<論文>感染症流行期における看護師の報道から見る「中国特色社会主義女性性」 --『 人民日報』を例として--

Abstract

As COVID-19 spreads, nurses - the people who fight against the epidemic on the frontlines – are attracting global attention. Because more than 90 percent of the nurses in China are women, the representation of nurses in the media is inevitably associated with femininity. Therefore, the nurse is a valid object for analysis – helping us to better comprehend the characteristics of femininity in contemporary China. On the one hand, making nurses visible in the media allows people to realize how difficult it is for nurses to work under epidemic conditions and helps to promote a nurse-friendly social environment. On the other hand, there are also risks associated with the representation of nurses. For instance, a one-dimensional and monolithic representation of nurses might ignore the individual needs of some nurses or even make it more difficult for nurses to express their true emotions and thoughts. Therefore, it is important to examine how the public image of the nurse has been constructed by the media in order to create a truly helpful media environment for nurses. In this article, I explore how nurses have been described in People’s Daily, the main official newspaper in China, and I discuss the underlying gender presumptions on which the image of nurses has been constructed. In order to clarify the explicit features of femininity in contemporary Chinese society, I approach this task from a comparative perspective. By studying both the SARS coronavirus period and the COVID-19 period, and comparing the portrayals of both female nurses and male nurses, it was found that the representation of nurses has reflected a distinctive femininity in Chinese society, resulting from a process of historical accumulation - a concept which I describe as “Socialist Femininity with Chinese Characteristics”. I conclude that the image of the nurse, as portrayed in People’s Daily during various infectious periods, and which is based on “Socialist Femininity with Chinese Characteristics”, places too much emphasis on sacrifice and altruism and might have a negative effect on nurses - especially those who grew up in a new age characterized by globalization, fragmentization and individualization.