“Leftover Woman” Narration: The Detour and Revival of Masculism

In China, “leftover woman” is a derogatory term to describe women who are still single after their mid-twenties. Being unmarried after a certain age is deemed as a personal defect for them. Women’s value seems to decrease as they grow older. In public discourse, leftover women are blamed and denied; they are treated like a problem to be solved or a predicament to be escaped from. Even though Chinese women’s social status has increased a lot in the past decades, they still cannot avoid being regulated by patriarchal values that demand women should undoubtedly take up domestic roles.

Although leftover women are stigmatized in public discourse, their portrayal in TV drama seems to be rather positive. One of the reasons for TV drama’s positive representation is that feminist values are becoming more and more prevalent in Chinese society. Any obvious and straightforward operation of masculism in media productions will easily trigger resistance from audience. To effectively operate in contemporary China, masculism needs to take a circuitous strategy to avoid the resistance.

In China’s TV series, leftover women’s pursuits for career development are tolerated within a certain limit. Such limit is that they show strong desire for marriage. In my study, I’d like to argue that masculism has borrowed the logic of neoliberalism by advocating the legitimacy of women’s personal choice and personal pleasure. It promotes the idea that feminist’s movement of improving women’s rights in public sphere is not the end of female empowerment. Nowadays, women’s rights have already increased a lot in public sphere; the empowerment for them could go further by fulfilling their personal desire. Masculism strategically equals marriage as women’s personal choice and pursuit of happiness. The strategy will allow masculim to conceal its authoritarian and oppressive identity, hide in the trend of female empowerment and finally strengthen gender inequality in a more open and flexible way.

This study is a critical analysis of the Chinese TV series about “leftover woman” and will adopt the method of multimodal discourse analysis established by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen. The method will help me go into every detail of the Chinese narratives concerned. It will not only identify the traditional masculist discourse and neoliberal discourse in leftover woman narration. It will further explore the dynamic interactions, negotiations and tensions among different gender discourses in the construction of leftover woman.