The Alienation of Women’s Discourse on Chinese Social Media

Nanjing University Jinling College, Nanjing 210089, China

Abstract

The burgeoning gendered terms and the derogatory languages that underpin the patriarchy on Chinese social media emerge as an encumbrance to the development of women’s discourse which is plagued with discourse alienation. Given this, this paper reviews the recent research progress into the alienation of women’s discourse on Chinese social media, to manifest the representations of discourse alienation produced by language and to seek possible solutions for constructing healthy women’s discourse. Through analyzing the alienation from the lens of language, this review cites examples in previous research to illustrate how Chinese characters and language relating to women with positive meaning have been derogated, and demonstrates that women’s ways to express in the public sphere are influenced by male-dominated discourse. Three factors conspire to the alienation of women’s discourse, namely the consumerism fueled by Internet communication, the imbalance between the progress of women and ingrained patriarchal culture in the Chinese context, and the passive action taken by women themselves. Major findings were: 1) Chinese-language social media is the breeding ground for the burgeoning gendered terms that stigmatize women’s cohort and muffle women’s discourse; 2) Social media platform perpetuates the patriarchal ideology and consumerism, leading to the alienation of women’s discourse; 3)Women usually plunge into the impasse of men’s discourse by borrowing, imitating and adopting men’s language to express themselves. This paper also indicates the problem of the operation mechanism of social media platform by excessively spreading biased gender representations, which can be addressed with the establishment of a corpora of gender-biased expressions to detect and curb their dissemination.