Imagining a progressive gender order: The career girl and the working mother in Chinese “inspirational women serials”

• In Event: ICA Interactive Paper/Poster Session II
  In Interactive Paper Session: Feminist Scholarship Interactive Poster Session

Abstract

This paper interrogates how popular television serials in China imagine a progressive gender order within the rocky ecology of Chinese feminism. The study analyzes two figurative types – the career girl and the working mother – in Chinese “inspirational women serials” as well as the media discourse about the serials. The analysis situates gender ideologies embodied in the two figurative types within the social context of Chinese feminism, which is the simultaneous embracement of liberal feminist notions and the championship of the neoliberal individuals. I argue that such historical coincidence, along with the inadequate social conditions for feminism, enables these “inspirational” women characters to possess progressive gender meanings while also delimiting gender politics to the individual terrain. The analysis of the two figurative constructions shows that (1) the figure of the career girl clearly denies traditional gender norms, but is also transformed into a personal striving story predicated on an individual woman’s quality; (2) the working mother is empowered to retain her career after childbirth, but is constructed to be an entrepreneurial, all-capable person, leaving the persisting gender inequality in work-family labor distribution unexamined.

Author

• Qi Ling, U of Iowa