Mirror, Discipline, and Negotiation: A Qualitative Exploration of the Impact of "Viva La Romance" on the Gender Perception of Young Chinese Women in Contemporary China

Abstract

General debates about media, gender, and intimacy in contemporary China highlight how romantic reality television can both reinforce and challenge traditional norms of wifehood and marriage. This paper will explore the effects of the reality show  in influencing the gender perception of young Chinese ladies between the ages of 25 and 35. It tackles the wider issue of how most aestheticized images of couples in terms of their travel and emotional communication affect expectations of femininity, emotional labour and marital roles. The study aims at the four objectives of analysing gender roles encoding in the show; studying the ways viewers perceive these representations; studies perceived effects on gender identity and relationship expectation; and patterns of acceptance, negotiation, and resistance, guided by the Gender Theory and Acceptance Theory. The qualitative design in the study involved semi-structured interviews and focus groups, and purposely chosen participants were used. According to the thematic analysis, there was heightened awareness of women's emotional labour, reinforcement of traditional roles in part, encouragement of relationship self-reflection and reinforcement of egalitarian beliefs among a critical minority. The majority of the participants were involved in negotiated readings where they admired intimacy at the expense of unequal burdens imposed on wives. The paper comes up with the conclusion that Viva La Romance is an object of reflection, of discipline and of negotiation, of stabilisation and destabilisation of gender norms in modern China that is both relatively stable and more or less unsettled.