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.

Contributes to the development of global literature on gender, sexuality and work beyond the existing Euro-American model Exposes new forms of gender inequalities in the Chinese workplace Makes an essential and timely contribution to knowledge of the position of educated women in the new labour market in East Asia

Autorentext

Jieyu Liu is Deputy Director of the SOAS China Institute, SOAS University of London, UK. In 2015, she was awarded a five-year European Research Council grant to examine family and sexual relations in East Asia.

Inhalt
Chapter 1. Becoming White Collar Beauties in Urban China.- Chapter 2. Toward a Local Feminist Understanding of Gender and Sexuality.- Chapter 3. The Weaker Sex.- Chapter 4. Sex in Work.- Chapter 5. Sex as Work.- Chapter 6. Sisterhood.- Chapter 7. Marriage, Family and Divorce.