Gender, Sexuality and Power in Chinese Companies Beauties at Work [Hardcover]

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 womens 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.

Chapter 1 Becoming White Collar Beauties in Urban China                                     14

 

Chapter 2 Toward A Local Feminist Understanding of Gender and Sexuality         36<

 

Chapter 3 The Weaker Sex                   &l„