Gender Labels in Flux: The Role of Women in Gender Discourse in Post-Reform China
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Date
2022-10-04
Authors
Lang, Jun
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
With the boom of networked digital communication, verbal misogyny permeates Chinese social media, reflecting and reinforcing a sexist gender order in society at large. At the same time, a new generation of Chinese women is seizing digital platforms to counterstrike linguistic sexism in a gender discourse warfare. How has the role of Chinese women in gender discourse changed from passive targets of gender labeling to active agents of feminist activism? My dissertation attempts to answer this question by analyzing the changing gender dynamics in the shifting social labels in contemporary China (1980 to present). Following the groundwork on verbal sexism in wireless China by Jing-Schmidt and Peng (2018), I take an interdisciplinary approach to gender label analysis, integrating the sociolinguistic principle of the mutual constitution of language and society, critical discourse analysis of gender labels as vehicles of power, feminist linguistics, and a socio-technological view on grassroots digital communication. Not only will this dissertation fill a gap in the interdisciplinary research on gender and language in Chinese, it is also the first to use data mining from digitized press and social media, supplemented with survey data on the perceptions of the social meanings of gender labels. This dissertation is an interdisciplinary digital humanities project and has implications for both gender research and social actions toward gender equality.
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Keywords
China, Chinese feminism, Digital communication, Gender labels, Language and gender, Linguistic sexism