Representations of ‘leftover women’ in the Chinese English-medium newspapers

Abstract

Previous media studies have largely examined the media construction of ‘leftover women’ in the Chinese-medium news media that are pervaded by patriarchal content. Yet, little attention has been given to the thematic content surrounding leftover women in the Chinese English-medium news media which seem to be more liberal in their stance. To fill this niche, this study employs a key keyword analysis to examine the dominant thematic concepts related to leftover women in the Chinese English-medium news media. The findings illustrate that the key keywords in the news reports belong to three thematic categories, namely social actors and attributes, dating activities and relationships, and other social matters. These thematic categories are intertwined with one another to construct the overall representations of leftover women suggesting ideological implications for both patriarchy and egalitarianism. The usefulness of employing corpus techniques to examine overarching themes in gender representations is also highlighted in this study.