Constructing a fairy tale around intercultural couplehood on Chinese television

Research on intercultural couplehood often relies on cultures and ‘solid identities’ to explain the couples’ experiences. By looking at the media construction of an intercultural couple on Chinese television, we are interested in how they are presented and co-constructed through different perspectives, especially if and how (cultural) differences are used by the participants to enact the couple's identification. We take a dynamic ‘liquid’ approach to linguistic discourse analysis, through dialogism and utterance theory, to identify the voices and the related discursive strategies that contribute to create and ‘imagine’ the couple. Keywords: intercultural couplehoodmedia constructionChinese televisioninterculturalityidentificationlinguistic discourse analysis Notes 1. The name of the show: we translated it into English as Country Date. It was first broadcast on CCTV-7 (China Central Television – Channel 7, which focuses on military and agriculture) in January 2011. The couple in question is Sino-Armenian. 2. Renteln (2005, p. 48) defines ‘cultural defense’ as follows: ‘The premise of the cultural defense argument is that culture exerts a strong influence on individuals, predisposing them to act in ways consistent with their upbringing. The theoretical basis for a cultural defense hinges on the idea that individuals will think and act in accordance with patterns of culture’. The scholar gives a clear example of how it can be misused: a lawyer defended an Iranian Jewish husband who had battered his wife to death by claiming that ‘[d]ue to cultural and religious grounds, they were unable to get a divorce’. 3. The excerpts were translated by the authors of this article. 4. A ‘kang’ is a brick bed which can be warmed by a fire in the pipe underneath.