Performative equality and state feminism

Abstract This study examines how contemporary Chinese EFL textbooks construct gendered meanings through everyday pedagogical discourse. Drawing on a corpus of 743 mixed-gender dialogues extracted from 72 state-approved primary and secondary EFL textbooks and employing corpus-based Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA), the study investigates both patterns of gender representation and the discourse-pragmatic mechanisms through which gendered identities and social roles are constructed. Although female and male characters appear in broadly comparable proportions across the corpus, systematic differences emerge in occupational positioning, epistemic authority, interactional agency, affective positioning, and domestic responsibility. Building on these findings, the study proposes performative equality as an analytical concept that captures the coexistence of visible numerical gender parity and persistent discursive inequality in educational texts. The findings demonstrate that state-approved textbooks mediate broader policy discourses while highlighting the importance of evaluating textbook equality beyond numerical representation to encompass discourse-pragmatic dimensions of authority, knowledge, care, and social roles.