Contextualising Postfeminism in China: Cosmopolitan Young Women, Aesthetic Labour, and Gendered Social Media

Abstract

This thesis contextualises postfeminism in China by examining young middle-class Chinese women’s aesthetic labour and related social media practices. It demonstrates that transnational postfeminism considerably informs middle-class young women’s self-making and self- fashioning practices along with neoliberal governmentality, post-socialist gender politics, and digital culture in the context of urban China. Drawing upon semi-structured interviews conducted between June and October 2020 with 31 young middle-class Chinese women living in Chinese first-tier cities who enjoy watching and/or producing beauty/fashion/lifestyle content on social media, I analyse how the interviewees generally perceive feminine beauty, how they use social media to fashion femininity, how they affectively engage with feminised online communities, and how they embrace aesthetic entrepreneurship in visibility economies. In this thesis, I argue that postfeminism plays out in young middle-class Chinese women’s self- making and self-fashioning in at least three ways: first, postfeminism in China emerges from globally-circulated gendered neoliberalism and takes root in Chinese post-socialist gender politics. Second, transnational postfeminism in urban China interacts with traditional, authoritarian, and capitalist patriarchies as well as women’s negotiations with and resistances to patriarchal pressures. The third is that postfeminism becomes a set of discursive and affective resources for young middle-class women to desire and perform their feminine subjectivities in the context of urban China. By employing the framework of postfeminism, this thesis advances research on young middle-class Chinese women’s femininities, identities, and subjectivities in the age of social media. At the same time, it also enriches and complicates current understandings of postfeminism as a transnational culture by foregrounding both the Chinese context and young women’s voices.