Postfeminist heroes and heroines in contemporary Chinese advertising

Abstract

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.