Sassy and subservient: Chinese girls and media in the urbanizing countryside.

摘要

The primary research questions in this dissertation sought to illuminate and explore how Chinese rural girls negotiate media and gender roles in their daily lives. The ultimate goal of my study was to let these rural girls' voices be heard and understood from their own perspectives. Based on four months of fieldwork in a rural elementary school in Jiao Nan, Shandong province of China, which involved observations of and interviews with the participants, the study illustrated the many ways the girls interpreted media gender messages in relation to their own lives.;Broadly, I found that in China's transition from a rural society to urbanization, Chinese rural girls were able to critically negotiate media gender messages combining the formal gender ideologies, their personal experiences, and discourse registers to construct gender identities that maintained a balance between a traditional feminine attention on endurance and morality and a more contemporary femininity that values independence and equality. The specific practices that offered insights into their use and interpretations of media were their extensive TV watching, secretive media use behind their parents and teachers' backs, their preference of subversive media characters, the creative interpretations of contradicting media gender roles due to complex social and cultural environments, their participation in and imitation of media talent shows, and their identification of an mediated urban life style.;In conclusion, the girls received mixed and conflicting prescriptions of gender roles from the media in China's changing rural environment, which necessitated nimble, flexible, and often defensive negotiations on the parts of the girls. In a related trend, the girls' consumption practices -- of media as well as products -- had to be dexterously negotiated in order to balance competing pressures in their lives.