Shanghai Baby as a Chinese Chick-Lit: Female Empowerment and Neoliberal Consumerist Agency

Abstract

This paper argues that Shanghai Baby's celebration of an active, empowering form of female sexual and economic independence, voiced in neo-liberal market terms of active choice and individual freedom, signals an important departure from earlier representations of Chinese women and points to affinities both in narrative, thematic and ideological dimensions with the contemporary Anglo-American chick lit. The novel is anchored in the last years of the 1990s, when integration of the Chinese urban society in a global consumer culture are much greater than before. The novel also appropriates feminist terms of female empowerment and agency to celebrate the sexual and economic confidence of a new urban, me- first generation of well-educated and physically attractive women. It also stresses their deliberate alienation from feminism as a social movement. Empowerment and agency are to be sought in individual consumerist power and via full participation in an increasingly globalized commodity culture that addresses these women as active consumers with unconstrained choice. This paper points out that such rhetoric of agency and individualism reflects the impact of the neoliberal market rationality. This has moved beyond the economic dimension of maximized profit-making into the social and cultural area of subject formation. These women are thereby interpellated as actively choosing and self-responsible consumers and social differences are aestheticized as lifestyles. I argue that Shanghai Baby also contains complex and contradictory messages which help to cast a critical light on the twin discourses of post-feminism and consumerism of the chick lit genre. By appropriating feminist terms of empowerment and also by stressing that women should embrace and adjust to mainstream patriarchal culture and its conventional discourses of erotic beauty, the novel reveals a level of anxiety, frustration, and constant pressure of self-discipline. This eventually undermines its language of female sexual sub- jectification. By celebrating Shanghai's integration into a global consumer culture, while hinting at the hidden race and class hierarchies and exclusions, the novel partly debunks the consumerist rhetoric of unconstrained freedom and agency and reveals the working of unequal power relations.