Feminist Metaphors of Force and Obstacle: Constructing Empowerment and Inhibition in American and Chinese Magazines
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55578/jlcas.2610.011Keywords:
feminist metaphors, empowerment, inhibition, American and Chinese magazines, sociopolitical ideologiesAbstract
Cross-cultural analyses of feminist issues in magazines remain scarce. Metaphorical use influences societal attitudes toward gender equality and resistance. This study investigates the feminist metaphors of force and obstacle in American magazines Ms. and Bust (1,617 articles; 2.13 million words) and Chinese magazines Women of China and Marriage and Family (5,182 articles; 3.63 million words), using corpus tools, the Metaphor Identification Procedure, and an inter-coder reliability check, revealing how cultural and ideological contexts construct narratives of empowerment and inhibition. Results show that, after normalization per 100,000 words, force metaphors are nearly three times more frequent in the Chinese corpus (194.8 per 100,000 words) than in the American corpus (69.8 per 100,000 words), whereas obstacle metaphors show the reverse pattern (35.0 versus 3.6 per 100,000 words). American discourse pairs force with repeated, adversarial talk of barriers to be broken, removed, or dismantled, reflecting liberal individualism and often critiquing structural inequities. Chinese discourse is saturated with collective force metaphors of solidarity and institutional coordination, yet rarely frames women’s progress as obstructed, instead emphasizing coordinated agency and top-down synergy. These distinctions illustrate how sociopolitical ideologies shape the conceptualization of gender equality, positioning feminism as both a transformative force and a movement constrained by cultural narratives.
References
[1] Formanowicz, M., & Hansen, K. (2022). Subtle linguistic cues affecting gender in (equality). Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 41(2), 127–147.
[2] Deignan, A. (2005). Metaphor and corpus linguistics. John Benjamins.
[3] Kövecses, Z. (2010). Metaphor: A practical introduction. Oxford University Press.
[4] Janusz, S. (1994). Feminism and metaphor: Friend, foe, force. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 9(4), 289–300.
[5] Nicholson, L. (2015). Feminism in “waves”: Useful metaphor or not? New Politics, 12(4), 34–39.
[6] Reali, F., & Avellaneda, L. (2023). Feminists are warriors: Framing effects of war metaphors. Crossroads: A Journal of English Studies, 43(4), 103–123.
[7] Rub, E. A. (2022). A comparative analysis of feminist discourse representation using conceptual metaphors during Women’s History Month 2022 in national American and British newspapers [Bachelor’s thesis, Malmö University].
[8] Batterson, C. (2016). “Feminism” and feminism: A rhetorical criticism of Emma Watson’s Address to the U.N. The Journal of Undergraduate Research, 5, 1–12.
[9] Alqahtani, N. (2026). A feminist critical discourse analysis of English-language media representations of Muslim women in a time of crisis: The Independent and BBC News articles. Frontiers in Communication, 11, 1831356.
[10] El-Ibiary, R. (2026). Media framing of violence against women and girls in Egypt: A feminist critical discourse and framing analysis of news coverage (2020–2024). Frontiers in Communication, 11, 1773808.
[11] Ahmed, U. (2018). Metaphor in the construction of gender in media discourse: Analysis of metaphors used to describe women in Nigerian newspapers. International Journal of Gender and Women’s Studies, 6(1), 88–99.
[12] Yang, Q. (2024). An analysis of metaphor in Trifles from the perspective of feminism. Lecture Notes on Language and Literature, 7(7), 52–59.
[13] Chen, Y. (2023). “Women Are Warriors” or “Women Are Flowers”: A corpus-based study on the metaphorical framings of women in Women of China. Queen Mary’s OPAL #51 Occasional Papers Advancing Linguistics, 1–39.
[14] Bao, K. (2023). War on feminism: An analysis of metaphorical representations on Weibo. Social Semiotics, 35(2), 330–348.
[15] Jung, G., & Moon, M. (2025). “Feminism is like a light to me”: The collective process of feminist awakening among young female college students in South Korea. Asian Journal of Social Science, 53(1), 1–9.
[16] Oyebanji, O. F. (2026). National voices: A corpus-based comparison of LGBTQ+-related opinion discourse in Nigerian and South African newspapers. Corpus Pragmatics, 10(1), 43.
[17] Li, H. (2020). 基于语料库的英汉“anger/怒”概念隐喻研究 [Conceptual metaphors of anger/nu in English and Chinese: A corpus-based study] [Doctoral dissertation, Hunan Normal University].
[18] Hijjo, N. F. M., Kaur, S., & Kadhim, K. A. (2019). Reframing the Arabic narratives on Daesh in the English media: The ideological impact. Open Linguistics, 5, 81–93.
[19] Kövecses, Z. (2017). Levels of metaphor. Cognitive Linguistics, 28(2), 321–347.
[20] Ms. (n.d.). Ms. official website. Retrieved June 1, 2024, from https://msmagazine.com/
[21] Shragai, A. (2025). Reading Ms. magazine in San José: Transnational gender-work among US American women in 1970s Costa Rica. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 45, 100–128.
[22] Doherty, M. (2023). More than magazines: Ms., Sassy, and fifty years of feminism. The Yale Review, 111, 158–176.
[23] Bust. (n.d.). Bust official website. Retrieved June 1, 2024, from https://Bust.com/
[24] Groeneveld, E. (2009). “Be a feminist or just dress like one”: BUST, fashion and feminism as lifestyle. Journal of Gender Studies, 18(2), 179–190.
[25] Women of China. (n.d.). Women of China official website. Retrieved June 1, 2024, from http://www.womenofchina.com/
[26] Frith, K., & Feng, Y. (2009). Transnational cultural flows: An analysis of women’s magazines in China. Chinese Journal of Communication, 2, 158–173.
[27] Chen, E. (2016). “Power femininity” and popular women’s magazines in China. International Journal of Communication, 10, 2831–2852.
[28] Marriage and Family. (n.d.). Marriage and Family official website. Retrieved June 1, 2024, from https://www.mf-china.com.cn/
[29] Choi, S. Y. P., & Luo, M. (2016). Performative family: Homosexuality, marriage and intergenerational dynamics in China. The British Journal of Sociology, 67(2), 260–280.
[30] Bakarić, M. B., Prskalo, L. N., & Popović, M. (2022). A general framework for detecting metaphorical collocations. In Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Multiword Expressions @ LREC2022 (pp. 3–8).
[31] Pragglejaz Group. (2007). MIP: A method for identifying metaphorically used words in discourse. Metaphor and Symbol, 22(1), 1–39.
[32] Landis, J. R., & Koch, G. G. (1977). The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data. Biometrics, 33(1), 159–174.
[33] Hewitt, N. A. (2012). Feminist frequencies: Regenerating the wave metaphor. Feminist Studies, 38(3), 658–680.
[34] Alexander, K., Eschle, C., Morrison, J., & Tulbure, M. (2019). Feminism and solidarity on the left: Rethinking the unhappy marriage metaphor. Political Studies, 67, 972–991.
[35] Bao, K. (2024). Comparative analysis of representations of feminism across Chinese social media: A corpus-based study of Weibo and Zhihu. Social Media + Society, 7(3), 1–13.
Downloads
Published
Data Availability Statement
The data analyzed in this study were compiled from publicly available magazine articles published in Ms., Bust, Women of China, and Marriage and Family. The compiled corpus is available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. The full source texts are not reproduced because they are protected by third-party copyright.
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Shi-Fang Chen (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.