Lecture Notes in Education Psychology and Public Media

- The Open Access Proceedings Series for Conferences


Lecture Notes in Education Psychology and Public Media

Vol. 1, 26 December 2021


Open Access | Article

Empower or disempower? The Cunning Patriarchal Consumerism and Female Representation in the Chinese Online Shopping Festival “Queen’s Day”

Xiaohan Huang * 1
1 Department of Media and Communication Studies, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University

* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Advances in Humanities Research, Vol. 1, 170-181
Published 26 December 2021. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by EWA Publishing
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Citation Xiaohan Huang. Empower or disempower? The Cunning Patriarchal Consumerism and Female Representation in the Chinese Online Shopping Festival “Queen’s Day”. LNEP (2021) Vol. 1: 170-181. DOI: 10.54254/2753-7048/1/ICEIPI_193.

Abstract

Chinese online shopping festival has become increasingly important to research on cultural and societal issues related to gender. This paper focuses on the Chinese online shopping festival “3.8 Queen’s Day”, investigates the relationship between female empowerment and patriarchal consumerism power embedded in “Queen’s Day” in context of Chinese society. This paper analyses the reason of the popularity of “Queen’s Day” through the historical and societal perspective, and by critical discourse analysis of the advertisements and slogans in “Queen’s Day”, the patriarchal power presented by dominant male aesthetics and patriarchal discourse have been found. Then, through renaming “Women’s Day” and the word “Women” (“妇女” in Chinese) to “Queen”, it can be seen that patriarchal consumerism discourse has done alienation towards female by deconstructing the historical and societal meaning of the “Women’s Day”. This paper uncovers the cunning of patriarchal consumerism as inconspicuous male power seemingly empowers but actually disempowers female through ads that advocate “female independence”.

Keywords

male gaze, female empowerment, Chinese online shopping festival, patriarchal consumerism

References

1. Xu, C. (2020, March 9). "3.8 Queen's Day" Taobao live streaming led to a 264% year-on-year increase in sales. The Beijing News. Retrieved from: http://www.bjnews.com.cn/finance/2020/03/09/701304.html

2. Southern Finance Omnimedia Corp. (2021). Report on the Trend of Live Streaming in 2020 [Online]. Retrieved from: https://m.21jingji.com/live/show?id=682

3. Niu, Q.X. (2020). Goddess Festival, Queen's Day, 38 festival, Is this the rising of female awareness or hypersensitivity behind the frequent name changes? (in Chinese). Modern Advertising, 2020(06), 22-23.

4. Meng, B.C. & Huang, Y.N. (2017) Patriarchal capitalism with Chinese characteristics: gendered discourse of ‘Double Eleven’ shopping festival, Cultural Studies, 31(5), 659-684, DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2017.1328517

5. Chen, T.Z. & Cheung, M. (2020) Consumption as extended carnival on Tmall in contemporary China: a social semiotic multimodal analysis of interactive banner ads, Social Semiotics, DOI: 10.1080/10350330.2020.1720992

6. Hu, C.Y. & Luo, M.X. (2016). A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Tmall's Double Eleven Advertisement. English Language Teaching, v9 n8, 156-169

7. Yang, S.M. (2007). The shaping of ideal female image by Confucianism in Han Dynasty and the gap between it and reality (in Chinese). Nandu Xuetan, 2007(06), 6-9.

8. Gao, X. (2003). Women existing for men: Confucianism and social injustice against women in China. Race, gender & class, 114-125.

9. Leung, A. S. (2003). Feminism in transition: Chinese culture, ideology and the development of the women's movement in China. Asia Pacific journal of management, 20(3), 359-374.

10. Yi, Y.Z. (2006). The basic connotation of Chinese traditional female ethics (in Chinese). Journal of China Women's University, 2006(03), 43-46.

11. Kang, M. E. (1997). The portrayal of women’s images in magazine advertisements: Goffman’s gender analysis revisited. Sex roles, 37(11-12), 979-996. doi:10.1007/bf02936350

12. Luo, Y.J., & Hao, X.M. (2007). Media Portrayal of Women and Social Change. Feminist Media Studies, 7(3), 281– 298. doi:10.1080/14680770701477891

13. Chen, F. (2013). To explore the female image in advertisements from the perspective of feminism (in Chinese) (Master’s Thesis). Available from CNKI database.

14. Wu, A. X., & Dong, Y. (2019). What is made-in-China feminism (s)? Gender discontent and class friction in post￾socialist China. Critical Asian Studies, 51(4), 471-492.

15. Soar, M. (2000). Encoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising Production. Mass Communication and Society, 3(4), 415–437. doi:10.1207/s15327825mcs0304_05

16. Ritzer, G. & Jurgenson, N. (2010). Production, Consumption, Prosumption. Journal of Consumer Culture, 10(1), 13–36. doi:10.1177/1469540509354673

17. Meehan, E. R. (2012). Gendering the commodity audience: Critical media research, feminism, and political economy. Media and cultural studies: Keyworks, 242-249.

18. Kaur, K., Arumugam, N. & Yunus, N.M. (2013). Beauty Product Advertisements: A Critical Discourse Analysis. Asian Social Science, 9(3), 61-71. doi:10.5539/ass.v9n3p61.

19. Xu, H.M. & Tan, Y.Y. (2020). Can Beauty Advertisements Empower Women? A Critical Discourse Analysis of the SK-II’s “Change Destiny” Campaign. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 10(2), 176-188.

20. Xu, Y. (2019). Reflection on the discipline of female body consumption under visual metaphors (in Chinese). Journal of Yichun College, 41(8), 50-54.

21. Zhou, Q.Y. & Sun, H.Y. (2020). "Constructed" Body—Influence on Female Body Aesthetics from the Perspective of Mass Media (in Chinese). Popular Art, 2020(19), 227-228.

22. Fei, X.T. (2005) "Common Beauty" and Human Civilization (Part 1) (in Chinese). Qunyan, 2005(1), 17-20.

23. Wallis, C. (2014). Gender and China’s Online Censorship Protest Culture. Feminist Media Studies, 15(2), 223– 238. doi:10.1080/14680777.2014.928645

24. Chen, Y. (2010). International Women's Day: The Special Field and Public Cultural Space of Chinese Women's Movement (in Chinese). Collection of Women's Studies, 2010(2), 41-47.

25. Kong, H.B. (1994). The spread of International Women's Day in China (in Chinese). Collection of Women's Studies, 1994(1), 47-50.

Data Availability

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Authors who publish this series agree to the following terms:

1. Authors retain copyright and grant the series right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this series.

2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the series's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this series.

3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See Open Access Instruction).

Volume Title
Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Educational Innovation and Philosophical Inquiries (ICEIPI 2021), Part 1
ISBN (Print)
978-1-915371-00-3
ISBN (Online)
978-1-915371-01-0
Published Date
26 December 2021
Series
Lecture Notes in Education Psychology and Public Media
ISSN (Print)
2753-7048
ISSN (Online)
2753-7056
DOI
10.54254/2753-7048/1/ICEIPI_193
Copyright
© 2023 The Author(s)
Open Access
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Copyright © 2023 EWA Publishing. Unless Otherwise Stated