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Persuasion or Insulting? Unpacking Discursive Strategies of Gender Debate in Everyday Feminism in China

Yue Deng, Zheng Chen, Changyang He, Zhicong Lu, Bo Li

Abstract

Speaking out for women's daily needs on social media has become a crucial form of everyday feminism in China. Gender debate naturally intertwines with such feminist advocacy, where users in opposite stances discuss gender-related issues through intense discourse. The complexities of gender debate necessitate a systematic understanding of discursive strategies for achieving effective gender communication that balances civility and constructiveness. To address this problem, we adopted a mixed-methods study to navigate discursive strategies in gender debate, focusing on 38,636 posts and 187,539 comments from two representative cases in China. Through open coding, we identified a comprehensive taxonomy of linguistic strategies in gender debate, capturing five overarching themes including derogation, gender distinction, intensification, mitigation, and cognizance guidance. Further, we applied regression analysis to unveil these strategies' correlations with user participation and response, illustrating the tension between debating tactics and public engagement. We discuss design implications to facilitate feminist advocacy on social media.

Persuasion or Insulting? Unpacking Discursive Strategies of Gender Debate in Everyday Feminism in China

Abstract

Speaking out for women's daily needs on social media has become a crucial form of everyday feminism in China. Gender debate naturally intertwines with such feminist advocacy, where users in opposite stances discuss gender-related issues through intense discourse. The complexities of gender debate necessitate a systematic understanding of discursive strategies for achieving effective gender communication that balances civility and constructiveness. To address this problem, we adopted a mixed-methods study to navigate discursive strategies in gender debate, focusing on 38,636 posts and 187,539 comments from two representative cases in China. Through open coding, we identified a comprehensive taxonomy of linguistic strategies in gender debate, capturing five overarching themes including derogation, gender distinction, intensification, mitigation, and cognizance guidance. Further, we applied regression analysis to unveil these strategies' correlations with user participation and response, illustrating the tension between debating tactics and public engagement. We discuss design implications to facilitate feminist advocacy on social media.
Paper Structure (36 sections, 3 figures, 4 tables)

This paper contains 36 sections, 3 figures, 4 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. INTRODUCTION
  2. RELATED WORK
  3. Everyday Feminism on Social Media in Chinese Internet Spaces
  4. Gender Debate on Social Media
  5. Discursive Strategies in Gender Debate
  6. METHOD
  7. The Study Context: Two Representative Cases of Gender Debate within Everyday Feminism in China
  8. Data Collection and Pre-processing
  9. Data Collection
  10. Data Pre-processing
  11. Preliminary Exploration on the Context
  12. RQ1: Identifying Discursive Strategies in Gender Debate
  13. RQ2: Investigating Debating Strategies' Effects on User Participation and User Response
  14. Dependent Variables
  15. Independent Variables
  16. ...and 21 more sections

Figures (3)

  • Figure 1: The analytical flow to understand discursive strategies in the gender debate.
  • Figure 2: The distribution of (a) uncivil and constructive content in gender debate, as well as (b) incivility and constructiveness within supportive and unsupportive discourse. "Incitructiveness" refers to posts that encompass both uncivil and constructive content.
  • Figure 3: Temporal Analysis of Post Count and Attributes in Gender Debate