Gender, Sexuality and Power in Chinese Companies

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Liu Jieyu

   Pages 1-10

3. Becoming ‘White-Collar Beauties’ in Urban China

   • Liu Jieyu

   Pages 11-31

4. Towards a Local Feminist Understanding of Gender and Sexuality

   • Liu Jieyu

   Pages 33-54

5. ‘The Weaker Sex’

   • Liu Jieyu

   Pages 55-71

6. Sex in Work

   • Liu Jieyu

   Pages 73-87

7. Sex as Work

   • Liu Jieyu

   Pages 89-106

8. Affect, Power and Resistance

   • Liu Jieyu

   Pages 107-121

9. Marriage and Family

   • Liu Jieyu

   Pages 123-141

10. Conclusion

    • Liu Jieyu

    Pages 143-153

11. Back Matter

    Pages 155-158

    PDF

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.

• Gender
• Sexuality
• Work
• Organization
• China
• Power
• Naturalization
• Commodification
• Objectification
• Neoliberalism
• Subversion

“This concise book is a welcome contribution to the understanding of highly educated young women in the labour market of China. … anyone eager to learn more about the lives of young, highly educated urban women in China will find this book an exciting resource. Researchers interested in a comparative analysis with other East Asian countries will find good material in this publication. Feminist scholars interested in gender and sexuality in a global context will find this book insightful.” (Amélie Keyser-Verreault, Anthropologica, Vol. 61, 2019)

“Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Chinese Companies is nevertheless a fascinating account of its milieu, backed by vivid ethnographic descriptions and indepth analysis. The author’s ability to cross disciplinary lines will make her book appeal not only to anthropologists and sociologists of China and East Asia but also to scholars of work, gender, and class in other parts of the world.” (Xinyan Peng, Anthropology of Work Review, Vol. 40 (1), 2019)

“Jieyu Liu’s book is well-structured, jargon-free and covers a wide range of the collectively shared experiences of the Only Child Generation in the inner and outer space. … The book will be of great value to scholars, students and non-academics interested in how urban young female professionals navigate the sexualized workplace. … Overall, the book offers valuable original insights that enrich the existing scholarship on gender and sexuality in the workplace in China and is certainly worth a read.” (Ling Tang, International Sociology Reviews, Vol. 33 (5), 2018)

“Beauties at Work offers a skillfully constructed and theoretically rich account of the experiences of a generation ofwomen who have had unprecedented opportunities, as they confront thinly veiled gender limits to their mobility in the workplace. It should garner the attention of feminist scholars and be included on course lists for sociology of gender, work and economy course lists, as well as relevant courses in anthropology and China studies. It should also be of interest to a popular audience interested in Chinese organizations.” (Eileen Otis, The China Quarterly, Vol. 233, March, 2018)

• SOAS University of London, London, United Kingdom

  Liu Jieyu

Jieyu Liu is Deputy Director of the SOAS China Institute, SOAS University of London, UK. In 2015, she was awarded a five-year European Research Council grant to examine family and sexual relations in East Asia.

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