Confucius Institute Talk: White-collar Beauties: Gender, Sexuality and Power in Urban China
| Dates: | 24 May 2018 |
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| Times: | 13:00 - 14:00 |
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| What is it: | Talk |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, Adults, Alumni, Current University students, General public |
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| Speaker: | Dr Jieyu Liu |
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This talk is about 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.
Speaker
Dr Jieyu Liu
Role: Reader in Sociology of China and Deputy Director at the SOAS China Institute
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
A116
Samuel Alexander Building
Manchester
