Post-feminism and chick flicks in China: subjects, discursive origin and new gender norms

ABSTRACT

Most research on post-feminist culture has been conducted in the Western context. Within the very limited scholarship on post-feminism in China, the conception of globally transmitted and duplicable post-feminism is dominant, which is usually rationalized in the global expansion of neo-liberalism. This article, however, argues that post-feminism in China exists but encapsulates notable distinctions from its Western counterpart, in terms of the class of its subjects, female elites’ relationship with the state, and post-feminism’s entanglement with local feminisms. To emphasize the transnational perspective, I would like to coin a new term for the Chinese equivalent of post-feminism, what I will call “consumerist pseudo-feminism” (消费主义伪女权), acknowledging the buzzwords ‘consumerism’ and ‘pseudo-feminism’ that are frequently used in the Chinese media. Anchored to this reconceptualization, Chinese chick flicks, burgeoning genre films with its niche audience of middle-class young women are analyzed. Through close-reading, I would like to investigate how consumerist pseudo-feminism is represented in terms of middle-class women’s fantasies, the rhetoric of women’s empowerment, and new gender norms.

KEYWORDS:

• Post-feminism
• consumerist pseudo-feminism
• transnational
• chick flicks

Introduction

Post-feminism as a popular cultural form and sensibility appeared in the West in the 1980 s and has grown in prevalence since the 1990 s. The post-feminist subject, as defined by Diane Negra, is “white and middle class by default, anchored in consumption as a strategy (and leisure as a site) for the production of the self” (Negra and Tasker 2007, 2). In addition to material practices of consumption, post-feminism circulates predominantly through media representations. Although manifested in a variety of ways, the ideology of post-feminism can be simply defined as emphasizing “freedom of choice with respect to work, domesticity, and parenting” as well as “physical and particularly sexual empowerment” (Negra and Tasker 2007, 2).

While the substantial scholarship on Western post-feminism derives from diverse areas such as education, sexuality, employment, and popular culture, there has been only limited research on post-feminism in non-Western contexts. As S. Dosekun points out, the dominant views in Western academia about the possibility of post-feminist culture in non-Western countries have ingrained biases (2015). First, the belief is that post-feminism is not likely to exist in the Global South, as women there still need feminism to become empowered before they can be eligible as subjects of post-feminism. Second, in the instances that construe a non-Western post-feminist subject, which are few, the possibilities are circumscribed to “the global girl”. “The global girl” is depicted from the Western perspective as a “hard-working, independent (minimal wages)” factory girl, who has “minimal access to global feminine consumer culture”, but longs to fulfill the image of Western femininity and sexuality embodiment presented in popular culture (963). At best, post-feminist culture in non-Western countries is deemed “a tame, derivative copy of its putative Western original” (963).

For Chinese scholars, it is not as difficult as it is for their Western counterparts to imagine a non-Western post-feminist subject who belongs to a privileged class rather than being a factory worker. In her study of neo-liberalism and ‘chick lit’ in China, Eva Chen defines neo-liberal female subjects as “a young generation of educated professional women” who are “celebrating [their] new-found material pleasure and individualistic aspirations” (Eva Chen 2012, 217). However, the parameter she adopts is still Western chick lit, whose global traits she finds to be manifested in the locally produced text. This perception of globally transmitted and duplicable post-feminism is also reflected in Altman Peng’s investigation of feminism in neo-liberal China, which emphasizes its inherent similarities with Western post-feminism in the cross-border, neo-liberal economy of consumerism (Peng 2019).

Aiming to shift these Western parameters, I will argue that post-feminism in China exists but encompasses notable differences from its Western counterpart in terms of the class of its subjects, female elites’ relationship with the state, and post-feminism’s entanglement with local feminisms. My investigation will be carried out within a transnational framework, as suggested by Dosekun (2015). Thinking transnationally means that the portability of post-feminist culture and sensibility can be acknowledged but be contextualized within state borders and specific national discourses and practices. In this light, any discussion of post-feminism’s discursive circulation in China must be situated within the corpus of Chinese history and politics.

To facilitate this, I would like to coin a new term for the Chinese equivalent of post-feminism, what I will call “consumerist pseudo-feminism” (消费主义伪女权), acknowledging the buzzwords ‘consumerism’ and ‘pseudo-feminism’ that are frequently used in the Chinese media to gesture toward what in the West would be called post-feminist behaviors. I avoid using “post-feminism” in the Chinese context because this term has not been adopted in Chinese popular culture. Rather, I suggest “consumerist pseudo-feminism” because these are the words that circulate in China and, like Western post-feminism, refer to subjects who are middle-class women shaped by the values and practices of consumption in the neo-liberal economy. Moreover, they are attached to ideologies of the freedom of choice, self-betterment, and girl power. “Consumerist pseudo-feminism” thus stresses the local discursive context, as well as the material conditions for such discourse, while retaining an awareness of its relation with post-feminism in the West. To achieve this, the first section of the article aims to contextualize the development of consumerist pseudo-feminism in the Chinese context by analyzing middle-class women’s identity, the discursive origins of post-feminism in the 1980 s, and its complicated relationship with various local feminisms.

Based on this theoretical framework, the second section will analyze recent Chinese chick flicks to provide illustrative examples of the cultural representation of consumerist pseudo-feminism in contemporary China. In 2007, the eye-catching announcement of the arrival of a “her-economy”, referring to an economic phenomenon that foregrounds female subjectivity in spending and consumption, signified a strategic shift in the awareness of potential box-office contributions made by female audiences. Targeted at the niche audience of middle-class or quasi-middle-class young women, the investment in chick flicks reaped high returns, as exemplified by 50 million RMB in profit for Sophie’s Revenge (2009), the first chick flick in China. This led to burgeoning production within this genre in the recent decade. Based on eleven Chinese chick flicks, my analysis will focus on middle-class women’s fantasy of gender relations and the urban landscape as well as the power relations underlying the norms of femininity. Moreover, my argument that Chinese post-feminism must be distinguished from that of the West on the basis of discursive as well as material local differences will be strengthened by the comparative analysis of Chinese remakes of Hollywood chick flicks.

The rise of consumerism and subjectivity of middle-class women

Consumerism took shape in China in the 1980 s and 1990 s during the period of economic reform. In Beng Huat Chua’s study on the government-led consumption expansion in Asia, he argues that there was a “covenant” between the government and its people which promised “improved standards of living in exchange for restraints on political freedom” (2002, 9). This covenant recognized, Chua argues, that “the more authoritarian the regime the more essential is high-economic growth to rationalise it, if overt repression were to be avoided” (9). In the Chinese context this meant, on the side of the government, the state’s retreat from the private sector, increased wages anchored to the booming market economy, and a large quantity of commodities manufactured for consumption. On the side of the people, the newly found pleasure in consumption, which was not experienced during the controlled procurement and distribution of the socialist era, persuaded certain beneficiaries to embrace the legitimacy of the CCP’s continued regime and ostensibly coherent socialism.

Such mundane pleasures were experienced at the level of the individual, now liberated from socialist collectivism. Like state-led consumerism, individualization was largely led, and in some cases imposed, by the state during its implementation of neo-liberal economic reform. Most of the urban workers were disconnected from their work units only reluctantly, as they were the beneficiaries of lifelong employment and the welfare institution. Such a state-led individualization differs from the Western ideology of individualism mainly in two ways. On the one hand, Chinese individuals repositioned in the free labor market were not equipped with adequate political rights due to the ongoing deferral of democratic reform at the state level. On the other hand, the chronological sequence between neo-liberalism and individualism was reversed. In the West, the implementation of a neo-liberal economy was carried out on the basis of democratic politics, institutionalized welfare, and ideologically classical individualism. In contrast, as Mette Hassen observes, “in China, the neoliberal deregulation of the economy and the labour market of everyday culture and consumerism [was] initiated before and without the constitutional anchoring of individualization as we know it in Europe” (Mette Hansen and Svarverud 2010, xix). In other words, China’s individualism is a result of neo-liberalism, rather than vice versa.

Consumerism and individualism are mainly encoded in and practiced by the newly formed middle class in China. In the 1980 s, the government began to envisage a middle class in the phrase “group with middle-level income”.¹ As should be evident, this terminology emphasized a group of people defined particularly by their level of income and corresponding consuming ability; however, their political leanings and political position were neglected in such terminology. With a very limited space for negotiating democracy, the rising middle class in China manifested a discrepancy between their economic and political positions.

If in the 1990 s the middle class were evoked and imagined largely in terms of mass culture and burgeoning consumerism (e.g., advertisements sold commodities as well as middle-class lifestyles), then it was not until the new millennium that this class grew into a substantive group (Jinhua Dai 1999, 13). The definition of the middle class in China to this day is controversial, but criteria such as income, profession, and education are usually highlighted to conceptualize this group on the basis of criteria taken from the World Bank and the US, especially for income. In 2015, based on the “Global Wealth Report” issued by Credit Suisse, “the number of China’s middle-class adults, defined, per US standard, as individuals having wealth between USD 50,000 and USD 500,000, has reached 109 million, outnumbering that of the USA (92 million) to become the largest in the world” (Huidi Ma and E. Liu 2017, 105). Later this figure was increased by the China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) to 204 million (Li Gan 2015).

The middle class is usually deemed to be the major force of consumption, amongst which middle-class women as consumers have been highlighted in recent marketing surveys. Alongside the “her-economy,” coined in 2007 to stress the importance of female subjectivity to a consumption-driven economy and included in the new vocabulary of the Ministry of Education, other terms such as “women’s consumerism” and “the women’s consumerism era” began to circulate from 2007 in business reports and business magazines. The consuming subjectivity of women is, foremost, enabled by their possession of the ability to consume, that is, their financial independence. But to what extent are they actually independent financially? If we piece together data from various sources, it is not difficult to see that middle-class women in mainland China possess far fewer assets and social resources than their male counterparts. Of the total number of middle-class people, women make up approximately one-third (Li Li 2003, 31). Most middle-class women are situated between the lower and middle levels of the middle class, as the majority of power and wealth accumulates on the side of men. This can be demonstrated in Li Chunling’s survey on the sex ratio of different categories within the middle class. In this survey, she divides the middle class into business owners, professionals, government officials, and corporate managers. Except for the professional group, each of the other three groups consists of less than 20% women (Li Li 2011, 9). This huge gap illustrates men’s absolute dominance in the distribution of political and financial power.

This marginalized position of women within the middle class is seldom addressed in the media, which relentlessly advertise female celebrities as models of empowered women in a buying mood. It is intriguing to note that, if the definition of the middle class is measured according to occupation, income, consumption, and self-identification, respectively, then the lowest female ratio is that based on income while the highest is consumption, at 32.7% and 52.1%, respectively (Li 2003, 28). This almost 20% gap suggests that a considerable number of women consume commodities at one level higher than their income can allow. Thus, the question arises, who actually foots their bills, if they are not permanently in debt? The answer is rendered explicit in the stereotype of a spendthrift woman and her male financial provider that is constructed and circulated as jokes and buzzwords in the media. For instance, slogans such as “pay for her shopping if you love her” explicitly place men in the position of paying for women’s consumption, while also hinting at women’s financial dependence.

With a lower level of financial and social resources and a higher level of consumption, middle-class women in mainland China bear at least two features. First, they tend to prioritize family/marriage over career development. As the glass ceiling of a career is foreseeable and quickly reached, female professionals tend to direct their energy to a more rewarding arena, that is, building a family. Second, a proportion of middle-class women, deficient in privileged resources, look for shortcuts by securing a man who already has such resources, in order to maintain a certain level of consumption and thus a middle-class identity. These shortcuts predominantly include marriage, but there are other means, such as willingness to be a mistress to a rich married man, which has caused many moral disputes since the 1990 s. In both cases, in exchange for acquiring the resources of privilege from a man, femininity is commodified in the form of the capital to be accrued from body/beauty, thus enhancing the asymmetrical power relation between sexes.

Women’s studies movements: a concession of feminism

The 1980 s and the 1990 s saw the creation of the so-called “women’s studies movement”, which gradually faded out in the late 1990 s as it was appropriated by consumerist culture. The women’s studies movement lays claim to being the origin of pseudo-feminism. It was initiated and led by Li Xiaojiang, who established the first center of women’s studies at Zhengzhou University in 1987. Based on this platform, she organized two symposiums on women’s studies, edited a series of influential books on women’s studies and published her own books on the topic, e.g., Eve’s Exploration (夏娃的探索, 1987), Sexual Gap (性沟, 1989) and Becoming Women (走向女人, 1994). The widely acknowledged consequence of the contribution made by Li and her followers was that female subjectivity became a topic of academic research and policy-making through the ACWF (All-China Women’s Federation) in the 1980 s. The notion of female subjectivity separated women’s liberation from the class struggle and suggested a departure from the degendered subjectivity of the proletarian cultural revolution; at the same time, however, it was built on essentialist notions of femininity and confined to urban female elites.

In this context, urban female elites refer to female governmental cadres, entrepreneurs, and intellectuals who used their political, economic, and cultural capital to ascend to the middle and upper class during the social stratification after 1978 (Xueyi Lu 2002; Tang Yao, Zhao Yuan and Chen Zhian 2018, 481). Women who fell into the urban lower class were largely female workers who were laid off during the nationwide wave of unemployment in the 1990 s (Yao, Yuan and Zhian 2018, 481). From the standpoint of being a beneficiary of the reform, Li justified the drastic increase in the unemployment rate of women as an inevitable and justifiable result of breaking with the egalitarianism of the socialist era, claiming that a substantial proportion of female workers were either not skilled or not physically capable (Xiaojiang Li 1988a, 307). Although she was also fully conscious that a significant number of female workers were laid off because of their gender, her justification of women’s unemployment generally corresponded with that of male sociologists such as Zheng Yefu and Sun Liping, who blatantly called for women’s return to domesticity in order to leave jobs free for men. In the post-reform era, feminism was thus stratified. Female urban elites’ proposal for a return to femininity had nothing to do with lower-class women’s fight for a living. While socialist feminism had addressed women as monolithically proletarian, the gendered subject of the women’s studies movement was divided into at least two segments: the proletarian and the bourgeoisie, with different interest appeals.

It is fair to say that urban female elites betrayed the rights of lower-class women for the sake of their middle-class interests. If, as discussed before, there was a covenant between the government and its people (especially the middle-class, which benefited most from the reform) to do with increased income and consumption in exchange for democratic rights, then I would add that there was also a covenant between the government and urban female elites. The state in effect guaranteed that urban female elites would gain a share of interest from the reform in exchange for conceding not only their democratic rights, but also their investment in feminism.

The cooperation between urban female elites and the state was evidenced by the recruitment of intellectuals (including female intellectuals) into the new CCP regime after reform (Teresa Wright 2010, 24). Following on the “decade after 1966 [when intellectuals were] systematically discriminated against”, the next generation of intellectuals rose to the level of social elites during the class realignment (Andrew Walder 1995, 325). In return for their endorsement of breaking with egalitarianism and sacrificing the working class, they obtained rewards of material and social respect (Wright 2010, 34). It was based on this privilege that Li proposed women’s freedom of choice and self-betterment as feminist strategies in the post-socialist era. These strategies, such as presenting feminine beauty and expressing female sexual desire, were not political in the socialist sense but rather expressed lifestyle choices in response to the state’s retreat from people’s private lives. By avoiding discussion of political factors such as class and patriarchy, she created the illusion that women were already so empowered that they could (finally) become feminine.

The price paid by urban female elites (yet not restricted to them) in their covenant with the government was their acquiescence to the restoration of patriarchal power in legislation, government, and corporations. The ratio of female legislators in the People’s Congress dropped after the start of reform and failed to reach the 1975 peak of 22.6% over the next three decades (Mengtong Yu 2018). Not much progress has been made in this regard. According to the Global Gender Report in 2018, the number of female legislators, senior officials, and managers constitute only 16.8% (63). This figure partly explains why some laws harming women’s rights were proposed, passed, and implemented without much dispute from women, e.g., the revised judicial interpretation of marriage law in 2018 legitimizing the accumulation of fortune on the side of men.

To sum up, the women’s studies movement introduced discourses about female subjectivity but with an emphasis on urban female elites, gender-based labor division and freedom of choice for individual woman based on a class privilege that was newly obtained from a covenant with the government. Moving into the 1990 s, these discourses were co-opted by the rise of consumerism, as manifested mainly in three respects. First, the female body was encoded as different from its male counterpart, and was brought to the male gaze in advertisements, corporate marketing strategies, and media representations. To cater to the male gaze or to please themselves, as they claimed, women began to display excessive femininity by using cosmetics, undergoing plastic surgery, and following fashion. Second, a certain degree of labor division was accepted and, to compensate for the gender disparity, a certain level of cooperation between the two sexes was encouraged, e.g., an increasing call for men’s participation in domestic life. Third, the freedom of choice and self-fulfillment for women was re-defined in terms of consumption, which connected together wealth, middle-class lifestyle, and the pursuit of pleasure.

Pseudo-feminism: temporal order and double distancing

The women’s studies movement, now seen from the perspective of its later appropriation by consumerist culture, has since been labeled “pseudo-feminism” in Chinese mass culture. This term generally refers to a practice of feminism which is deemed not to be authentic. Of course, authenticity hinges on the particular context and speaker’s standpoint, but in feminist scholarship the notion of authenticity is usually anchored to liberal feminism, as inferred from a proposed replacement of sexual difference essentialized in pseudo-feminism by the concept of gender (Zheng Wang 1997). Liberal feminism refers to the corpus of theories and practices critiquing asymmetrical power relations between genders, as developed during the first and second waves of feminism in the West. The systematic introduction of liberal feminism to mainland China can be traced back to the middle of the 1990 s, when overseas scholars organized classes about liberal feminism and translations of feminist books began to circulate among female intellectuals and ACWF cadres.

When Wang Zheng, one of these overseas scholars, first applied the notion of gender to the Chinese context in the 1990 s, she found that she had to invent a new Chinese term, 性别, to translate and conceptualize it, in order to distinguish it from the essentialism embedded in the women’s studies movement, that is, from pseudo-feminism. By this period, pseudo-feminism, in her opinion, was nothing other than the combination of “consumerism, conventional femininity and sexiness” (Wang 1997, 17). This is to say that pseudo-feminism, in its resemblance to “post-feminism”, took shape in China before the (re)arrival of liberal feminism. This chronological order differs from that in the West, where post-feminism arose after the adoption of liberal feminist perspectives, hence the “post”. However, from another lens, Chinese post-feminism is also “post”, as it occurred after the local version of equal-rights feminism, that is, after socialist feminism.

This difference of temporal order leads to the other distinction between pseudo-feminism and post-feminism. As the second wave of feminism in the West possessed a high-level of historical visibility and discursive influence during the 1960 s and 1970 s, when it was co-opted by post-feminism in the 1990 s it was “taken into account” yet “repudiated”, which produced, in the words of Angela McRobbie, a “double entanglement” of feminisms (Negra and Tasker 2007, 28). In contrast, Chinese pseudo-feminism features what I term a “double distancing”. On the one hand, it distances itself from liberal feminism, which is deemed to be an imported value from the West. This is exemplified in Li Xiaojiang’s high-profile boundary-staking differentiation between women’s studies and liberal feminism, as seen when she publicly refused to attend the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995, because it signified intrusion by Western feminism. Moreover, her books reiterated that liberal feminism was “the product of Western capitalism” (Xiaojiang Li 1988b, 33) and hence incompatible with the Chinese situation, which led to her declaring that she was not a feminist (Xiaojiang Li 1995, 3). Liberal feminism is thus held at a distance due to its lack of historical visibility and its purported lack of relevance in China. It is largely restricted to the academy, while it encounters mostly ignorance, indifference, and misunderstanding in Chinese popular culture.

Second, pseudo-feminism also distances itself from socialist feminism, which, though it had local historical prominence, has been defamed and thus dismissed in the post-socialist era. On the one hand, socialist feminism seems “inaccessible” “because [it] lies behind the impassable barrier of 1976” (Sue Thornham and Feng Pengpeng 2010, 208). Such an impassable barrier was partly caused by the transition of the economic system from socialism to capitalism and consequently a stigmatization of socialist history. Situated in the revolutionary era, socialist feminism is relegated to an obsolete history not worth revisiting and re-evaluating for the current context. On the other hand, socialist feminism is accused of being largely a failure. The main accusations lie in that it deprived women of femininity and also it was imposed on women for exploitation of female labor during the industrialization. The former was used in women’s studies movement to rationalize a return of essentialized femininity in the 1990 s; while the latter constituted the theory of state-granted women’s rights, which disavowed the subjectivity of female individuals. This theory has dominated the academia for decades. It was not until recently that Wang Zheng systematically criticized this theory by proving efforts made by female cadres in ACWF in negotiating power with male-dominated authority, as well as proletarian women’s agency in participating in the social sphere (Zheng Wang 2017). This distancing led to “increasingly explicit and overt” gender discrimination, “particularly in the context of the economic reforms” (Emily Honig and Hershatter Gail 1988, 309). Such gender discrimination was generally manifested in women’s unemployment as well as loss of equal pay, equal labor division, and welfare concerning children.

With awareness of this double distancing effect, it is possible to define consumerist pseudo-feminism in China as a popular culture and sensibility that is anchored to middle-class women, whose consuming capacity is extravagantly celebrated in the media and by marketers despite the fact that their actual financial status is mostly at the lower and middle level of the middle class. The rhetoric of self-reliance, self-betterment, and freedom of choice is based on women’s access to higher education and employment as urban professionals, as well as their share of benefits from a booming economy in terms of consumer choices and affluent lifestyles. However, due to the unspoken covenant with the state/party, middle-class women surrender their democratic rights, avoid political protest against patriarchal hierarchies and ignore the social injustice experienced by a vast number of lower-class women. Consumerist pseudo-feminism, positioned between socialist and liberal feminisms, distances itself from both feminisms. Instead, it attributes responsibility for gender equality to the government and relies on it for progress.

Consumerist pseudo-feminism and chick flicks

Although there is no single definition of chick flicks, the genre generally refers to “overtly commercial films tailored to appeal to a female audience” and to give them pleasure (J. Berry and A. Errigo 2004; Suzanne Ferriss and M. Young 2008, 17). Chick flicks have been developed in Hollywood since the 1990 s out of an overlap with the genre of romantic comedies (Tarmer McDonald 2007, 16). Situated in “chick” culture—that is, a light-hearted feminine culture focused on consumerist leisure pursuits within the arc of romance and marriage—chick flicks are “vitally linked to postfeminism” (Ferriss and Young 2008, 3). They were introduced to Chinese cinema as a replicable mode of commercial film in 2009, with the debut of Sophie’s Revenge (非常完美) by Jin Yimeng. This was followed by Go, Lala Go! (杜拉拉升职记, 2010) and Love is not Blind (失恋33天, 2011), both of which had high return on investment. In 2013, chick flicks constituted 16.8% of the total domestic box office and have remained approximately at 15% ever since (Kewen Ding 2017, 17).

The success of this genre can be accounted for by at least three aspects. First, romance and comedy stand as the second and third most popular genres in the Chinese cinematic market, behind action film. Second, the import quota of Hollywood films allowed into China by the revenue-sharing scheme increased to 34 annually in 2012, but most of them were blockbusters. This leaves a large potential market share for the domestically made and lower-budget chick flicks. Third, the market strategy has shifted to the potentially huge box-office contribution made by female audiences since 2007. The investment in chick flicks pays off well, e.g. each of the four Tiny Times franchises reaped over 100 million RMB in box-office.

Academic attention has been given to the Hollywood origin of this genre, its business mode and its narrative paradigms (Jia Xian 2012; Li Li 2012). Since Western post-feminism cannot be readily adapted to the local context, the existing research on chick flicks in China resorts to general scholarship on consumerism and materialism. To add depth to this, I will investigate Chinese chick flicks within the discursive framework of consumerist pseudo-feminism, which highlights the subjectivity of middle-class women, the rhetoric of freedom of choice, the dangers of a failing feminine masquerade and the “double-distancing” from both socialist and liberal feminisms. As a cinematic representation of consumerist pseudo-feminism, the Chinese chick flick can be distinguished from its Hollywood counterpart in numerous ways. Fantasies of middle-class women in China, for instance, do not necessarily coincide with those in the West, especially when it comes to masculinity and westernized urban space. The double-distancing effect, moreover, tends to generate more conventional gender norms in Chinese chick flicks. Nonetheless, the rhetoric of freedom of choice is commonly seen in both Chinese and Hollywood chick flicks, as it arises from the globally transmitted neo-liberal economy, which calls for self-management and self-responsibility.

Fantasies of middle-class women: reimagined masculinity and urban space

According to various data analyses of spectator profiles, the audience targeted by chick flicks consists of mainly young female professionals and students (Ge Mou 2014). If we anchor this to the class division discussed earlier, then we find that the majority of the audience for chick flicks comprises mainly lower-middle and quasi-middle-class women. They are drawn to chick flicks presumably because these films weave fantasies for them of an aspirational life.

What are the fantasies created in chick flicks? Foremost, a perfect image of the eligible bachelor is fantasized within a revised mode of masculinity. Usually, these eligible bachelors belong to the higher level of the middle class or the privileged class, judging from their positions such as the executive of a foreign company, owner of a private enterprise, or freelancer with a large fortune. They are, in most cases, the economic superiors of the female protagonists, or possess higher social and financial status. This gender disparity is taken for granted and satisfies female audiences’ longing for financial security from their future Mr. Right. Living with many anxieties regarding their situation in the lower-middle class, the female audience gains in chick flicks a chance to indulge imaginatively in an affluent or luxurious lifestyle, which is at least one level higher than their status quo. But as career women rather than housewives, they are independent to various extents; thus, domestic cooperation or sharing in chores is expected from their male counterparts. It is interesting to note that almost all the male leads in chick flicks are good at cooking. In both Sophie’s Revenge and Romance out of Blue (浪漫天降, 2015), the female leads are portrayed as messy, sloppy, and not able to take care of themselves properly. The conventional women’s role as caregivers and housekeepers is reversed in the way that male leads are featured in close-ups skillfully preparing a meal and cleaning the room. A conventional masculinity is thus revised to incorporate thoughtfulness and family care for the fantasy of the female audience, who are probably pressured by or at least exposed to the double obligation of career development and child-raising in reality.

Second, the films offer fantasies of a new urban landscape and a particular lifestyle, embedded in this landscape, which spectacularizes westernized global citizenship and a privileged class identity. A westernized global citizenship is projected onto the urban landscape through its transplantation into a Western urban space. A local urban landscape is thus veiled to the extent that the audience is left wondering about its setting. The typical example is Sophie’s Revenge, which bewilders the audience with its Western landscape. The story is supposed to take place in some big cities in China, but the main setting in the movie is shot in the reserve area of a colonial building for tourism. Sophie, the female protagonist, lives in an antique and western-style duplex, and in the last sequence walks with her boyfriend into a park resembling New York’s central park in the autumn, just as printed on a postcard. Appropriated from urban landscapes in Hollywood movies, some props are introduced that confuse temporal and spatial contexts. For instance, a taxi looks like the yellow cabs familiar from New York streets, yet has the English words “China Taxi” on its body. It is bizarre to note that the director lands an American taxi on the street of a supposedly Chinese city and tries to designate it as Chinese, while no taxi in China refers itself as China Taxi.

Besides transplantation, the global urban landscape is also built through collaging a world map into a single movie to render it like a collection of city promos. Dear Enemy (亲密敌人, 2011) is set in Hong Kong, but includes sequences shot in London, South Africa, Australia, and mainland China. The sequences in South Africa and Australia are very short and practically without any narrative function, but seem to be of significance to create a sense of global mobility that caters to the fantasy of urban elites. In the spatial imagination of middle-class consumers, local places are spectacularized in order to highlight class privilege. The spatial imagination is particularly emphasized by the urban oasis. In the highly urbanized spaces of China, a villa or an apartment with an oasis-like garden is desirable. Oasification, as defined by David Fraser, “commodifies green, pleasant aspects of a constructed nature to create a buffer zone between the individual apartment and its larger social and spatial contexts” (David Fraser 2000, 27). These larger contexts include the polluted environment and urban noises much complained about by ordinary residents. That is to say, possession of an oasis is a means to distinguish a privileged class identity defined by accessibility to a more peaceful and pleasant environment as well as leisure. In One Night Surprise (一夜惊喜, 2013), a designed villa with a beautiful garden in the middle of mountains is set as the home for the male lead, even though it is unrealistic for a professional who goes to work on daily basis, as it should be several hours’ drive away from his workplace in the center of Beijing.

Freedom of choice

An empowered image of the urban professional woman is fantasized in repetitive tropes of freedom of choice for individual woman. The freedom of choice, as represented in chick flicks, mainly consists of selecting a Mr. Right and planning career development, marriage, and reproduction. As for the right Mr. Right, female leads claim priority and initiative in selecting their true love from at least two eligible bachelors in movies such as I Do (我愿意, 2012), Sophie’s Revenge and One Night’s Surprise. With regard to career choice, they range across middle-level managers in foreign companies, such as an HR manager in Go, Lala, Go! and a design director in One Night’s Surprise; freelancers, such as a designer for cosmetic packaging in Suddenly Seventeen (二十八岁未成年, 2016); a cartoonist in Sophie’s Revenge; and an airline stewardess in Romance out of Blue. These professions not only offer a high income but also endow female leads with a cosmopolitan identity associated with fashion, both of which are deemed to be ideals of most female audiences, especially those neophytes in ordinary companies.

Certainly, portrayals of empowered female professionals on screen should be applauded and encouraged in male-dominated cinema, but the trope of freedom of choice that has been embedded in consumerist pseudo-feminism since the women’s studies movement in the 1980 s is suspicious. What is left unsaid and concealed behind the glamorous appearance of choice-power? First, the depoliticalized narrative naturalizes the heroine’s individual success and ignores institutional sexism in the workplace, such as the glass ceiling and unequal pay. This deliberate ignorance was admitted by Xu Jinglei, the director of Go, Lala, Go!, when she tried to explain in an interview why she cut off the female lead’s struggles in the original novel of Du Lala’s Promotion. According to her, real office strife is too harsh for the female audience, who suffer from it on a daily basis (Lei Wang 2010). In other words, what she offers in Go, Lala, Go! is merely a dose of consolation about the real limitations of women’s free choice in climbing a corporate ladder.

Second, behind the ostensibly all-inclusive and all-accessible freedom of choice, there are strict cultural norms that compel urban female professionals to make the right choices. In this light, as Angela McRobbie puts it, “choice is surely, within lifestyle culture, a modality of constraint” (Angela McRobbie 2007, 36). By modeling the right choices, chick flicks justify their “rightness” by building value patterns of inclusions and exclusions. Not complicated, the right choices (in the name of freedom of choice) in chick flicks can be boiled down to the priority of securing a rich man’s love.

Not only is career development aimed at securing a love relationship, but it could possibly be to the direct benefit of such a love relationship in the workplace. In The Truth about Beauty (整容日记, 2014), the neophyte learns and practices the overt shortcut toward promotion, that is, sleeping with the man who has corporate power. It manifests that tapping into a man’s resources through a workplace romance is reasonable as long as women do not surrender their independence completely, as in a conventional power relation between sexes.

The cautionary tale of the masculine women

In chick flicks, a contrast is very often built between feminine heroines and female supporting characters who are characterized as masculine. The feminine heroines are usually portrayed as being naïve and cute, wearing exquisite make-up, and loving luxurious fashion. In most cases, they are mid-level managers in a company. The masculine supporting characters are, in contrast, sophisticated and dominating. Though these women are not mannish in appearance, they usually wear suits to maintain a professional look. Their masculinity is mostly manifested in their position as the head of the company such as CEO or board chairman, with a few exceptions taking the form of a mid-level director. These distinctions build up to one crucial divide between feminine and masculine women, namely that the former are sexually desirable while the latter are not.

Masculine women, despite their career achievement, are stereotyped as having one identity, that of a woman left alone by widowhood or a failed relationship. Pointedly, this combination of CEO and post-relationship woman follows a logic of cause-and-effect. The CEO is deemed a masculinized position, which, if assumed by a woman, effaces her desirable femininity. This leads to a power confrontation between husband and wife and a failure in the division of labor. The masculine woman, on the one hand, is portrayed as bossy and aggressive, her achievements exceeding those of her husband and thus leaving no room for her to be taken care of. For instance, in Miss Partners (梦想合伙人, 2016), the CEO’s husband finds a mistress who is younger, sexier and reliant on men, in order to secure his masculinity in the conventional gender hierarchy. On the other hand, a masculine woman is blamed for her negligence of domestic responsibilities. In Love on Lushan Mountain 2010 (庐山恋2010, 2010), the tension between the board chairman and her daughter is accounted for by the mother’s inadequate attention to her daughter due to her busy career development.

The post-relationship woman, however, constitutes a warning for the consequences that follow from a failure of the feminine masquerade, i.e., loss of sexual desirability, marriage, and children, which are presumably desired by all women. Very often, such a warning is narrated through feminine female characters in the film. Feminine women seem to be eligible and motivated to impose gender policing on masculine women (Judith Halberstam 1998, 24) in order to shore up the gender conformity which they comply with and benefit from. In Miss Partners, it is the sexy mistress who points out to the CEO that her failure as a good wife and mother has cost her a happy marriage. As executors of gender policing, feminine women are not willing to extend their philosophy of freedom of choice to masculine women. Freedom of choice is used to justify housewives and conventional femininities in chick flicks, thereby excluding masculine women. The latter have no other choice but to pathetically remain single and endure loneliness. It is fair to say that the culture of consumerist pseudo-feminism imposes double standards, or rather, it is harsher and more hostile toward its imagined other, the non-masquerading woman, than to men or patriarchal institutions.

The effect of distancing feminisms

As I have argued, consumerist pseudo-feminism distances itself from socialist feminism in that it leaves women’s issues to the government; at the same time, it distances itself from liberal feminism, as it shows no interest in Western values that have little visibility in local history or discursive circulation in Chinese popular culture. This double distancing leads to the hollowing out of feminist critique, which leaves the conventional gender bias unchallenged in the narrative of chick flicks. If many Hollywood chick flicks take into account the effects of second-wave feminist critique, it means at least that they note and acknowledge its presence. Although they largely repudiate liberal feminism, Hollywood chick flicks show traces of alertness and self-consciousness in narrating power dynamics between the two sexes. However, this alertness and self-consciousness are, in many cases, lacking in the Chinese chick flicks. That is why conventional norms of femininity regarding appearance and goals are tolerated in the narrative, which results in a weakened representation of women’s empowerment.

If we compare some Chinese remakes to the original Hollywood chick flicks, the disparity of empowerment is rendered obvious. Take Sophie’s Revenge, for example. It may not be precise to call it a remake, but it has a very similar storyline to Addicted to Love (1997). Both films tell a story about a man and a woman conspiring to take revenge on their exes, who are having an affair. This cooperation results in a romance between the two. The biggest difference between the two movies lies in the means and purpose of the revenge. In Addicted to Love, the revenge is wreaked against the ex-boyfriend in order to punish him for cheating prior to accepting his apology, while in Sophie’s Revenge the revenge is carried out on the new girlfriend, in order to drive her away and re-capture the heart of the ex-boyfriend. The narrative in the latter sounds very familiar, aligned as it is with many patriarchal stories that blame women for men’s cheating, hence offering them exemption from moral interrogation.

The other example is Once Again (二次初恋, 2017), a remake of 17 Again (2009). Both movies narrate the male lead’s return to youth in the crisis of divorce, which re-confirms his love, remedies his relationship with his children and eventually saves the marriage. The major distinction between the two movies is the subjectivity of the wife. In 17 Again, after kicking the grumpy husband out of the home, the wife actually improves her living quality through renovating her garden by herself and dating again. In Once Again, it is the husband who leaves his grumpy wife because she complains about his unemployment. The wife’s dependence and passivity are clear, despite the fact that she is a college teacher. She is so tempted by the financial support and social resources offered by her previous suitor that she is persuaded to file for divorce. Because the wife lacks subjectivity, the story develops into two men competing with each other to win a woman, a typical patriarchal narrative paradigm. Thus, this remake loses the sense of women’s empowerment in its original version and ends up in a cliché.

Conclusion

This article has studied the discursive trajectory of post-feminism in China and its cultural representation in chick flicks. The trajectory has been mapped within a transnational framework that scrutinizes the local history of consumerism, individualism, the rise of the middle class, the women’s studies movement and its appropriation by the market economy. Acknowledging important national differences, this article reconceptualizes post-feminism in China by highlighting its historical and political differences from the West, to distinguish it from dominant perceptions of a universally applied mode of Western post-feminist culture. Designated as consumerist pseudo-feminism, this movement focuses mostly on female subjects who are lower-middle class and whose consuming aspirations have been amplified in disproportion with their financial status. The discursive origins of consumerist pseudo-feminism can be traced to the women’s studies movement, which cooperated with the state, resulting in concessions made by feminism particularly in terms of unemployment among working-class women and lower levels of participation by urban female elites in government and on managerial boards. Moreover, by engaging local feminisms differently, consumerist pseudo-feminism is chronologically situated between socialist and liberal feminisms, with a substantial temporal overlap with the development of liberal feminism since the 1990 s. Its interaction with socialist and liberal feminisms can be, as I have argued, characterized by “double distancing”. Distinctive from the feature of “double entanglement” in post-feminism, consumerist pseudo-feminism demonstrates more ignorance of and indifference to the other feminist discourses.

Such a discursive, historically situated understanding of consumerist pseudo-feminism adds depth and new perspectives to the scholarship of chick flicks. From the perspective of spectatorship, I contend that the fantasies of middle-class women are projected on screen in the form of revised masculinity and imagined urban space. From the perspective of ideology, the rhetoric of freedom of choice engrains new patterns of inclusion and exclusion through offering a heavily constrained ‘right choice’ to women, with the norm of feminine masquerade being used to stigmatize powerful women as pathetic failures in marriage and motherhood. Unlike Hollywood chick flicks, some Chinese chick flicks transplant themselves into a Western urban space in order to fantasize a westernized global citizenship, which fails to fit the local context but nonetheless offers up an aspirational lifestyle. The other distinction of Chinese chick flicks lies in their lack of alertness to and self-consciousness in narrating gender dynamics, which leads to an uncritical tolerance of patriarchal norms, and thus a weakened representation of women’s empowerment along the lines of a highly constrained rhetoric of ‘choice’. These differences in cinematic representation and discourse from that of the West constitute a distinguished cultural landscape of post-feminism in Chinese context.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Misha Kavka for her invaluable suggestions, continued support, and encouragement. I also thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback on this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fan Yang

Fan Yang is PhD. candidate in Media Studies at University of Amsterdam. Her research interests are discursive trajectories of various feminisms in mainland China, women’s cinema and discursive feminism on Chinese social media. E-mail: [email protected]

Notes

1. Based on the standard of World Bank, households with a daily income between 10–100 US dollars.