Iron girls, strong women, beautiful women writers and super girls: a discourse analysis of the gender performance of women in contemporary China

Abstract

Using data collected from Shanghai from 2002 to 2005, this paper focuses on the gender performance of young women in today's China and how they understand their 'femininity' in their self-identification. Our analysis examines four popular ways of looking at and talking about Chinese women from the 1960s to the present, as 'iron girls', 'beautiful women writers', 'strong women', or 'super girls', and how the women themselves construct their femininity, with reference to these images, as virtuous in the 1970s, masculinised in the late 1980s, commercialised in the 1990s and androgynous in the twenty-first century.