Abstract
A number of Tai Lue women in Xishuangbanna, Southwest China, engage in the tea business as entrepreneurs, despite facing dual marginalisation resulting from long-standing ethnic and gender stereotypes. The representations of Pu’er tea authenticity, along with women’s charm and beauty as part of tea aesthetics in Chinese tea culture, transform into ethnic and gendered capital for Tai Lue women in the tea business. Through fieldwork and qualitative analysis, this study finds that in business processes, Tai Lue female entrepreneurs develop a ‘distinctive persona’ to their advantage, embodied in the ‘ethnicised tea femininity’ they cultivate, which is supported by ethnic and gendered capital. The ‘ethnicised tea femininity’ they perform aligns with ‘gender essentialism’ theorised by Leshkowich in Essential Trade: Vietnamese Women in a Changing Marketplace. Lue women essentialise themselves to seize opportunities at the intersection of politics, economics, gender, and ethnicity.
Published Version
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