Representations of Chinese gendered and racialised bodies in contemporary media sites

ABSTRACT

Social media are influential sociocultural forces that construct and transmit information about gender, health and bodies to young people in the digital age. In health and physical activity, Chinese people are often represented and positioned differently to other (minority) ethnic groups. For example, Black young people are often understood as having low academic motivations and aspirations but as ‘natural’ athletes; in contrast, Chinese young people, seen as the ‘model minority’ who excel in STEM subjects, are fragile, reserved and disinterested in physical movements. These public forms of representation may sit in opposition to the young people’s embodied identity. When these misrepresentations are internalised, issues such as micro-aggression and racism may have an impact on Chinese young people’s health and wellbeing. This paper aims to examine how Chinese bodies are gendered and racialised in contemporary social media sites (e.g. Google News, LiveJournal, Medium, Wordpress). Drawing on critical discourse analysis and Foucault’s concepts of normalisation and discursive practice, the paper will problematise the often taken-for-granted gendered and racialised stereotypes related to Chinese physicality and health on social media sites. Implications for developing future research and teaching resources in critical media health literacy for young people on issues related to gender and equity will be provided. The results affect how we understand, represent, and discuss Chinese (young) people on social media sites, thereby how Chinese young people engage, construct, and perform their embodied identities in Western, English speaking societies.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese bodies
• critical discourse analysis
• race
• gender
• critical media health literacy
• social media

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In the UK, Black denotes an ethnic minority group which includes Black African, Caribbean and Black British (Office for National Statistics, 2012). Ethnic minority refers to a socially identified population which shares distinctive characteristics and differentiates themselves from the dominant group and/or that experiences disadvantages or inequality as a result of discrimination (Healey, 2006).

2. White is used as a racial term in this paper. Race is understood as a social construct more than a physical essentialism. The concept of race is useful for the interrogation of power relations, in particular to who has the power to define race and its social consequences in everyday practice (Fenton, 2010).

3. Non-white is used in this paper to denote people who are not of European origin and those who do not have the skin colour of European descent.

4. Dual femininities is an attempt to balance ‘modern’ and traditional Chinese ideals in being a modern female. This concept embodies both ‘autonomous’ and ‘dependence’ aspects of femininity and provides an alternative lens that argues against the neoliberal discourses of aspirations, individualism and personal responsibility (Pang & Hill, 2018).

5. Louie (2002) discusses the wen-wu paradigm that originates from the Yin–Yang system and is useful in explaining the conceptualisation of Chinese male and female body practices in contemporary culture. Wen includes qualities such as scholarly, mental and literary, and Wu includes qualities such as martial arts, physical skills and power.