Media Dissemination and Public Reception of Gender Discourse in 1990s Chinese Women's Literature

This paper aims to examine the role that media played in the construction and delivery of the post 1980s Chinese women’s literature and culture as a form of feminist discourse with reference to both traditional and emergent media thus managing the constituent emergence and circulation. Based on a review of five seminal papers, this study presents an analysis that identifies the duality of the media as both enabling and constraining environments. Traditional media contributed to the perpetuation of patriarchal gender roles and ideologies, whereas social media provided possibilities for the reclamation of feminism. The study helps in shifting the understanding of how issues of gender were framed in the Chinese media during the socio-cultural change period and throws light on the changes in the role of engaged feminist media.