A Critical Discourse Analysis Approach Towards Gender Representations In A Chinese Children’s Cartoons:Pleasant Goat And Big Big Wolf

Gender inequality has always been a critical social issue. Misrepresentations of gender in various media will affect how human perceive and perform gender. This is especially the case when it comes to the process of children’s gender socialization. A critical review of the literature shows that gender representations and stereotypes in children’s books and cartoons are widely researched in abroad, most of which, however, are conducted from a sociocultural perspective by calculating frequencies of characters’ names and volume of their speech while few are conducted from a linguistic perspective. In China, however, empirical studies of gender representations in children’s cartoons are scarce. Considering the role of language of maintaining social ideology, the present study holds that it is of critical importance to investigate this issue from a linguistic perspective in order to find out not only how gender differences are presented, but also how language produce and reinforce gender ideology in cartoons.Adopting a critical discourse analysis approach, the present study aims to investigate linguistic data in a popular Chinese cartoon series, Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf. Thirty episodes of linguistic data were collected and transcribed to form a small-size corpus. Following the analyzing frameworks of Systemic Functional Grammar, data analysis and discussion show that (1) male characters produce more imperative commands to direct others and speak with high value of probability and high degrees of forcefulness, whereas female characters use more interrogative questions to demand good&services and speak with low value of probability and low degrees of forcefulness;(2) interpretations under social context suggest that males are presented as more powerful and capable, and with higher social status, while females are constructed to be less informed and powerless, and paying excessive attention to their looks, which shows consistency with traditional gender stereotypes;(3) prevailing gender ideology in society is conveyed through the interactions between characters, and traditional gender stereotypes are confirmed in this cartoon.The present study intends to use a critical discourse analysis approach to investigate gender representation in children’s cartoons, endeavoring to reveal how gender is represented and constructed to be different or biased through discourses of characters instead of stating the differences of language use between two genders in previous studies. Implications of the study are (1) scriptwriters of children’s cartoons should be more cautious about their character building and language use in case of transferring stereotyped gender ideology to children;(2) misrepresentations of gender in cartoons will influence how children perceive and perform gender, so adults should raise their gender awareness, parents should be more careful about their children’s gender socialization as well, and the department related to cartoon production and publication should be aware of the gender and gender equality issue and be cautious about possible misrepresentations and stereotypes of gender.