“She uses men to boost her career”: Chinese digital cultures and gender stereotypes of female academics in Zhihu discourses

Abstract

Portrayed by the media as the story of “how a female PhD juggles intimate relationship with four male PhD academics”, the LM incident, named after the female main character of the story, was a high-profile case, which provoked public debates on Chinese social media in 2019. In this article, we explore how the stereotyping of female PhDs plays out in Chinese Internet users’ discussions about the LM incident. We collected a total of 632 relevant posts from the most popular Chinese community question-answering (CQA) site–Zhihu and analysed them by drawing on critical discourse analysis (CDA). The research findings reveal how a sexualised portrayal of female PhDs, which is dramatically “different” from the traditional, asexual stereotypes of well-educated women, is established in Zhihu users’ postings. Many Zhihu users, including both women and men, mobilise an overwhelmingly sexualised portrayal of female PhDs, which speaks to the normalisation of patriarchal discourses in the status quo of Chinese academia and beyond. The research findings shed light on post-socialist gender politics, which facilitates the perpetuation of gender essentialism in China in the post-reform era.