Gender Studies: Three Decades Of Reform And Opening Up The Mainland Chinese Popular Music

Every society has its own particular ideology related with gender,which determqines the structures of the gender,and embodies the particular relationships among the social powers,and controls the society.Embodying the important cultural phenomenon of contemporary social mentality and symptomatology of spirit,popular music,however,includes large numbers of information of gender which give us a great hand to observe and comprehend the ideology of the gender.Considering this,when we study the popular music in terms of the gender,it is very important to put the problem of gender into the context of contemporary mass culture for the study of mass culture of contemporary china and the study of gender.Compared with monograph come from the West, Hongkong and Taiwan,there are rarely systemic monograph in Chinese Mainland.In recent years,although some monographer explored the popular music under a gender vision,most of them focused on the static analysis on the female image in popular music, neglecting the masculine image which is ruled by the particular gender system embodied in the popular music,having a tendency to replace the study of the gender with the study on female,ignoring the change of the gender idea,and,furthermore,failing to discuss the development and change of the gender rules in the interaction between the popular music and the accepter.Meanwhile,the author would like to research the gender in terms of both Lyrics and singer image in the popular music of Chinese Mainland from 1979 to 2009,to attemp to display the effect from gender system,to discuss the change of the gender idea in the popular music,to sum up the development and change of the gender rules in the interaction between the popular music and the accepter.There are five parts in this thesis.The main body involves chapter one,two and three.Chapter one Popular Music and Gender,as the general programme of the paper,including three section,is about the review of the studies concerned,the expatiation of theory,the definition of the conception and the object and goal of the study in this paper.In chapter one,the emphasis is laid in section two,in which author expatiates on the academic categories used in this paper:Gender,Gender Stereotype,Masculinities/Femininities.Chapter two and chapter three are concerned with the expandedness of the analysis,both including three section and one brief summary.Chapter two The Gender study of lyric is concerned with the gender study of popular song from the angle of the lyric.Author discusses the important meaning of the lyric in the gender study of popular song in section one and analyzes detailedly the Gender Stereotype and the pluralistic gender image showed in the lyric of popular song of Chinese Mainland from 1979 to 2009 in section two and three,via contrast, presenting the chinese reality of gender power structure nowadays, exposuring the the development and change of the gender rules in the interaction between the popular music and the accepter.Chapter three The Gender Study of The Singer Image is concerned with the gender study of the popular song from the angle of the singer image.Author not only discusses the important meaning of singer image in the gender study of popular song in section one and discusses separately the image change of men and women singer in Chinese Mainland since reformation and opening to the outside world, but also presents flux of gender idea in recent thirty years and the trend of androgyny of the Masculinitie/Femininities,via analysis of the tendency of change of Masculinities and Femininities showed in the change of singer image.We could see that the nowaday society of China is still in the center of men's power and the traditional gender ideology still control the gender rules nowadays, via the study of the gender in terms of lyric and singer image of popular song in Chinese Mainland since reformation and opening to the outside world,whereas we could see,too,that because of the policy of reformation and opening to the outside world, the great changes occurred in politics,economy and culture have impacted on the existing gender structure and the traditional gender idea,and that the inclusion to social culture and the pluralistic tendency of value orientation also support the gender liberation,and that the appearance of a variety of new gender images and new Masculinities/Femininities will surely drive the structural change of intersexual powers,accelerating the change of gender rules.