“I’m a female-PhD and I’m married”: resisting gender stereotypes of female PhDs on Zhihu

ABSTRACT

While most of the studies have focused on how female PhDs are stereotypically depicted as a sexless third gender and an ultimate leftover in Chinese mainstream media representation, little attention has been paid to how such negative stereotypic representation and its underlying patriarchy are resisted. Drawing on feminist critical discourse analysis (Lazar, 2005, 2014) and legitimization strategies (van Leeuwen, 2007, 2017), this study sets out to investigate how the discursive legitimizing strategies for female PhDs play out on Chinese social media by employing a corpus-assisted approach. The data for the present study comprise 2,124 posts retrieved from China’s most popular community question-answering (CQA) site – Zhihu. It is revealed that Zhihu users commonly employ (1) personal authority, specifically that of female PhDs, to establish legitimacy; (2) moral evaluation, involving negation, affirmation and re-evaluation to legitimize the presence of female PhDs and their marital practices; (3) rationalization, including definition, explanation, means-orientation and goal-orientation to achieve the social empowerment of female PhDs. Also, this study probes into the ideologies implicated by the use of these discursive practices in relation to the wider sociocultural contexts. The implications may hopefully shed light on the optimal ways for female PhDs’ advocacy in contemporary China.

KEYWORDS:

• Female PhDs
• legitimization strategies
• Zhihu
• resistance
• ideology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The question is available at https://www.zhihu.com/question/277993892

2. The question is available at https://www.zhihu.com/question/20174795

3. To distinguish the Chinese nvbo (two characters) and nvboshi (three characters), both of which have the same meaning, we use female-PhD to refer to the former and female PhD to refer to the latter.

Additional information

Funding

This study has been supported by the Project of Humanities and Social Sciences, Ministry of Education, People’s Republic of China [Grant No. 22YJA740005].

Notes on contributors

Rongji Zhang

Rongji Zhang is currently a PhD candidate of linguistics at the School of Foreign Languages, Sun Yat-sen University. His research interests include gender studies, corpus linguistics and (critical) discourse analysis.

Yumin Chen

Yumin Chen is currently a Professor of linguistics at the School of Foreign Languages, Sun Yat-sen University. Her research interests include functional linguistics, social semiotics and discourse analysis. Her recent publications include research articles in the journals Semiotica, Discourse & Communication, Visual Communication, and Linguistics and Education.

Xiang Zhao

Xiang Zhao is currently a Lecturer of new media at the School of Literature and Communication, Guangdong Polytechnic Normal University. His research interests include computational communication and media studies.