Hiding women healthcare workers in the media spotlight
How the Chinese state media represented women HCWs in response to the Covid-19-engendered crises
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12688983 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Hao Cao (0000-0001-6379-2912, Wuhan University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 918-936 |
| Publication date | 2022-01-12 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Feminist Media Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1468-0777 • E-ISSN: 1471-5902 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/14680777.2021.2018009 |
| OpenAlex | W4205634195 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 28 |
As the first country to be hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese government was confronted by the dual crisis in public health and gender domination. How did the Chinese official media discursively respond to the crises? Using qualitative content analysis and critical discourse analysis, this study examines the Chinese state media’s discursive tactics amidst the COVID-19-engendered crises that destabilized the gendered symbolic order. Examining six party organs’ coverage of healthcare workers (HCWs) on Weibo in the first half of 2020, the findings show that the state media managed to achieve two seemingly incompatible objectives—valorizing women HCWs while maintaining gender domination—through selective visibility and the manipulation of the discourses of domesticity and femininity. While women HCWs were given considerable attention and valorized for their sacrifice and emotional labor, they were relegated to marginal topical areas and demanded to suppress their private and bodily needs. This study, henceforth, contributes to extant feminist studies by unraveling the sophisticated representational devices employed by powerholders in coping with crises in the gendered symbolic regime and the contradictions in such maneuvers that portent subversion of these very strategies of discursive domestication
China · Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19 · Critical discourse analysis · Femininity · Government (linguistics · Health care · Pandemic · Political economy · Political science · Sociology · State (computer science · Subversion · Gender Politics and Representation · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Gender, Security, and Conflict · Law · Medicine
Media Commercialization and Authoritarian Rule in China
Impact on mental health and perceptions of psychological care among medical and nursing staff in Wuhan during the 2019 novel coronavirus disease outbreak
Interpreting the crisis
Our Covid Conjuncture
Are women still “the other”? Gendered mental health interventions for health care workers in Spain during Covid-19
Searching for an online space for feminism? The Chinese feminist group Gender Watch Women’s Voice and its changing approaches to online misogyny
Intersectional digital feminism
Haunting juxtapositions
Let feminists tell me my fault”
From Developmentalism to the HIV/Aids Crisis
The European Commission's Neoliberal Trade Discourse since the Crisis
Overcoming the ‘tyranny of the urgent’
Information Management During Crisis Events
Of Crises and Conjunctures
Detention of the Feminist Five in China
SuperNurse? Troubling the Hero Discourse in Covid Times
Conjunctures, crises, and cultures
Crisis' and Migration in Poland
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2024 - 2025 (2) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |