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Liu, Jieyu (2016) Gender, Sexuality and Power in Chinese Companies: Beauties at Work. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. (Gender, Development and Social Change)

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Abstract

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.

Item Type: Authored Books
Keywords: gender, sexuality, power, work, Urban China
SOAS Departments & Centres: Regional Centres and Institutes > SOAS China Institute
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ISBN: 9781137505743
DOI (Digital Object Identifier): https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50575-0
Date Deposited: 19 May 2016 17:44
URI: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/id/eprint/22482

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