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Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Science

ISSN Online: 2576-0548 ISSN Print: 2576-0556 CODEN: JHASAY
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ArticleOpen Access http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2026.09.006

Gendered Rituals and Feminine Identities: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of the Qixi Festival and Valentine’s Day

Rong Lu

School of Foreign Languages, Tianshui Normal University, Tianshui 741000, Gansu, China.

*Corresponding author: Rong Lu

Tianshui Normal University under Grant No. KYQ2023-09.
Published: September 11, 2026

Abstract

The Qixi Festival is often called the Chinese Valentine’s Day today, and this label has drawn much attention in discussions of cultural globalization and fusion. However, few studies have compared the two festivals from a gendered perspective in a systematic way. Through a feminist lens, this paper looks at what the two festivals share and where they differ, with special attention to their effects on women’s lives and gender roles. The analysis is qualitative and text-based, drawing on Hofstede’s cultural dimensions and Bell’s ritual theory. Neither festival, it turns out, began as a romantic celebration; love arrived late in both cases, first through legend and literature, and later through commerce. The differences appear in six dimensions: how each festival began, who takes part, what customs are performed, what these customs mean, how the day is celebrated, and how each festival changes across regions. From the feminist perspective, the Qixi Festival is a female-centered group event that builds community and celebrates women’s wisdom and skill, while Valentine’s Day is more private and couple-oriented, with romance as its focus. The study thus deepens cross-cultural understanding of love-related traditions from a women-centered perspective, and offers insights into how traditional festivals can be preserved and renewed in a globalized age, given their different impacts on women’s lives and gender relations.

Keyword

Cross-cultural comparison; feminine identity; gendered ritual; Qixi Festival; Valentine’s Day

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Copyright

© 2026 by the author(s).
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) license, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not modified or adapted.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

How to cite this paper

Gendered Rituals and Feminine Identities: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of the Qixi Festival and Valentine’s Day

How to cite this paper: Rong Lu. (2026) Gendered Rituals and Feminine Identities: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of the Qixi Festival and Valentine’s Day. Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Science, 10(9), 1059-1067.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2026.09.006