Sexed Bodies, Sexualized Identities, and the Limits of Gender

Abstract

Sex is one of the dominant metaphors of China's postmillennial consumerist modernity. Public media and private discussions map endless pleasures and possibilities onto sexed bodies, foregrounding sexuality as an increasingly significant component of individual identity. Yet, as argued in this article, the diversity of sexual representations masks the discursive operation of the sexed body in consolidating individual accommodation with the consumer market and in “neutralizing” the exploratory and pluralist meanings of contemporary sexual culture. Inheriting a recent ideological history in which sexuality was not a significant component of public discussions about gender relationships, and in an ideological context bridging local and global interests that limit the interrogation of gender as a critical category of enquiry and organization, sex and the sexed body emerge in mainstream discourse as a collection of acts, responsibilities, and choices dissociated from the broad social issues of gender hierarchy and injustice.

Gender and China's Online Censorship Protest Culture

“…In this context, Jacobs (2012) argues that online contention fueled by "erotic energy" (17), as well as an "emerging porn culture and porn taste," should be understood as "an aspect of civil sexual emancipation" (11). However, such an optimistic view gives scant acknowledgement to China's deeply engrained patriarchal culture and contemporary belief in binary gender, where males are strong, active, and rational and where females are the opposite (Evans 2008). Such binaries are easily folded into a fusion of global and domestic media that sexualize and objectify women.…”

“…While images of women at the beginning of the reforms were coy and relatively innocent (Hooper 1998), with the acceleration of marketization since the mid-1990s, a booming consumer culture has been sustained through the circulation of sexualized images of men and especially women. Although China's contemporary visual and narrative cultures contain a wider depiction of sexuality than in the past, various media all commodify and objectify women's bodies, positioning them as either sexual or childlike (Wei Bu 2001;Evans 2008). At the same time, mediated constructions of masculinity turn alternately to Chinese folk culture, the capitalist myth of the self-made man, or portraits of wartime brotherly solidarity (Geng Song 2010).…”

“…Using a gender lens, I argue that these media deploy a masculinist discourse and visual style that position the female body and the feminine as the site of subordination, penetration, and insult. Moreover, they are a digital manifestation of what Harriet Evans (2008) calls the "limits of gender" in China, or the increased range of depictions of the sexed body without a simultaneous embrace in most popular and scholarly discourse of the critical language of gender as a means of interrogating the social and cultural power relations inscribed in notions of masculinity and femininity. Certainly consuming such media can be pleasurable, and active audiences can read these texts in diverse ways.…”

Patriarchal capitalism with Chinese characteristics: gendered discourse of ‘Double Eleven’ shopping festival

“…Scholars have considered the limitations of state feminism implemented during China's socialist era, pointing to how class struggles tended to encompass gender issues (Croll 1978, Andors 1983, Chow 1991, Gilmartin 1994, Evans 2008a, 2008b. The orthodox Marxist position on female subordination perceived gender equality as 'a component of a broad program of social transformation oriented toward the eradication of class and socio-economic differentials' (Evans 2008b, p. 12).…”

“…First, as many historical works on Chinese women have pointed out (e.g. Croll 1978, Honig and Hershatter 1988, Evans 1997, 2008a, 2008b, Zhong 2006, the gender sameness that was part of Maoist state feminism was widely rejected after the Cultural Revolution. Urban…”