Abstract
In this chapter, the authors examine jokes about gender relations from the Chinese Internet to examine how these are examples of contemporary “depoliticization” in Chinese politics. While looking at the emergence more generally of humor on the Internet in China and some views of its critical potential, they note that gendered jokes do feature commentary on society and politics, but ultimately locate them primarily as an expression of cynicism and political passivity. Even as the jokes, about marital relations and the proper role of women, do have political implications in their implicit rejections of Maoist feminism’s radical gender equality, they serve an ironically didactic function in a China where moral meaning has become individualized and privatized.
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Notes
- 1.
Bei Kongju Tunshi de Nüren (“Women Swallowed by Fear”). March 8th Women’s Day Special Issue, Sohu Culture, sohu.com, 4 March 2011, <http://cul.sohu.com/s2011/women/> (accessed 21 March 2011).
- 2.
- 3.
According to a recent survey by the China Internet Network Information Center, internet users in China are about 54.8% male and 45.2% female (2010, n.p.). Some research does find a “gender gap” in internet usage, with men more likely to use “chat rooms” and having more self-confidence in their computer skills than women (Li and Kirkup 2007).
- 4.
For arguments regarding China’s “privatization,” see Zhang and Ong (2008).
- 5.
Similar debates exist regarding political humor and internet expression in other contexts, for instance, with some arguing that Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show in the United States is more individualized critique than search for real “political solutions” (Hart 2013, 338), but others asserting that his viewers are political informed and engaged (Bennett 2007). For an examination of online community and cynicism in a different dissident context, that of Uzbekistan, see Kendzior (2011).
- 6.
Yang does not include it in his list of the seven main issues in his analysis of online activism (popular nationalism, rights defense, corruption and power abuse, environment, cultural contention, muckraking, and online charity), although it is included as part of some of these wider categories (2009, 55). In their analysis of shunkouliu from the 1990s, “sex and the social role of women” is one of the themes discussed by Link and Zhou (along with “a society driven by money,” corruption, “the disappearance of socialist values,” views of the course of the revolution, “political challenges,” and regional differences) (2002, 97–103).
- 7.
Due to space constraints, our analysis here will focus solely on the content of the jokes, rather than on their linguistic characteristics. In short, some of them do fall into a category that might be described as versions of “shunkouliu” (short, pithy, rhyming), while others are more like anecdotes. The complete set of jokes analyzed are available upon request. Jokes were found through searches on baidu.com as well as renren.com, and were circulated on blogs, internet bulletin boards systems (BBS), as well as through mobile phone text-messages (SMS or 短信), in two major time periods, early 2011 and fall of 2012. A warning to the reader: some of these jokes are funnier than others, at least in the view of the 老外co-author of this paper.
- 8.
The jokes we are discussing are all fairly heteronormative as well as assuming some basis of sexual bimorphism—homosexuality and transgender questions, while more openly discussed in China today than in the past, are not particularly part of our data set. Also, many jokes seem primarily to be about and to apply to urban, middle-class Chinese, which is consistent with their audience being the larger set of Chinese “netizens” who are in urban areas.
- 9.
Regional stereotyping has long been part of Chinese humor (Chey 2011, 21).
- 10.
This is somewhat consistent with a view of some feminists that in the Chinese critical setting, gender is sometimes a stand-in for class, the critiques of which are largely taboo (Wang and Zhang 2010, 66–67).
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Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to the Allegheny College Academic Support Committee and the Great Lakes College Association New Directions Initiative program for support of this research on political humor. Sharon Wesoky would especially like to thank Le Ping for this research collaboration on gendered political humor and Jiarong Li, Song Mingyuan, Gong Bin, and Ji Yanfeng for translation and linguistic assistance on this project. Sharon is also grateful that, as always, Jim Fitch sustains a home environment that is supportive both of getting work done and lots of laughter along the way.
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Wesoky, S.R., Le, P. (2018). The Politics of Cynicism and Neoliberal Hegemony: Representations of Gender in Chinese Internet Humor. In: Tam, Kf., Wesoky, S. (eds) Not Just a Laughing Matter. The Humanities in Asia, vol 5. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4960-6_7
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