| Recently, being “leftover” has become a commonplace in China. The youngest post-1980 s women start to feel like “leftover women” and men of“post-1980s-generation” have stepped into the era of being “leftover”. More and more singles resort to the online dating sites to post personal ads, in the hope of finding their Mr. Right or Ms. Right. With this background, this study mainly intends to examine online dating self-disclosure of men and women ranging in age from 25 to 34(the “post-1980s-generation”). For this purpose, sixty self-presentations on the one of most popular Chinese online dating websites are randomly collected and thoroughly analyzed, thirty by men and thirty by women.Based on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, this study is conducted with three stages: description and interpretation of the textual features of ODA, and explanation of the social-cultural practice of the gender identities of leftover men and women as revealed in the previous two stages. In the stage of description, the ideational and interpersonal functions of SFG are applied to analyze the language aspect of the texts. To be specific, the former is realized by the transitivity system and the latter by mood and modality. In the stage of interpretation, the intertextuality features of the texts are described and interpreted. In the stage of explanation, the discourse is explained from the Chinese socio-cultural perspective and the hidden ideology is revealed.Correspondingly, each stage of study is intended to achieve an objective below:1) to examine how males/females portray themselves as potential husbands/wives in the textual feature of online dating ads, 2) to uncover the male and female gender identities contained in the online dating ads and 3) to reveal the hidden gender ideology reflected in these gender identities under the Chinese socio-culturalcontext.This study finds that males portray themselves as optimistic, positive,straightforward, outgoing, filial, mature, steady, responsible and loyal while females as outgoing, tender, filial, considerate, and independent. However, women expect their would-be husbands to be kind-hearted, enterprising, trustworthy, warm,masculine, humorous, protective of them, and above all be nice to them whereas men expect their would-be wives to be kind-hearted, cultured, and be the support to their family and their husbands. Therefore, there is a gap between men’s and women’s self-evaluations and expectations.Apparently their gender identities are stereotypical images reflecting Chinese traditional cultural values, which are located in Chinese social context. The gender relation between males and females is that males are dominant over females because husbands are expected to be breadwinners to deal with social affairs whereas wives to be supporters of their husbands to handle domestic affairs and educate their children. However, China’s embrace of globalization has already changed Chinese people’s concept of marriage as well as personal thoughts. Women are economically independent and equal to their husbands instead of being absolute housewives. As a matter of fact, women are in under greater pressure than before because they are now filling the role of mother, housewife, and career woman.The findings have some enlightening implications for CDA study and prove that gender prejudices still prevail among people in China. Personal ads especially the self-presentations embody the online daters’ thoughts and ideology. Therefore,singles should improve their critical language awareness to distinguish the daters’ hidden ideology when they seek their partners.In addition, the findings aim to provide some valuable information of post-1980s-generations’ views about mate-selecting and marriage, and gain insights into the differences between males and females. Furthermore, the present exploration in the field of critical analysis is hoped to be of some implications forreading and writing instructions in ESL classroom. Hopefully the study can attract more attention to the industry of online dating to offer guidance to create a harmonious and appropriate language environment between the two genders and boost harmony among people, thus it will provide academic support for constructing a harmonious society. |
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