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  • Gender, Sexuality and Power in Chinese Companies: Beauties at Work by Jieyu Liu
  • Amélie Keyser-Verreault
Liu, Jieyu, Gender, Sexuality and Power in Chinese Companies: Beauties at Work, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 158 pages.

This book is the first ethnographic account of the work and life of “white-collar beauties” in contemporary China. It addresses the gendered and sexualised issues in the workplace of the “one child generation.” Women of this generation are presented by the media as living an enviable life: urban, highly educated, professional, intelligent, pretty and the only children of their natal families – young women who grew up in a child-centred environment and received unprecedented care and investment from their parents. Simply put, few gendered differences in their education have meant these young women have strong career ambitions. Liu argues that the way young women strategise has significantly shaped their negotiations of the gender-based inequality that they still face in the workplace. The social, economic and cultural processes that lead to the making of the “white-collar beauty” in post-Maoist China are the topics of Chapter 2. The media feature such women and, in doing so, influence the aspirations of young women of a generation. White-collar beauties are constructed to embody nationalist and neoliberal desires, which clash with earlier ideologies. One question the book develops is how much such depictions are a media fantasy and how much they are a reality. Is the enviable lifestyle real?

In rethinking the concept of gender and sexuality, two fundamental notions of feminist theory, Liu argues, in Chapter 3, for the importance of reformulating local feminist frameworks to account for the gendered and sexual control and resistance experienced by her interlocutors. The ethnographic material of the book is foregrounded in Chapter 4, where the ideas of gender of her interlocutors collide with the essentialisation of gender categories by company management. Management ideologies legitimise male domination, which offers poor career advancement possibilities for young and highly educated women with career ambition. Liu shows the interplay between women’s consent and resistance to their experience in a highly patriarchal Chinese work environment. As a matter of fact, many women reject the gendered expectations of their work. This refusal arises in a context where women, growing up as the only children of their families, do not experience gender differences in educational development. Liu succeeds in documenting the complexity of the politics of the naturalisation of gender and its interaction with class as a central issue in the white-collar workplace.

Next Liu turns, in Chapter 5, to the ways that the objectification of women’s sexuality is put in place and sustained by managers to enhance workplace productivity. Liu shows how “white-collar beauties” are subject to a deep level of objectification and commodification. Indeed, women become the targets of sexual jokes in the private setting, and when their reputability is less of an issue, women may even become the tellers of such jokes. In what amounts to a highly patriarchal and eroticised work setting, with few procedures for dealing with sexual harassment, white-collar women learn to behave strategically.

Chapter 6 addresses the relationships between women and their clients to reveal the sexist politics and sexual content of interaction between women workers and clients. Here, selling women’s sexuality is institutionally and deliberately deployed by management. Women treat clients to banquets, karaoke parties, and saunas. Such business practices are exhausting and extremely stressful for women. As the sexuality of women is highly moralised, white-collar beauties find themselves walking a fine line between respectability and disreputability. They strive to look pretty, but not sexy. Women, in addition to having to abide by business practices, have to take great care to manage their sexual reputations. This is a burden their male colleagues need not undertake. This insight allows Liu to challenge Hakim’s (2010) claim that women use erotic capital as a way to advance in modern societies. Liu argues this ignores how sexuality is culturally shaped, and that such a strategy, which overlooks local gender politics, further perpetuates and naturalises a Chinese gendered order.

The politics of the relationship between women and men, but also of...

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