Unsilencing the Home Village: A Discursive-Theoretical Analysis of the Construction of the Rural in Chinese Short Videos

Abstract

With the rapid rise of digital technologies, the short video, as a low-threshold media form, enables rural subjects to become visible in the public sphere and to realize expression and performance of self-identity. Drawing on Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory as the theoretical backbone, this study adopted discourse-theoretical analysis on 294 short videos about rural daily life on the Chinese video sharing website Bilibili to discuss how short videos function in the discursive construction of rural areas. The study finds that, first of all, rural people’s active media practice dislocates the hegemonic identity formation by demonstrating various dimensions of rural areas. Secondly, we can see three nodal points of the counter-hegemonic discourse on the rural at work: humanized space for daily life, diversified citizenship with dignity, and subjects with initiative and responsibility in national ideologies. Last but not least, although short videos unprecedentedly amplify the voice of the countryside’s counter-hegemonic discourse, such resistance is still limited by the inherently unbalanced power relations between the urban and the rural.