“I want to look as if I am my child’s big sister”: Self-satisfaction and the yummy mummy in Taiwan

Abstract

This paper explores the trend of stay-fit maternity in Taiwan and extends the feminist analysis of the yummy mummy under neoliberalism to a non-Western context. Drawing insight from Foucault’s critique of the theory of human capital and his emphasis on “psychic return,” it examines a process of continuous interaction between outer appearance and the inner world of these Taiwanese women during and after pregnancy. Thus, by using the perspective of the flux of psychic return in order to understand these women’s continuous aesthetic labour, I emphasize the importance of self-satisfaction as a determinant gain of the valorization of appearance in this process of maximizing self-appreciation and diminishing self-depreciation. I underline not only the importance of the functioning of an economy of affects which supports and overdetermines their beauty practices but also, in some circumstances, that the immaterial return in the quest for beauty takes priority over material earnings and the influences of social pressures. As well, my analysis finds complex and overlapping relations between self-satisfaction and neoliberal rationality such that self-appreciation constitutes the pleasure of embodying a recognized ideal of the maternal, the joy of overcoming undisciplined flesh, and the confidence-enhancement of being mistakenly seen as a young girl.