East Asian Linguistics Workshop: "The blurred lines between pop culture and party propaganda: Two sexist labels in China’s convergence culture"

In this talk I present two studies that examine sexist labeling in contemporary China through the lens of convergence culture. The first study explores mĕinǚ ‘beautiful women’, a viral personal label and social address that evokes hegemonic femininity. Data from Chinese social media and digital state media shows that both popular media and state media feed into the seemingly unending career of mĕinǚ in the digital media ecosystem where they interact in complex yet patterned ways. To probe the use and perception of mĕinǚ across social categories, a survey of native speakers (n=294) identified a generational contestation of the term, foreshadowing a divergence among Chinese youth from the hegemonic gender ideology reproduced and perpetuated in the convergence of pop culture, beauty economy, and state sanction. The second study explores xiăojiĕjiĕ ‘little older sister’, a new viral diminutive form of reference and address based on fictive kinship, an apparent successor of mĕinǚ. Data tracing the digital trajectories of the term in WeChat public accounts shows a similar convergence of popular media and state media whereby the latter eagerly appropriates the memetic style of the former in positive-energy discourse. A perception survey of Chinese university students (n=133) on headlines from WeChat public postings provided converging evidence of the blurred boundaries between popular and state media uses of xiăojiĕjiĕ. Drawing implications for convergence culture as a theoretical framework, I argue that convergence is patterned and that patterns of convergence can be described and conceptualized at finer granularity and may be more predictable than assumed. 

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Zhuo Jing-Schmidt is Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures and Director of the Chinese Flagship Program at the University of Oregon.