A Study On The Gender Discrimination In Chinese Characters With The Radical “女”(Female)

Since the 1980 s, cultural studies on Chinese characters have gradually become a popular research trend under the impact of language and culture craze. As it develops, the close connection between Chinese characters and Chinese culture has also become popular. Scholars consciously take Chinese characters as a major tool to cultural studies. For instance, cultural connotations of characters with the radical “女”(female) has always been a subject of much academic attention in studies on Chinese characters, especially female social status. But gender discrimination with broad social significances is comparatively lack of adequate researches. This paper thus focuses on gender discrimination in characters with the radical “女”(female).While characters with the radical “女”(female) can be studied from various perspectives, previous studies are mostly based on Shuo Wen Jie Zi by Xu Shen. Unlike these, this paper explores the meaning of every character out of the 796 characters with the radical “女”(female) included in The Kangxi Dictionary, the largest collection of Chinese characters in the history of ancient Chinese dictionaries, and categorizes them in detail by considering emotion colors and semantics. Accordingly, this paper classifies those characters and also quantifies their categories, presenting the outlook of the cultural connotations in them. Given investigations and analyses on previous researches, gender discrimination is found to mainly exist in characters with the radical “女”(female) which indicate status and titles, marriage and birth, appearances and behaviors, as well as personalities and conducts. Therefore, this paper discusses respectively gender discrimination in the four types of characters from form and meaning and semantic distribution, and concludes the manifestation of gender discrimination in them. Finally, we analyzes the reasons from social history and Chinese characters why Chinese characters with the radical “女”(female) would bring about gender discrimination of “male superior to female”.