A Cultural Discourse Study Of Women’s Rights

This dissertation is utilizing a cultural discursive perspective into women’s right studies. By integrating methods of Cultural Discourse Studies (CDS) and the Ethnography of Communication, it aims at exploring into how the Chinese political elites negotiate the rights conflicts in the family planning issue through discursive strategies. Based on a suggested theoretical framework of "Double-G" model (Grand-frame and Ground-based analysis), this study makes a full-grained analysis of the discursive properties, strategies and principles of the Chinese political elites in talking about women’s reproductive rights and family planning conditions. In responding towards the external conflicts with the U.S. over Chinese family planning conditions, Chinese political elites preferred shaping family planning within a discursive framework of cultural heritage, social development, and domestic equilibrium; however, the U.S. counterpart does a favor in constructing the issue within a universal rights discourse. In responding towards the internal conflicts with the indigenous people, the elites speak more cooperatively and considerately for the sake of strengthening the relationship between the government and the people. By exploring into both the externally and internally responding discourses of Chinese political elites in dealing with women’s rights conflicts, we find that the elites negotiate the conflicts in the family planning issue through certain discursive strategies under the principles of "equilibrium","non-interference","rectification", "guanxi", and "image". We also conclude that such Chinese discursive principles in talking about women’s rights are rooted from the cultural psychology of "equilibrium" of indigenous Chinese people. Though such an "equilibrium" discourse against rights fails to be as argumentative, eloquent, and persuasive as the western rights rhetoric, it is more effective in helping the political elites negotiate the conflicts between the government and the people, which is encouraging, inspiring, educating, and entertaining—namely, others-oriented.