Gender, Sexuality and Power in Chinese Companies: Beauties at Work (Gender, Development and Social Change) - 9781137505743

This book offers the first ethnographic account of the experiences of highly educated young professional women, hailed by the Chinese media as æwhite-collar beautiesÆ. It exposes the organizational mechanisms û naturalization, objectification and commodification of women û 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 womenÆs 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.

• | Author: Jieyu Liu
• | Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• | Publication Date: Oct 16, 2016
• | Number of Pages: 171 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover/Political Science
• | ISBN-10: 1137505745
• | ISBN-13: 9781137505743