Toward a Frigid Body: Minimalist Fashion and the Sinthomosexual in China

Abstract

The emergence of “the frigid style,” namely the appellation of minimalist fashion in China, is synchronized with a heightened national policy that aims at boosting reproduction and compensating for an aging society—a new phase of China’s sexual revolution since the economic reform in the late 1970s. This article argues that the frigid style, incarnating sexual aloofness, is a bodily defense against the discursive reconstruction of body for a reproductive agenda. The frigidly dressed body is not a conspicuous manifesto against biopolitics; instead, it incorporates the Chinese ideal of security and nobility. Articulated in the pursuit of security is a persona of nothingness safe from the normative discourses of ideal citizenship, while in nobility a fantasized western lifestyle that disregards the limitations on gender, class and race. Moreover, the rise of frigid style is accompanied by the popularization of what Lee Edelman calls “sinthomosexuality,” namely sex without any impetus of reproduction. The sinthomosexual outlook on bodily autonomy and agency connotes a new subjectivity in China—the construction of subjects appealing for apoliticality. This apolitical subjectivity might furnish us with a critical lens to look at normcore fashion across the globe.