Gender, sexuality and power in Chinese companies [electronic resource] : beauties at work /
Jieyu, Liu.author.
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.
Includes bibliographical references at the end of each chapters and index.
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.
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.
Asia-Politics and government.
Sociology.
Industrial sociology.
Ethnology-Asia.
Economic development.
Social change.
Asian Politics.
Gender Studies.
Sociology of Work.
Asian Culture.
Development and Social Change.