Digitally mediated (dis)empowerment paradox in
women-led group-buying during the Shanghai
COVID lockdown

Digitally mediated (dis)empowerment paradox in
women-led group-buying during the Shanghai
COVID lockdown

empowerment, disempowerment, paradox, group-buying, COVID-19 lockdown.

Extant scholarship increasingly attends to the mixed—and paradoxical—incorporation of information and communication technologies in social

lives. Building on existing research, this study further explicates how digitally mediated (dis)empowerment paradoxes stem from the interac-
tions among unevenly transformed structural affordances and constraints in the political, market, socio-cultural, and technological realms under

digitalized contexts. Drawing on ethnographic data on women-led digital group-buying during the coronavirus disease 2019 lockdown in
Shanghai, China, this study illustrates that the pandemic-inaugurated digitalization paradoxically transformed existing technological constraints

into digital resources and techno-skills for women to lead digital group-buying and empower them socio-technologically. Yet these empower-
ments paradoxically turned into new gender inequalities, as entrenched state and market inequalities compelled female organizers to meet

added or dueling burdens. This study, therefore, contributes to understanding the re/configuration and varied interaction patterns of different
facets of structural affordances and constraints that condition digitally mediated (dis)empowerment paradoxes under digitalized contexts.

Hao Cao 1,�, Yujie Zhong1

https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmae005

Oxford University Press on behalf of International Communication Association.

May 14, 2024

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