Discourse Of Feminine Identity In The Chinese Consumer Culture: A Critical Study Of Media Language

Within contemporary culture under the influence of globalization, identity shifts from a fixed set of characteristics determined by birth and ascription to a reflexive, ongoing, individual project shaped by appearance and performance through consumption. Feminine discourse is a part of the whole modern scenery. It is a culturally imposed standard of a hierarchical system of value facilitated by cultural determinants like advertising and mass media. This thesis aims to reveal a shift in narratives of woman identity as language turns to be promotional in this cultural tendency in China. Meanwhile, it also attempts to reach an understanding of visual texts in particular, a significant way of communication in public domain with the recent development of technologies. So far, CDA has mostly been confined to verbal texts or to verbal parts of texts. The data of this study consist of written stories from magazines Woman Friend and Rayli, front covers of Woman Friend in 1990, 1996 and 2003 respectively, and women talking from the Focus Group Discussion. The textual analysis is made in terms of narrative by Labov (1967) and Kress& van Leeuwen's model of sign-making grammar (1998). This analysis shows that there is a shift of constructing female identities: in 1990 the prominent attribute is moral characters; in 2005 it turns out to be appearance or looks as the prominent attribute for femininity in consumer culture. Meanwhile, visual texts lead to a new reading habitus, body scrutiny, and mediate consumption activities. Accordingly, theoretical discussion is put in the Chinese context in the perspective of modernity, economic organization, mass media and globalization. It comes to the conclusion that the knowledge of femininity is generated by the power of consumerism. And it eventually results in a wide spread of westernized images among Chinese women. In other words, the local images of Chinese women are excluded and marginalized in the domain of knowing and desire set by feminine discourses. Besides, it shows that Critical Discourse Analysis is capable of providing the theoretical foundation and analytical tools for cross-cultural studies.