Femininity, Intimacy And Consumerism: Discursive Transformation Of The Concepts Of Love And Marriage

In modern society the topic of love has been extremely highlighted, from mass media, psychotherapy, commercial advertisement, literature, to private conversation. Compared with the male, female are more concerned themselves with topics related to love. Present studies on love are mainly confined in sociology and psychology;the former relates love to general and abstract social structures, while the latter approach the subject from psychological mechanism of individual. These two kinds of studies tend to neglect the discursive nature of love in modern society, and are often trapped in the network of prevailing social discourse.The thesis attempts to reveal how the concepts of love and marriage are discursively constructed and restrict people's activities through critical discourse analysis. The author believes that there is a great unbalance in the subjectivity of two sexes in discourse on love. As the primary consumer of the discourse on love, young female's affections more subjected to its construction. Therefore, the author takes the young female group as the main research object. However, it doesn't mean that the analysis result cannot be applied to other social groups. As to the individual, discourse creates "subject-positions" for he/she to fill in, once he/she makes sense from it.The data in this thesis are taken from a group discussion among female friends on the topic of "love". Drawing on Wodak's (2001) discourse-historical approach, the author makes analysis on discursive strategies employed in the construction, perpetuation, transformation and destruction of romantic love. The author also applies Toulmin's model of argumentation (1979) and Labov's structure of spoken narrative (1967,1972) to reveal the linguistic realizations.The romantic discourse began to prevail after the Cultural Revolution when popular cultures from Hong Kong and Taiwan flooded into the mainland, with the development of publishing industry and mass media. Romantic discourse has exerted great influences on people especially females' life. It produces a system of knowledge about love and helps cultivate women's need for intimacy. Nowadays a macro economic discourse has infiltrated into every domain of social life, and transformed the concepts of love and marriage. On the one hand romantic love is constructed as a formality that closely related to symbolic values of commodities;on the other hand it is dismantled by discourse on reality of life, which reflects the gap between individual's huge consumer desire and limited purchasing power. The conflict between discourses on reality and romance doesn't lie in that the latter is illusionary, but rather in the different objects that they attach values to. In consumer society, romantic formality often submits to other pressing consumer desire in family life.The study reveals that people's talk on love is confined by orders of discourse. Discourse constructs people's concepts of love and marriage, and in turn it's reproduced and maintained in actual utterances. Through various discursive strategies, people's emotion and affection are carefully contained, channeled and expressed.