Gender, Sexuality and Power in Chinese Companies: Beauties at Work

Liu, Jieyu

Abstract

This book offers the first ethnographic account of the experiences of highly educated young professional women, hailed by the Chinese media as ‘white-collar beauties’. It exposes the organizational mechanisms – naturalization, objectification and commodification of women – that wield gendered and sexual control in post-Mao workplaces. Whilst men benefit from symbolic and bureaucratic power, women professionals skilfully enact indirect power in a game of domination and resistance. The sources of women’s subversion are grounded in their only-child upbringing which breaks the patrilineal base of familial patriarchy fostering an unprecedented ambition in personal development, gender as inherently relational and a role-oriented system, and inner-outer cultural boundaries as signifiers of moral agency. This raises a new feminist inquiry about the agents for social change. Through a nuanced analysis grounded in the socio-cultural locality, this book throws fresh light upon the ways in which gender, sexuality and power could be theorized beyond a Euro-American reality.

Citation

Liu, J. (2016). Gender, Sexuality and Power in Chinese Companies: Beauties at Work. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50575-0

• Book Type: Authored Book
• Publication Date: Oct 16, 2016
• Deposit Date: May 19, 2016
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Series Title: Gender, Development and Social Change
• Series ISSN: 2730-7328
• ISBN: 9781137505743
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50575-0
• Keywords: gender, sexuality, power, work, Urban China
• Publisher URL: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50575-0