Calibrated grandmotherhood: how older rural Chinese womencontent creators navigate digital empowerment on Douyin

Short-video platforms have expanded possibilities for public expression inChina, yet older women in rural areas remain among the most digitallymarginalised populations due to intersecting age, gender, and rural dispar-ities. This study examines how those who actively create content onDouyin negotiate empowerment within significant structural constraints.The findings reveal that empowerment through platform participation ismultidimensional and unevenly realised. Participants achieved recognition,social connection, and enhanced self-regard, outcomes that carry inde-pendent significance for women whose decades of care work went largelyunacknowledged. Those who sought economic returns, however, facedcompounding structural barriers rooted in educational history, platformpredation, and normative constraints on feminine self-presentation. Tonavigate platform visibility while remaining within local moral boundaries,participants practiced the calibrated grandmotherhood, strategic self-presen-tation that aligns with normative expectations of respectable older femin-inity and algorithmic preferences. This calibration produces anempowerment paradox: the very agency that enables recognition reinfor-ces rather than challenges the gendered age norms constraining thesewomen. The study contributes to empowerment theory by demonstratinghow, under conditions of intersecting marginalisation, effective agency andtransformative agency may exist in tension, with platform affordanceschannelling agency into reproductive rather than transformative forms.