Media Representations Of Chinese Gender Minority:A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis Perspective

It has been 70 years since Zellig Harris(1952)first coined the concept of discourse studies.During this period,both connotation and denotation of discourse studies have been continuously refined and expanded,and its interdisciplinary research nature is also constantly highlighted.As its important research perspectives,both multimodal discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis have attracted considerable attention from Chinese scholars in recent years(e.g.,Wang&Jin,2023;Zhang,2020).However,compared with overseas studies,the research that integrates the two(i.e.,multimodal critical discourse analysis)to address social problems is still rare.Moreover,in extant research,few scholars seek to combine multimodal critical discourse analysis with gender issues to explore the feasibility of its application.By taking these points into consideration,this study attempts to propose a framework for multimodal critical discourse analysis and applies it to the news discourse pertaining to gender minority,in order to broaden this research field.As "invisible people",gender minority have aroused extensive attention from the Western scholars,which,in turn,leads to a series of scientific and insightful research.The reasons why the present study takes these people as its research object lie in the following six aspects:(1)Scholars continue to call for attention to marginalized groups to show academic responsibility(e.g.,Ding,2013;Ding&Shen 2013;Halliday,1978;Ran,Gong,&Yang,2018;Tong&Xie,2019;Wang&Chen,2020);(2)Most of the previous studies on gender minority were conducted by Western scholars,with few being conducted by Chinese scholars;(3)Most scholars focus solely on a single group(e.g.,bisexual or transgender),whereas few target lesbian,gay,bisexual,and trans people as a whole for their research.This kind of research design may run the risk of presenting skewed findings about these people;(4)Existing studies are mainly conducted from a synchronic perspective,but there are scant diachronic or longitudinal studies;(5)As one of the means to generate meaning,multimodality has been completely ignored in extant research paradigm to study gender minority;and(6)The interpretations of the representations of gender minority remain to be strengthened.Specifically,from the perspective of multimodal critical discourse analysis,utilizing news reports on Chinese gender minority in China Daily,Global Times,Beijing Review,and Shanghai Daily as research data,and taking a longitudinal dimension(2001-2021)as its starting point,the study intends to address the following three research questions:(1)What are the dominant verbal and visual representations of Chinese gender minority in these four Chinese English-language newspapers?(2)How are gender minority verbally and visually represented in Chinese English-language newspapers?And(3)What socio-cultural factors impact verbal and visual representations of Chinese gender minority in Chinese English-language newspapers?In order to answer the questions aforementioned,this study adopts a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the collected news data.By drawing upon classic theories in discourse studies,the study integrates existing analytic models related to multimodal and critical discourse analysis to propose a multimodal critical discourse analysis framework suitable for the analysis of media representations in news discourse.In short,this framework contains two dimensions of news media representations:verbal dimension and visual dimension.And meanwhile,its analysis centers on five key levels:(1)lexicogrammatical level,referring to the focus on the types and characteristics of words-selection in news reports;(2)pragmatic level,referring to the pragmatic effects achieved through representative reporting techniques,such as pathologizing,stigmatizing,and delegitimizing gender minority;(3)the level of representational meaning,referring to the expression of real intentions of news reports through narrative styles and journalistic stances;(4)the level of interactional meaning,referring to conveying the interactive effects between news journalists and readers by means of perspective,distance,and gaze;and(5)the level of compositional meaning,referring to the use of frame and mode to express the meaning of pictorial composition.The findings of this study are mainly in the following three aspects.Firstly,with the help of AntConc 3.5.8 software of corpus linguistics,this study identifies the keywords and their word frequencies of 354 news reports.Then the USAS semantic tagger is used to cluster and integrate the top 100 keywords,which contributes to obtaining prominent representation patterns about Chinese gender minority in four English-language newspapers.Namely,gender minority are recurrently verbally represented as patients,victims,progressionists,and sluts.As patients,they are reported to have not only physical but also mental or psychotic illnesses,and thus need medical treatment;as victims,they are repeatedly juxtaposed with such topics as marriage rights,adoption rights,freedom of holding activities,domestic violence,and robbery in order to emphasize the gap between them and heterosexual people and the potential harm brought by their sexual orientation;as progressionists,they are represented as contenders for equal civil rights and participants in the public welfare,and even some news reports have viewed them positively;as sluts,they are believed to have unfaithful and unhealthy sexual lifestyles and sexual behaviors.These representations are mainly realized through specific verbal strategies,such as activation,passiviation,nomination,functionalization,association,intensification,aggregation,adjacent collocation,split collocation,fallacy,metaphorical representation,positive theme,negative theme,legitimization,and delegitimization.Secondly,with the help of thematic analysis(Coffey&Atkinson,1996),89 news photos pertaining to Chinese gender minority are coded and categorized.Two rounds of coding later,this study finds that the four English-language newspapers have rich patterns of visual representations of Chinese gender minority,be it negative or positive.That is,gender minority are recurrently visually represented by the media as victims,disguisers,warriors,and elites.As victims,these people are juxtaposed with topics like marriage rights,adoption rights,social discrimination and stigmatization;as disguisers,they tend to hide sexual orientation from relatives,friends,and colleagues at home or in workplaces;as warriors,they bravely fight for their own legal rights and benefits,devote themselves fully to public welfare,and even participate in Pride Parades and other activities;as elites,these people not only pursue career success,but also contribute to social progress.The above representations are achieved mainly through(1)the visual strategies of representational meaning,which explore news reports’ narrative perspectives and stances toward gender minority.They also focus on the images(be they animate or inanimate)chosen in news reports and reveal the journalistic stances(be they affective or neutral);(2)the visual strategies of interactive meaning,which center on how news journalists interact with potential readers.Simultaneously,they cast attention to the angles of the selected news photos(be they vertical or horizontal),the distance between photos and their viewers(be they far or close),and whether the protagonist(s)in photos has(have)gaze contact with viewers;and(3)the visual strategies of compositional meaning,which investigate how news journalists achieve the meanings of pictorial composition by means of frame and mode.In news photos,the former is normally realized by direct and indirect framings,while the latter is achieved by dress,gesture,and placard.Lastly,based on the analyses of verbal and visual representations of gender minority,the present study at the macro level provides an in-depth interpretation of the socio-cultural factors that may lead to these representations.It harbors the idea that there are four socio-cultural factors responsible for abovementioned representations:(1)view of marriage,which mainly discusses how the characteristics and values of marriage impact the reporting styles of news journalists;(2)view of fertility,which mainly focuses on how the journalists and gender minority are affected by traditional fertility thought and fertility culture;(3)view of family,which centers on how social functions of Chinese family influence journalists and gender minority;and(4)the freedom of media,which answers why the positive representations of gender minority have appeared in news reports to achieve communication goals.Specifically speaking,the continuum from negative representation to positive representation depends on the breadth of journalists’vision,the westernization of Chinese reporting styles,the expectations of the audiences,and the participation of gender minority.The contribution of this study is twofold.In the first place,this study integrates news discourse studies with multimodal critical discourse analysis,and accordingly constructs a multimodal critical discourse analysis framework for news discourse research.Doing so not only promotes the integration and development of multimodal discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis,but also provides a new perspective for researching news discourse analysis.In the second place,by systematically analyzing the relevant reports on gender minority in the four Chinese English-language newspapers,this study enriches the research object of multimodal critical discourse analysis,highlights both verbal and visual representation patterns of gender minority,and also explicates social-cultural factors contributing to these representations.It is of much significance for readers to have a more comprehensive and scientific understandings of gender minority in China.