Sacrificing long hair and the domestic sphere: Reporting on female medical workers in Chinese online news during Covid-19

Sun, Xinmei; Chałupnik, Małgorzata

Abstract

In the context of the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, female medical staff constituted a large proportion of frontline healthcare workers in China, with 50% of doctors and over 90% of nurses being women. In this paper, we aim to examine how these medical workers were represented at the start of the pandemic in online news reports posted on one of China’s most popular social media platforms, Weibo. In the paper, we draw upon corpus-based critical discourse analysis, comparing representations of female medical workers to those of medical workers in general. We observe that not only are female medical workers portrayed through a predominantly gendered lens, but they are also subordinated to the needs of the state. We consider the role played by state-controlled media in regulating the position of (working) women in society and probe into rhetorical means through which this is achieved.

Citation

Sun, X., & Chałupnik, M. (2022). Sacrificing long hair and the domestic sphere: Reporting on female medical workers in Chinese online news during Covid-19. Discourse and Society, https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265221096029

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Mar 11, 2022
• Online Publication Date: May 19, 2022
• Publication Date: May 19, 2022
• Deposit Date: Jun 21, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 22, 2022
• Journal: Discourse and Society
• Print ISSN: 0957-9265
• Electronic ISSN: 1460-3624
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265221096029
• Keywords: Linguistics and Language; Sociology and Political Science; Language and Linguistics; Communication
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/7610943
• Publisher URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09579265221096029