"Girls' Day" Banners On University Campus As Gender Discourse:A CDA Perspective

At present,China is at an era of "gender awakening",up from the world of academics and art and down to the corners of all social media.Gender issues have always been the focus of attention of social studies.As a new festival emerged from Chinese universities,"Girls'Day" has received extensive public attention in recent years,and " Girls'Day Ban-ners " have been most extensively reported.However,in these banners,"My mother said she must have a girl from our school as her daughter-in-law","If you don t accompany her on Girls' Day today,tomorrow someone else will celebrate Women s Day with her."and other gender-stereotyped messages frequently appear.This paper examines 283"Girls'Day" banners,collected from identifiable online sources or local universities from 2016 to 2018.The language used on banners is taken as the re-search object,and the three-dimensional framework of Fairclough as well as his concept of recontextualization are employed to analyze the data.Firstly,the linguistic features embod-ied in the collected banners are described and interpreted at the textual and interactional level in the three-dimensional framework.At the textual level,Halliday s approaches to transitivity and interpersonal meaning are applied;at the interaction level,this analysis fo-cuses on the phenomena of presupposition,objectification,identification.,intertextuality(with web-styled language and classical poems),etc.and then analyses the discourse prac-tice and social practice of Girls'Day banners from a more macro level with the help of re-contextualization,in an effort to reveal the dialectical relationship between gender discourse and gender reality in universities.This study concludes that as typical gender discourse,most banners are produced with a male tone out of good wishes and compliments,but at the same time,a well-meant discursive event can reflect the general social attitude toward females.From how male students express their ideas in relation to female peers,we can see how the slogans are discursively shaping and shaped by ideologies of female identity and the asymmetrical power relations between the two genders,even at universities where students are generally believed to have received better education.If not given due attention,such gender discourse might help reproduce gender inequality in universities and among the general public at large.