Paper 027: Media Representations of ‘Leftover Women’ in China: A Corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Analysis
Yating YU, Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Keywords: Leftover Women; Media Representations; Corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Analysis; Gender Ideologies; Chinese English-language News Media
Abstract
The term ‘leftover women’, commonly referring to single women older than 27, has been in popular use in Chinese media since 2007. This study investigates how leftover women are linguistically represented in the English-language news media in China by employing a corpus-assisted approach to critical discourse analysis (CDA). A specialised corpus of 303 English news articles (i.e., 236,254 words), covering the years between 2007 and 2017, was built for this purpose. This study adopts a three-step procedure (i.e. identification, interpretation, and explanation) to examine the immediate co-texts of the lemma LEFTOVER WOMAN by combining the corpus linguistics (CL) concept (i.e. Sinclair’s Meaning Shift Units) and techniques (i.e. collocates and concordances) and CDA approaches (van Leeuwen’s sociosemantic approach, Charteris-Black’s critical metaphor analysis, and Lazar’s feminist critical discourse analysis). These findings shed light on media representations of leftover women, the contested ideologies emerging from these representations, and how shifting gender politics and identity shapes and is shaped by media in the world’s most populous nation. Additionally, this study contributes to the growing literature of corpus-assisted CDA in the domain of gender representations by proposing an analytical framework that is potentially applicable to future research.
References
Charteris-Black, J. (2004). Corpus approaches to critical metaphor analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lazar, M. M. (2007). Feminist critical discourse analysis: Articulating a feminist discourse praxis. Critical Discourse Studies, 4(2), 141–164. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405900701464816 Sinclair, J. M. (1996). The search for Units of Meaning. Textus, IX(1), 75–106. Sinclair, J. M. (2004). Trust the text. London: Routledge. van Leeuwen, T. (2008). Discourse and practice: New tools for critical discourse analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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This looks to be a very interesting paper. I hope you enjoy the conference! – Organizing committee
Thank you for a very interesting presentation. But why 27?
Are there any equivalent expressions for leftover men? What age in the case of men?
Are young Hong Kong people feeling in the same way? I heard some people celebrate Singles’ Day. Thank you. Yuka from Japan
@Yuka
Thank you very much for your interesting question. I want to know why 27 too. Haha. It was just decided by the state media or someone else. Yes, there is such a term called “leftover men”. However, it is not as frequently used as “leftover women” and it was not listed as an official neologism like “leftover women”. There is not a defined age for men at all. Yes, in China we celebrate Singles’ Day for commercial reasons to boost the economy, but it is not really to celebrate singlehood. Young people in Hong Kong are totally different from people in Mainland China and Hong Kongers tend to be more open-minded. A lot of people in Hong Kong just choose to not to get married or have children.
-Tiffany
Thank you for your interesting talk. This time you collected data from four newspapers: China Daily, Shanghai Daily, Global Times, and Shenzhen Daily, and treated them as one dataset. Just a quick question. Are these roughly equal types of newspapers? Or is there some kind of difference in their political orientations? (Shin Ishikawa, Kobe U)
@Shin Ishikawa
Thank you very much for your good question.
These newspapers can be treated as a homogeneous group because they are all controlled by the Chinese government!
-Yating YU
I see. Thank you for clarification!
“Left over” is a word used for food, and even in Japan, older unmarried women are often compared to unsold Christmas cake. I was wondering if comparing women to leftover “food” is an Asian cultural practice. If the question is about freshness, you could compare them to flowers or other things. Men are the eaters and women are to be eaten, or men are the buyers and women are to be bought, both of which indicate male behavior of “eat” or “buy”. I wonder if this is a characteristic of language metaphors in Asian cultures or if it is the same in other cultures.
@YUKIE KONDO
Thank you very much for your interesting question. Yes, I have heard of that term “Christmas cakes”. I think comparing women to leftover “food” or commodities is not only an Asian cultural practice but it also applies to other continents. The FOOD metaphors reduce women to edible substances, which tend to carry a negative evaluation. This reflects the conceptual metaphors “LUST IS HUNGER” and “THE OBJECT OF LUST IS FOOD”. In other words, the sex appeal of a woman is compared to the attraction of food. Whether a woman is desirable or not largely depends on her youth and physical attraction. In the case of leftover women, since they have passed the age of 27 which is regarded as a use-by date, they are seen as undesirable like “spoiled food”, implying the traditional patriarchal ideology.