praised women’s patience and skill, often remarking that embroidery showcased “women’s strengths.” Xu Yunle (participant) said the workshop made her feel “recognized,” because “people finally see women’s craft as cultural.” Others were more ambivalent. During a break, Jiang Xi (participant) joked that she felt reduced to a “needle and thread for the nation,” adding that “men talk history, we stitch the past.” The comment drew quiet laughter, but no one disagreed. Such moments affirm women as bearers of national tradition while reinscribing familiar gender scripts, making national pride both ordinary and attractive even as some women register its constraints.
Men’s negotiation centres on belonging without overshadowing. Many expressed respect for Hanfu as a women-led domain and were careful not to disrupt group dynamics. In one Hangzhou meeting, while outlining historical details, Zhang Hanxing (participant) stopped mid-sentence and said, “I’ll pause here, you all decide,” prompting nods around the table. Li Na later remarked that he “knew how this group works.” At public events, men often took on auxiliary roles, emphasizing cooperation rather than leadership. During a 2023 expo in Hangzhou, Li Ye (organizer) directed a historical re-enactment and took the final decisions on accuracy and visual composition, while Bo Keli assisted with backstage logistics. When the spectators praised the performance, several commented that “the coordination felt very smooth.” Jiang Ming (participant) explained, “She sets the standard, we help make it happen.” Such pairings were widely recognized as an ideal balance, allowing men to participate meaningfully without challenging the women’s established authority.
Persistent tensions revolve around authenticity and are consistently gendered. Men more often emphasize historical authenticity and ideological clarity, while women prioritize creativity, inclusivity and community. These differences surfaced in online discussions around mixed-dynasty styles and modern make-up. In one Weibo thread reacting to a Tang-style outfit paired with bold eye make-up, a male commenter insisted that “once you mix things freely, it’s no longer Hanfu but costume.” A female participant replied that “if everything is frozen, no one will stay,” adding that “culture has to be lived, not guarded.” Similar disagreements appeared offline. At a Hangzhou gathering, a debate broke out when a newcomer wore Song-style sleeves with contemporary accessories. Li Zhouhe (participant) cautioned that this was “not historically accurate,” while Wang Zhixun (organizer) intervened, saying, “We’re not a museum. People need space to learn.” Such moments rarely escalated into open conflict, but they revealed ongoing struggles over authority, and in particular, whose vision of Hanfu would guide the revival and shape the nation imagined through it.
State and societal contexts amplify these pressures by linking cultural revival to traditional values and, at times, gender hierarchy. Several women leaders described navigating these expectations carefully. In Nanjing, a municipal cultural office offered funding for an etiquette training programme but proposed a curriculum assigning gender-segregated roles drawn from classical texts. Lin Yue (community leader) recalled thinking, “If we accept it as is, we’re just acting out someone else’s idea of tradition.”Footnote 66 After negotiations, the organizers secured a revised programme centred on shared practices, such as calligraphy, tea rituals and historical storytelling, with mixed-gender participation. “We told them this was also traditional,” Chen Yansi (organizer) explained, “just not the version where women only stand quietly behind.”Footnote 67 The programme proceeded with official backing, illustrating how women tactically align with heritage discourse while reshaping its gendered terms.
Amid these pressures, solidarities also take shape through everyday interaction. At a Suzhou gathering, two young men asked female peers to teach them hair braiding and flower arranging. Zhang Hang (participant) joked that he was “completely useless at this,” while Liu Ze (participant) added more seriously that “outside, you’d never ask to learn this.” Zhao Xinyu (participant) responded by correcting his hand movements, saying, “It’s fine, everyone learns like this.” Several men described these moments as unusually comforting. Zhou Shen (participant) reflected that “when women teach you patiently like this, you don’t feel judged,” noting that “it’s rare to have that kind of space.”Footnote 68 Because women already set the tone, such exchanges validate female expertise rather than merely blur gender boundaries. Hanfu thus becomes a space where gentle masculinity gains legitimacy within a shared cultural project.
These micro-shifts inspire broader imaginings of national belonging. In group discussions, particularly among younger participants, Hanfu was described as offering a model grounded in “creative cooperation” and “mutual recognition.” A mixed-gender photo project completed in 2024 became a recurring reference point. Participants staged ordinary urban scenes, such as waiting for a bus, buying snacks and sitting on public steps, while wearing Hanfu and avoiding grand historical backdrops. Wang Wanhe (organizer) explained that the aim was to show “how tradition fits into everyday life, not just ceremonies.”Footnote 69 Xu Ning (participant) contrasted the project with online nationalist spectacle, saying, “This feels calmer. It’s about being together, not proving something.”Footnote 70 Members described the images as showing “how being Chinese can look like respect, fun and civility.” These reflections articulate an alternative vision “from below,” associating national belonging with cooperation and everyday civility rather than ideological intensity.
Taken together, the Hanfu movement shows nationalism as negotiation rather than monologue. Women’s cultural leadership generates empowerment while exposing them to moralized expectations of virtue and decorum. Men’s participation in a feminized arena unsettles conventional masculinity, prompting experimentation as well as defensive reassertions. Through friction and collaboration, participants expand the repertoire of legitimate national expression. Beautifying oneself, teaching others, mixing ancient and modern, and questioning gender norms become ways of doing the nation in daily life, revealing threads of gender and care that broader nationalist discourse often leaves implicit.
Discussion
This article examines how nationalist meanings are generated, evaluated and stabilized through gendered everyday participation in Hanfu’s mainstream revival spaces. Drawing on gendered everyday nationhood and Surak’s nation-work,Footnote 71 it shifts attention from what Hanfu symbolizes to how national belonging becomes persuasive in routine settings. In a state-tolerated, commercially mediated sphere, the nation is enacted through styling, etiquette training, event organization and everyday moral judgements about proper culture. Hanfu therefore functions as a culturally mediated arena of nationalism rather than as a formal state project or oppositional mobilization.Footnote 72 It remains relatively loose and socially marginal, more visible than powerful, and not an institutionalized movement with direct political leverage.
Across sites, two asymmetric modes of nationalist expression coexisted. Women, as cultural authorities in this feminized field, enacted an assertive banal nationalism, which unfolded through mundane routines such as adjusting hairpins, coaching posture and moderating rules of propriety. Yet these routines set standards and distribute recognition. Women’s organizational labour and aesthetic gatekeeping make nationalism easy to repeat and share, as similar claims circulate through gatherings, photos and tutorials, framed as pleasure and care. This is nationalism in practice rather than an ascription of political identity. Women exercised substantive organizational and interpretive agency through routine standard-setting and recognition work, even as this authority positioned them as guardians of an implicitly Han-coded “proper culture” and gatekeepers of respectable femininity, through which belonging became publicly credible. Men, by contrast, often enacted a defensive overt nationalism. Lacking implicit legitimacy, they relied more on didactic displays of historical knowledge and patriotic duty to justify participation. The contrast reflects different relationships to authority within a feminized cultural field, where legitimacy is granted through embodied competence, affective warmth and cultivated taste rather than declarative ideology.
The findings also refine how recent Hanfu scholarship understands Han-ness. Work including Law and Qin’s analyses of reflexive Han-ness shows that Han-centrism often operates implicitly through moral language, narratives of cultural decline and etiquette-centred claims about proper personhood, rather than through overt ethnic antagonism.Footnote 73 My findings align with this diagnosis but specify a mechanism: soft Han-ness is enacted through gendered positions in the field. Women often translate moralized Han-ness into an etiquette and taste repertoire that can feel apolitical yet authoritative. Men more often channel it into explicit instruction, boundary policing and moral mission, especially when marginality is experienced as a threat to masculine legitimacy. The claim is not that gender replaces Han-ness, but that gender more strongly organizes how implicit Han-ness becomes publicly legible, credible and emotionally appealing.
This perspective clarifies why Hanfu can appear inclusive while still reproducing boundaries. Participants commonly foregrounded harmony and framed Hanfu as “traditional Chinese culture,” emphasizing inclusiveness and downplaying ethnic distinctions. Yet “proper” etiquette and appropriate taste can still do boundary work when ethnicity is unnamed. Standards of civility and refinement can mark some accents, bodies and styles as cultivated or not, defining inclusion in conditional terms. Women’s authority is double-edged. It enables leadership and experimentation, but it also ties legitimacy to virtue, decorum and respectability, making it easier to discipline those who deviate from conservative gendered expectations. Men’s marginality can open space for gentler masculinity, as Hanfu offers a moral aesthetic “refuge” from dominant masculine scripts, but it can also generate compensatory nationalism that turns insecurity into boundary policing.
Finally, the case speaks to broader theories of women and nationalism and to debates that treat nationalism in contemporary China as plural, negotiated and shaped by constraint.Footnote 74 Feminist scholarship shows that women are often positioned as cultural bearers and moral representatives of the nation, while men are seen as defenders or spokespersons.Footnote 75 Hanfu reproduces this logic by making feminized labour central to nationalist credibility, but it also reworks it by placing women in highly visible roles as organizers and arbiters of “proper culture.” Wider patriarchal structures do not disappear. Women’s authority is situational and often depends on respectability and platform visibility, while men may retain subtler influence through resources or technical roles such as photography. Treating patriarchy as a background condition helps to distinguish everyday feminization from institutional male power. In this space, nationalism becomes persuasive because it is social, aesthetic, routine and widely shareable.
Conclusion
Hanfu’s mainstream revival demonstrates how cultural nationalism is made through gendered practice rather than simply declared. This article shows how women’s everyday authority sustains an assertive banal nationalism embedded in aesthetics, etiquette and organizational care, while men’s minority status in a feminized field often generates defensive overt nationalism marked by pedagogy, moral claims and occasional purist backlashes. These intertwined modes reveal nationhood as negotiated rather than monolithic: the same garment can register as self-cultivation, social care or moral mission, depending on position and audience.
Foregrounding gendered everyday nationhood also reframes what kind of nationalism Hanfu represents. The movement is not best captured as either extreme ethnonationalism or apolitical fashion. Explicit ethnic antagonism is often quieted in mainstream settings, yet a softer Han-ness persists as a moral and etiquette-centred grammar of “proper culture.” Gender relations condition how this grammar is enacted, who is recognized as a legitimate cultural bearer, and which styles of nationalist expression become publicly acceptable. Soft ethnocentrism can, therefore, persist as moral and etiquette grammar, even when explicit ethnic politics recede and gendered relations shape the credibility of that grammar.
Hanfu offers a clear view of nationhood as lived work, where politics is indirect, boundaries are subtle and legitimacy is negotiated through taste, civility and embodied self-presentation. Attending to such spaces clarifies how nationalism is produced at the intersection of gender, culture and governance, not only through what people say about the nation but also through the ordinary labour of making it feel proper, beautiful and shareable.
Supplementary material
The supplementary material for this article can be found at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305741026102756.
Data availability statement
The data that support the findings of this study are available upon reasonable request from the author. The data are not publicly available because they contain information that could compromise the privacy of research participants and are subject to ethical and confidentiality restrictions.
Acknowledgements
This article draws on research undertaken for my doctoral dissertation at Zhejiang University. I am especially grateful to Kurtuluş Gemici for his sustained guidance and support throughout this project. I also thank Mujun Zhou and Kristin Surak for their generous feedback, and Zitong Jin for her comments on an earlier draft. I am also grateful to the research participants who generously shared their time and experiences. This research was supported by the Zhejiang University Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Support Scheme (No. 225051B).
Competing interests
None.
Fuyun WEI is a PhD candidate in sociology at Zhejiang University and was a visiting research student at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research focuses on gender, cultural nationalism and everyday nationhood in contemporary China, with a particular interest in embodied cultural practice and the Hanfu revival.
