Divorce stigma on Weibo: A corpus-assisted social media critical discourse analysis of platform-mediated contestation
Jiapei Gu, Janet Ho · Discourse Context & Media · 2026
Despite rising divorce rates in China, the traditional “intact family” ideal remains hegemonic, subjecting children from divorced families (CDF) to courtesy stigma. This study investigates how this stigma is discursively constructed, negotiated, and resisted on Weibo, a leading Chinese microblogging platform. Adopting a mixed-methods approach, we analyzed 2989 comments on Weibo using BERTopic modeling and social media critical discourse analysis (SM-CDA). The findings reveal a deeply paradoxical discursive landscape. Anchored by the ideology of “neofamilism”, a dominant discourse employs predication and intensification strategies to assert the “complete” family as a non-negotiable norm. This ideal enables a “deterministic stigma” wherein CDF are represented as inevitably “damaged”, “incomplete”, and denied agency. However, these stigmatizing practices are actively contested. A robust counter-discourse utilizes negation and comparative structure to reframe the source of harm from the act of divorce to chronic marital conflicts, while a parallel discourse of empathy fosters affective solidarity and reconstructs positive identities of CDF through personal narratives. As such, we argue that Weibo functions not merely as an amplifier of traditional norms but as a critical site of discursive contestation, where the bottom-up discourse of lived experience leverages the digital democratization of discourse to contest top-down anxieties over family fragmentation. This study contributes to a nuanced understanding of digital discursive stigmatization and destigmatization in non-Western contexts.