Postfeminist heroes and heroines in contemporary Chinese advertising

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I argue that the postfeminist performance of contemporary Chinese advertising deflects attention away from the feminist call for gender equality. First, I explain why Chinese feminist development leads to “femininity melancholia.” I then examine the postfeminist heroes and heroines—that is the ideals of masculinity and femininity that inspire audience imitation—in contemporary Chinese advertising campaigns and femvertising vlogs (recent advertising with a focus on empowered women). In unveiling the pressures of young Chinese men’s idealized masculinity, I suggest Chinese men dread female individuation and desire to preserve women’s dependence and domesticity. Such pressures are intensified by idealized masculinity in advertising to men’s ambivalence towards femininity via Judith Butler’s gender melancholia. Engaging with Angela McRobbie’s ideas about postfeminist heroines trapped in performing perfectly balanced femininity, I propose that the postfeminist performance by Chinese female vloggers indicates that young women have maintained a sense of self-definition without abandoning their femininity in the face of intense scrutiny from social and cultural gazes. My analysis of the interplay between the “femininity melancholia” shown in contemporary Chinese advertising and Chinese people’s feminist consciousness contributes to the postfeminist debate about the relationship between feminism and femininity.

KEYWORDS:

• Postfeminism
• feminism
• femininity
• Chinese media culture
• melancholia

Acknowledgement

The author thanks the two anonymous reviewers that improved the quality of the manuscript. I would like to thank Professor Kristina Lucenko at Stony Brook University for her generous and generative comments and feedback. Her doctoral course about Feminist Rhetorics provides the inspiration, help and support. I also want to extend a profound thank you to Professor Celia Marshik, Professor Timothy August, and Professor Stephanie Rumpza for their helpful comments, edits, and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Bilibili is a popular video streaming site in China, also known as B site (B站 zhan) for short. Bilibili is featured in its danmu (弹幕) that refers to the constant stream or “barrage” of comments flowing across the screen during the video.

2. KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) are female influencers who use social media, such as WeChat and Weibo, to include their advertisements targeting Chinese women followers in their posts. Chinese feminists arguing for “女权 (nvquan)” would demand rights that are essential to Chinese women’s wellbeing, such as protecting their legal equal rights to property and inheritance. Many Chinese young men think many so-called feminist KOLs such as MiMeng write articles targeting female audiences, which often write women as victims and encourage them to spend men’s money and buy beauty products. They resent how these pseudo-feminists have caused girls to take it for granted that boys should buy gifts for them to express their love at almost all festivals.

3. A number of trolls used the term “田园女权(tianyuannvquan)” to name those militant feminists who radically call for rights and exploit men to receive the greatest benefits without a willingness to assume domestic responsibilities. The term 田园 (tianyuan) means something rural or rustic, condemning these feminists as naïve and uncivilized. Even worse, the character quan in the word for “feminism” is even replaced with a homophone meaning “dog.”

4. Zhinan originally referred to straight heterosexual males who lack good taste in clothing and have no ideas how to please their girlfriends.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Roya Liu

Roya Liu is a Ph.D. student in the English Department, Stony Brook University. Her research work focuses on transnational modernism, feminist media studies, critical disability studies, and age studies. E-mail: [email protected]