Constructing Gender In Chinese Media Discourse

This study explores the discourse practice of constructing gender in the Chinese media. Fifty-eight sample discourses are chosen for analysis, which cover a wide range of daily life topics. Two modes of media analysis (CA and CD A) are adopted. Drawing on a range of work in CDA tradition, in pragmatics and in systemic-functional linguistics, as well as in the sociological field, this study takes some tentative steps towards the development of an operational framework for critical discourse analysis.In this study, we suggest two aspects of discourse perspective: the situational position and the habitual position. Discourse perspective manifests itself at different language levels in the form of discourse perspective indicators. The aim of this study is to examine the applicability of critical linguistic analytical tools to Chinese discourse analysis and to understand the dynamic interaction between Chinese media discourse and the prevailing gender ideology. Four discourse types (Per-D and Inf-D, M-D and F-D) are distinguished and examined in this study.The results show the immense power of the entrenched traditional gender ideology and the role of media in reproducing and perpetuating it. On the one hand, although Women are no longer the "unaccessed voice" group, the myth of hero for men and the myth of love for women pervade the media discourses, which helps transform the audience into socially acknowledged men or women.On the other hand, our analysis proves that the discourse perspective framework integrating various analytical tools can account for socially constitutive nature of discourse. Discourse perspective indicators, such as modal verb, categorization, activation/passivation, presupposition, bridging inference, inter-discourse, ideological logic of discourse etc. are categorized according to their relations to the two aspects of discourse perspective. They are (a) explicit perspective indicators梩he language patterns which tend to be purposefully employed to construct the writer's situational position; (b) implicit perspective indicators梩he language patterns which suggest the writer's subconsciously adopted habitual position; (c) the perspective indicators in the halfway between them.