You are invited to this research seminar hosted by the Contemporary China Centre at the University of Westminster
‘White-collar Beauties: Gender, Sexuality and Power in Urban China’
Speaker: Dr Jieyu Liu (School Of Oriental and African Studies)
Discussant: Dr Derek Hird (University of Westminster)
Wednesday 21st March, 2018, 6-7.30pm
University of Westminster, Regent Campus
Room UG05, 309 Regent Street, London, W1B 2HW
For Non-University of Westminster attendees, please register with James Dyke in advance at [log in to unmask]
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.
Dr Jieyu Liu is Reader in Sociology of China and Deputy Director at the SOAS China Institute. Her research interests include gender, sexuality, family and generation in China. She is the author of Gender and Work in Urban China: Women Workers of the Unlucky Generation (Routledge) and co-editor of East Asian Sexualities: Modernity, Gender and New Sexual Cultures (Zed Books). In 2015, she was awarded a five-year European Research Council grant to examine changing family relations in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
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