In an effort to identify the most effective terminology as our researching keywords, the examination of labels for gay and lesbian is quite important.
Traditional terms for homosexuality included duanxiu zhi pi 斷袖之癖 ‘the passion of the cut sleeve’, fentao 分桃 ‘the divided peach’.2 There are terms
2 An example of fentao appears in a 6th-century poem by Liu Xiaozhuo: She dawdles, not daring to move closer, afraid he might compare her with leftover peach.
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include nan feng 男風 ’male trend’, xianghuo xiongdi 香火兄弟 ‘allied brothers’, longyang pi 龍陽癖 ’the passion of Longyang’.3 Modern terms for homosexuals are tongxinlian 同 性 戀 . Tongzhi 同 志 is also commonly used in LGBT community, sometimes along with nu tongzhi 女同志 ’leasbian’, nan tongzhi.男 同志 ’gay’. There are also slang terms like boli 玻璃 ‘crystal or glass’, which
are not so common. To determine effective keywords to be used in our thesis, we pick words that are related to homosexuality and search them on Google for their frequency. The reason we choose Google Search is because Google is the most-used search engine on the World Wide Web, handling more than three billion
3 It refers to a homoerotic anecdote about Lord Long Yang in the Warring States period.
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Table 3.1 shows the key terms related to homosexuality commonly used in society.
The most frequently occurring word is tongzhi, and the result indicates that this is the most popular contemporary Chinese word for lesbians, bisexuals and gay people. Furthermore, we also investigate those popular terms on Google Trends to see how often they are searched on Google. Google Trends is a public web facility of Google Inc., based on Google Search, that shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world. We restrict the country to Taiwan. The time period is between 2016 March to 2017 March and the data type is news only. Figure 3.1 displays the result which we retrieved from Google Trends. The horizontal axis of the main graph represents time (2016-2017), and the vertical is how often a term is searched for relative to the total number of searches in Taiwan news. Tongzhi was particularly high during the time between 2016 December 4-December 10, since many events occurred in this month. The second highest point appears in November. Tongzhi rises from 2016 September, and comes to the peak in December. Overall, the figure shows tongzhi 同 志 , tonghun 同 婚 ’same-sex marriage’ and tongxinglian 同 性 戀
‘homosexuals’ are the top three searched terms.
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Figure 3.1
Search Popularity of Key Terms on Google Trends
In ancient China, same-sex activities are portrayed in indirect expressions like daunxiu 斷袖 is a representation of cut-sleeve, fentao 分桃 as shared peach, pi 癖 as favorite. Same-sex activities are considered an abnormal tendency, so
those expressions decode the desire as a mental disorder. Namely, in the eyes of the general public, same-sex desire was seen as a disease rather than a social identity. When gay and lesbian movements began in the 1980s, the terms gay and lesbian were added to the lexicon of our language, and were viewed as social identities. Many people started challenging the belief that same-sex desire was a disease, so new identities related to same-sex interest have been recognized.
Tongzhi are more willing to identify themselves as gay or lesbian than they used to be. Furthermore, through political movements, terms such as “gay movement”, and “gay rights” have emerged. Tongzhi is a term which originated in the early
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Qing Dynasty, and it was defined as people with the same ethics and ideals.
According to the dictionary of Ministry Education, the term is defined in several ways: (1) people who share the same ambition, interest and idea, as recorded in houhanshu 後漢書 ’History of the Latter-Han Dynasty’ and honloumong 紅樓夢
‘ The Dream of Red Chamber’. (2) people in the same political party. (3) a general label for non- heterosexuals. After Sun Yat-sen used the term to address his followers in the last sentence in his will, geming shanwei chengong, tongzhi renghsu nuli 革命 尚 未成功 ，同 志仍 須努 力 “The revolution hasn't been
successful yet. Comrades should keep striving for it,” tongzhi started to be associated with political discourse. After 1949, with the founding of the People’s Republic of China, tongzhi became a new address term to signal differences in social status. In the Culture Revolution (1966-1976), tongzhi became more widely used among the masses. Due to its historical background, tongzhi can be referred to as comrades as well (Fang and Heng 1983). As previous discussed, the term tongzhi has emerged for a long time. People nowadays are raising concerns about
homosexuality, same-sex relationship. Although the relations of same-sex can be seen in history, same-sex desire became taboo in Asian society. As time changes, tongzhi had a gradual shift in meaning to refer to lesbians, gay men and other sexual minorities. The first use of this usage can be traced back to Mike Lin, a
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movie critic, who first started using the term in his articles. Initially, he used it to refer to his lesbian friends. The innovation of this word is originally used as a secret code, which allows those with same-sex desire to discuss it within their conversations. In this way, straight people are not aware of what they are talking about (Wong 2005). From then on, people started using this term commonly and its use also spread to public domain.
Gay rights activists campaigned for their rights in Hong Kong in the early 1990s, and the novel meaning of tongzhi is clearly stated in a definition provided by a booklet published by Chi Heng Foundation, which is an influential Hong Kong organization whose goal is to eliminate discrimination against sexual minorities.
In the booklet, they claimed that this label tongzhi has been appropriated to refer to homosexuals, bisexuals, trans-genders, trans-sexual and other sexual minorities, and this term also offers a simpler and more direct way to talk about those of non-normative sexual orientations. The use of tongzhi is used to emphasize the culture specificity of same-sex desire in Chinese society. Tongzhi becomes a label for self-identification. This term is widely accepted by the community for its positive cultural references, gender neutrality, desexualization of the stigma of homosexuality, politics beyond the homo-hetero duality and use as an indigenous cultural identity (Chou 2000). Subsequently, a famous director Edward Lam 林奕
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華 in Hong Kong held the first Hong Kong Gay and Lesbian Festival.4 He borrowed the slogan from Sun Yat-sen, using it in the title of the film festival.
Tongzhi here makes a connection to the public, which carries a meaning that
encourages tongzhi to stand out and speak out loud for themselves. In the following years, tongzhi has become a term that is not only used in Honk Kong but is also popular in Taiwan and other Asian countries. Extensive application emerges, in other words; nowadays tongzhi can broadly refer to all non-heterosexuals, including lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, which commonly abbreviate as LGBT, known as tongzhi wenhua 同志文化 ’tongzhi culture’.
Another important factor to use tongzhi as one of the target keywords is that some of those who with the same-sex desire find tongzhi too academic, formal and official. Wong (2008) in his research interviewed some friends of his, and in interviews, they often used tongzhi at the superordinate level to refer to sexual minorities in general, but when they were chatting, they didn’t use tongzhi in casual conversations. Likewise, they also claim it is too distant and detached when chatting with friends. If one is in a meeting, one tends to use tongzhi when talking
4 香港同志影展, known in Chinese as Hong Kong Tongzhi Film Festival, is an annual LGBT film festival held each September in Hong Kong. It is reputedly the oldest LGBT film festival in Asia, having been founded in 1989
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to the media or when they are talking to outsiders. Wong’s research provides me some insights into the reasons why we use the salient keyword tongzhi to conduct the thesis. The second keyword is tonghun 同婚, which is discussed in the first chapter. The Chinese term tongxinglian 同性戀 is originated from Japanese same-sex love 同性愛（どうせいあい）. In Chinese, the term can be understood as tongxinglianai 同 性 戀愛 , meaning the affection between same-sex couples.
Tongxinglian 同性戀 is also a morphemic translation of the English translation of
the English word homosexual (Wong 2005) 3.2 Data collection
This present study combines corpus linguistic methods and qualitative analysis in order to explore the connotations of homosexuality in the main stream media discourse. A number of scholars have recently adopted corpus linguistics methodology, and the impact of this has been attested by the growing numbers of studies that adopt the complementary methodologies (Baker et al. 2008). As Hunston (2002) indicated, corpus analysis of collocation can be especially valuable, and repeated collocations reflect social meanings which can even be in direct opposition to what is claimed. Likewise, Romaine (2001:153-176) claims that “connotations of words do not raise from words themselves but from how they are used in context”. That is, the meanings of words are constructed and
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maintained by patterns of collocations. In sum, the crucial features of connotations project cultural belief and therefore utilizing repeated collocation patterns in language use regenerates and reproduces ideologies, which reveal social stances underlying in the context. Furthermore, Baker (2008) also mentioned collocation is an important vehicle for the discursive presentation of social groups.
Informed by a study 台灣新聞媒體可信度研究報告 ‘News credibility in Taiwan’ (2015) carried out by Taiwan Media Watch (台灣媒體觀察教育基金會),
we choose top four Internet main stream media, considering their reliability. The study measures the performance of Taiwanese news organizations in terms of their credibility. The journalists are asked to evaluate the various news organizations with a set of questions. Figure 3.2 summarizes the reliability of Internet media in Taiwan. According to the figure, average score is around 6.38. CNA NEWS is high above the average score, which is 7.85. The second place is UDN NEWS, third is APPLE DAILY and then STORM MEDIA. In the next part, we will briefly introduce the four Internet media in our data.
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Figure 3.2
Reliability of Internet Media in Taiwan Adopted from News Credibility in Taiwan
According to the four Internet media official websites, CNA NEWS5, UDN.COM6, APPLE DAILY NEWS7 and STORM MEDIA8, the information is shown as follows.
a. 中央即時新聞 (CNA NEWS): The Central News Agency is a news agency operated by Taiwan. CNA sends out news in Chinese, English, French, Spanish and Japanese, and it has overseas branches in 35 countries and news agencies around the world.
b. 聯合新聞網 (UDN.COM): It is the third biggest newspaper in Taiwan, and is regarded as taking an editorial line that supports the KMT. In terms of style
5 http://www.cna.com.tw/about/info.aspx
6 https://udn.com/news/index
7 http://www.appledaily.com.tw/
8 http://www.storm.mg/
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and standards, UDN is considered one of the most literary news agencies in Taiwan.
c. 蘋果日報 (APPLE DAILY TAIWAN): It is a newspaper in Taiwan and owned by Hong Kong. The group is famous for making animated news stories on scandals and crimes, as well as on pop culture.
d. 風傳媒 (STORM MEDIA): Taiwan’s leading online media publications. It claims to have 4.6 million monthly unique visitors. It is a relatively new organization in the news industry, and it is also an independent media without any certain political stance, focusing on international and multi-cultural visions.
We selected 100 news texts concerning homosexuality from four online news databases; the news items were collected using the newspaper’s searchable online archive. The period was from 2016-2017, because we would like to examine social attitudes in contemporary society in Taiwan. The construction of the database is based on the top five keywords as shown in table 3.1 from the previous section, tongzhi, tonghun, tongxinglian, nu tongzhi and nan tongzhi.
Table 3.2 lists the data distribution of all the reported news we have collected by the five key terms. The number presents times that the words appear in the created corpus. It can be readily seen that tongzhi accounts the most in the news
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items, which appears 584 times. Then the following is tongxinglian and tonghun 189 times for tongxinglian and 137 times for tonghun. Basically, nu tongzhi devoted more space to the news items than nan tongzhi did. But the APPLE DAILY had more occurrences of nan tongzhi then nu tongzhi. In addition, in terms of the Internet media, Storm Media contained the most keyword occurrences, 370 times which accounted for 39% of the total occurences. CNA NEWS and UDN NEWS are similar in their keywords occurrences. It seems that tongzhi and tongxinglian play crucial roles in the Internet media.
Table 3.2
Distribution of five keywords in four main Internet media
CNA UDN
NEWS
APPLE DAILY
STORM
MEDIA Total
N % N % N % N % N9 %
tongzhi 134 57% 131 70% 71 47% 248 67% 584 62%
tonghun 32 13% 26 14% 39 26% 40 10.8% 137 14.5%
tongxinglian 61 26% 31 16% 30 20% 67 18% 189 20%
nu tongzhi 8 4% 0 0% 3 2% 14 3.8% 25 2.6%
nan tonzhi 0 0% 0 0% 7 5% 1 0.4% 8 0.9%
Total 235 25% 188 20% 150 16% 370 39% 943
9 The occurrence for each keyword
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As shown in table 3.3, we compiled important events chronologically with the number of news posts for each month from the data collected. The time period of these events are overlapped with the data we have collected. November and December, 2016 contain more news items than other months, and this can be attributed to the starting point of these events, the concert ai zui da, chishi women dou yiyang! 愛最大·其實我們都一樣！婚姻平權公益演唱 ’Love Is King: It
Makes Us All Equal!’ which was held by ten singers supporting tongzhi on 1st August 2016 at Taipei Arena. After the concert, a series of events occur and were reported, resulting in 11 major events. In October 2016, several legislators announced that they had proposed a new amendment to the Civil Code which would legalize same-sex marriage in Taiwan. November 2016, the committee discussed the proposals twice respectively. On 3rd December, opponents of same-sex marriage demonstrated in Taipei, Taichung and Kaohsiung. Then on 10th December, the following week, more than 250000 supporters of same-sex marriage gathered around the Presidential office, calling for the government to legalize same-sex marriage immediately. Soon on 26th December the Legislature’s Judiciary and Organic Laws and Statues Committee completed and passed the same-sex marriage bills.
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Table3.3
Number of posts each month and important events
Year Month Date News Event Number of
Figure 3.3 presents the distribution of the news item in the created collection in terms of months. More news items occurred in November and December than in those of January and December. This suggests that more social movements
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happened in November and December (see figure 3.3). In addition, October occupies 10 pieces of news items, and the proposal of same-sex marriage also occurred in this month. The rest of news items are scattered in May, June, July and August.
Figure 3.3
Percentage of news items from 2016.05-2017.02
The number of words per post in each Internet media is shown in table 3.4. The minimum, maximum, sum and average of words per post in each Internet media are also calculated. The smallest number of words in each news item appear in APPLE DAILY, and as a whole, CNA NEWS occupies the smallest space in the
corpus. On the other hand, STORM MEDIA carries the largest number of words in the all data. Particularly, the news items in STORM MEDIA contain editorials.
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Compared to news report, editorials is far lengthier than news reports. The number of words of the news items fall between 223 words to 3,617 words and the average is 977 words, a quite suitable length for investigating articles in the mass media.
Turning to the category of the news items, they are composed of breaking news, politics, entertainment, life, policy, society and some editorials.
Table 3.4
Number of words in the four Internet media
CNA NEWS UDN NEWS APPLE DAILY
STORM MEDIA
MIN. 281 340 223 293
MAX. 1,463 2938 2381 3617
AVERAGE 736 940 863 1367
SUM 18,656 23,568 21,627 34,163
Having specified the type and details of the data collection and steps, the next task in the present study is to analyze the data more carefully. This corpus consists of 100 texts on the Internet media in the period between May 2016 and February 2017 that were selected by four representative terms, a critical time for the development of same-sex marriage in Taiwan. To understand the image of tongzhi in contemporary society, it is significant to figure out how tongzhi is described and what happens following the occurrence in each sentence.
3.3 Data analysis
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Analysis was carried out in four stages: information retrieval to build the study database, word segmentation and figuring out the concordance by AntConc (3.4.4w) tool, indexing of news posts with assessments, collocational and textual content analysis, as shown in figure 3.4.
Figure 3.4
Research Methodology Flowchart
Information retrieval to build the study database
Initially, we searched these keywords on the four online database of news (CNA NEWS, UDN NEWS, APPLE DAILY, STORM MEDIA). Retrieval of news was
done by full-text search in the online database using the five key words, including headlines, articles, opinion columns, feature articles, breaking news and special-topic news. Tongzhi, tonghun, tongxinglian were the main keywords, because nan tongzhi, nu tongzhi are the words belonging to tongzhi. All news posts contained these five keywords were collected, and they were carefully examined by
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relevance, time period (from 2016-2017) and were deleted if the news posts overlapped. The total occurrence of keywords is 943. The number of news posts is 100. Furthermore, manual content analysis was done to check that all items sampled were relevant and to identify what appeared to be recurring thematic and formal patterns for more detailed analysis. We created a corpus by selecting posts containing at least one keyword associated with homosexuality (tongzhi 同志, tonghun 同婚, tongxinglian 同性戀, nan tongzhi 男同志, nu tongzhi 女同志). We
compiled 100 pieces of news posts (25 for each digital Internet media) together with the five keywords and manually scanning and eliminating irrelevant items.
Word segmentation by National Digital Archives Program and obtaining concordance by AntConc tool
Before we put our data into AntConc tool to carry out a corpus linguistic analysis, language processing software has to understand the words in a text so that the text can be processed. Chinese sentences contain no boundaries, unlike the writing
Before we put our data into AntConc tool to carry out a corpus linguistic analysis, language processing software has to understand the words in a text so that the text can be processed. Chinese sentences contain no boundaries, unlike the writing