Reprivatized Womanhood: Changes in Mainstream Media's Framing of Urban Women's Issues in China, 1995–2012
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12219 |
| Author | Feinian Chen,Shengwei Sun |
| Published date | 01 October 2015 |
| Date | 01 October 2015 |
S S F C University of Maryland
Reprivatized Womanhood: Changes in Mainstream
Media’s Framing of Urban Women’s Issues in
China, 1995–2012
After waves of women’s liberation movements,
the reform era has witnessed a puzzling stag-
nation, if not decline, in women’s status in
China. Among the existing literature on the
changing public gender discourse in postso-
cialist China, few studies have substantially
engaged with feminist critiques of the “sepa-
rate spheres” as an analytical framework.In this
study the authors performed content analyses on
202 articles drawn from 3 Chinese mainstream
magazines between 1995 and 2012 to describe
changes in media’s framing of urban women’s
issues. Over time, topics on marriage and pri-
vate relationships became increasinglypredomi-
nant, while concerns over gender discrimination
diminished in the mainstream media. The results
provide evidence for a revitalization of tradi-
tional gender values attributing women to “pri-
vate” spheres and reveal the media’s repeated
use of individualistic approaches to structural
problems, suggesting an alliance between patri-
archal and neoliberal ideologiesin shaping pub-
lic gender discourse while concealing structural
inequalities in urban China.
From the revolutionary statement “Women
can hold up half the sky” (Funü nengding
Department of Sociology, Universityof Maryland, 2112
Art–Sociology Building, College Park, MD 20742
(ssun88@umd.edu).
This article was edited by Yingchun Ji.
Key Words: content analysis, families and work, feminist,
gender,marriage and close relationships, media.
banbiantian) during the Maoist era to the pop-
ular sentiment of “Better marrying well than
having a successful career” (Gandehao buru
jiadehao) in contemporary time, public gender
discourses in China have undergone funda-
mental shifts in the course of marketization.
Since the early 1950s, the Chinese government
has endorsed the Marxist prescription for lib-
eration through labor, resulting in one of the
highest female labor force participation rates
in the world. The economic reform that began
in the late 1970s delivered mixed inuences
on the condition of gender equality in China.
Intensied economic reform since the 1990s,
the massive loss of jobs by women workers,
the widening of the gender gap in various labor
market outcomes, the commercialization of
women’s bodies, and the cultural devaluation
of women led many Chinese feminist scholars
to conclude that the economic reform has set
back the efforts toward women’s liberation
(see Wu, 2010, for review). While recognizing
the negative effects of marketization and the
privatization of social services on women’s
status, others also point to the positive side and
argue that the market reform has opened up
new possibilities for the awakening of women’s
self-awareness (Lin, 1998).
It is under this historical context that with
this study we sought to contribute to the
ongoing debate on the cultural construction
of gender norms in the public discourse in
contemporary urban China by highlighting the
gendered “separate spheres” ideology that has
been gaining prominence in the course of market
Journal of Marriage and Family 77 (October 2015): 1091–1107 1091
DOI:10.1111/jomf.12219
1092 Journal of Marriage and Family
reform. It resonates with the long patriarchal
tradition in Chinese society as summarized in
the dictum “Men manage external affairs while
women make home” (Nan zhu wai, nü zhu nei).
What kinds of issues related to urban women
are being discussed in the mainstream media?
How do the mainstream media frame women’s
issues? Do the media’s framing change over
time, and what do these changing patterns reveal
about the shifting social context in reform-era
China? Drawing on feminist critiques of the
public–private divide, our study builds on exist-
ing literature to investigate the changing gender
discourse as being reected in the mainstream
media’s framing of issues related to women
under the context of marketization.
Through conducting both interpretative and
quantitative content analyses on 202 articles
drawn from three Chinese mainstream mag-
azines between 1995 and 2012, in this study
we provide empirical evidence of the media’s
increasing use of individualistic framing that
works in favor of traditional gender ideology,
thus revealing the specic ways in which the
dominant public discourse regulates gender
norms in urban China. We argue that such an
alliance between neoliberal rhetoric empha-
sizing individual choice and traditional gender
ideology attributing women to private spheres
works to justify gender inequality that has been
exacerbated by marketization by framing the
resurgent emphasis on women’s private issues
and domestic responsibilities as a matter of
neutral, rational, and individual preference. The
results of this study call into question the individ-
ualist approach to addressing gender inequality
and underscore the critical need to address the
structural roots of gender inequalities in both
public and private spheres.
B: G C’
T S
Beginning in the early 1950s, the Chinese
communist government endorsed Marxist ideas
about women’s liberation and devoted major
efforts to promote women’s labor force partic-
ipation. Such a redenition of gender relations
took place under the broader context of socialist
transformation in which the work was collec-
tivized, private ownership was relinquished,
and the family activities and personal lives
became subject to state control (Hendersen &
Entwisle, 2000). State propaganda promoted
images of the “Iron Girls” to glorify women’s
public roles as workers in conventionally
male-dominated elds (Honig, 2000; Jin, 2007).
Despite the seeming elevation of women’sstatus
in the workplace, gender inequality persisted
throughout the Maoist era. The Communist
government’s limited prescription of gender
reform, which primarily focused on women’s
participation in socialist production, failed to
acknowledge gender inequalities in other arenas,
including the gendered division of household
labor, wage discrimination, and gender segre-
gation in the workplace (Bian, Logan, & Shu,
2000).
With the economic reform since the late
1970s, the Communist state gradually retreated
from its former role of social service provision,
leaving class and gender relations fundamentally
transgured by the market forces. Although the
privatization of the Chinese economy changed
the nature of work in China and created new
domains for women (Goodman, 2004; Wylie,
2004), the reform era is also marked by steep
increases in income inequality along gender
and class lines in urban China and along the
rural–urban divide, propelled by the market
reallocation of resources and rewards (Davis &
Wang, 2009; Gao & Riskin, 2009). Researchers
have identied persistent gender inequalities in
terms of declining employment rates for women,
a widening male–female wage gap, and increas-
ing gender segregation in the urban labor market
as a result of the expansion of a market economy
and the changes in state policies (Dong, Yang,
Du, & Ding, 2006; Giles, Park, & Cai, 2006;
Shu, 2005; Shu & Bian, 2003). In the domestic
sphere, there is no clear sign of a declining gen-
der gap in housework (Chen, 2005). The retreat
of the state from social welfare provision and
the privatization of social services have shifted
care responsibilities primarily to the family, in
particular women (Cook & Dong, 2011; Du &
Dong, 2010). As the market transition reshapes
the institutional arrangement of care, women
are increasingly caught between the double bind
of work and domestic labor.
Accompanying China’s economic restructur-
ing, the early 1990s witnessed a signicant shift
in the cultural milieu toward a mass culture
of consumerism. Gender scholars interested in
postsocialist China have critiqued the objec-
tication of women’s bodies along with the
creation of a “commodied subjectivity” for
women (e.g., Hooper, 1994, 1998). Also in the
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