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

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.

Constructing images of HCWs in Chinese government Weibo posts: a discourse-historical approach

“…In times of crisis, the construction of images is crucial in shaping public perception, influencing behavior, and managing narratives associated with the event or situation. Thus, image construction has attracted significant scholarly attention, leading researchers to explore the construction of diverse images of social actors, events, and activities in public discourses surrounding crises (e.g., Valdebenito, 2013;Wang, 2016;Wang and Liu, 2019;Sun and Chałupnik, 2022;Wang and Yao, 2022). For instance, Valdebenito (2013)…”

“…Role labels such as "父亲" ("father"), "妈妈" ("mother"), "子女" ("children"), "丈夫" ("husband"), and "妻子" ("wife") were primarily used to depict HCWs as ordinary individuals in the domestic sphere (Sun and Chałupnik, 2022). In referring to HCWs using these role labels, @healthchina created an emotional connection between HCWs and the public and invoked societal expectations for them.…”

The invisible frontline of the COVID-19 pandemic: Examining sourcing and the underrepresentation of female expertise in pandemic news coverage

“…Yet, Domínguez and Sapiña (2022) examined cartoons depicting male and female scientists and healthcare workers in the context of the pandemic and found that doctors and researchers were mostly depicted as men. Similarly, a discourse analysis of news media coverage in China concluded that when female medical workers were featured in the news media focused more on their appearance rather than their medical expertise (Sun and Chałupnik, 2022). Beyond these two studies, less attention has been dedicated to understanding the gender distribution of medical experts quoted within the news media.…”

The Discourse Construction of the Image of Medical Workers in News Discourse

“…Published by Francis Academic Press, UK -139-discourse analysts have begun to pay attention to the construction of healthcare worker images. For example, X Sun and Malgorzata Chalupnik [6] employed a corpus-based critical discourse analysis approach to compare the portrayal of female medical workers and general medical workers in online news reports on the Weibo platform. Their aim was to investigate how the image of female healthcare professionals is represented in online news and the underlying ideologies.…”