Qualitative Analysis of Female Texts in Chinese Stand-up Comedy

In the digital era, the rapid development of digital media promotes the widespread transmission of feminist viewpoints within the Chinese social context, despite the stringent regulations imposed on feminist activities by the authorities. Like Rock & Roast, stand-up comedy has become an effective medium for articulating females appeals and critiquing gender inequalities in China. Through methods of textual analysis and critical discourse analysis, this essay explores different kinds of females texts in Chinese stand-up comedy, different genres of feminism that these texts reflected, as well as male audiences attitudes towards those various types of females texts. This paper finds that the females texts offer different perspectives, with YangLi s texts particularly challenging hegemonic masculinity. As a result, her texts elicit strong resistance from male audiences, as they confront and question traditional gender power dynamics and norms. However, as a whole, the females texts created by female comedians in Chinese stand-up comedy show the features of popular feminism, which distinguishes from true feminism due to their failing to unveil the structural inequalities and oppression in social and cultural contexts.