Chinese Masculinity Research Articles

Rural Masculinities and Fathering: The Lived Experiences of Chinese Farmers

Little attention has been paid to the process of Chinese fathers in the countryside representing themselves as men while encountering rapid social changes. This qualitative study explored how rural Chinese men construct masculinities through stories about their fathering experiences. Fifteen farmers from southwest China were interviewed about their involvement in childrearing. The fathers were identified to have constructed configurations of masculinity fitting their social context, which were negotiated using various personal, interpersonal, and contextual resources. The participants presented themselves as family supporters, collaborative husbands, and strict but caring fathers who envisioned relying on their children near death. Gender inequalities were revealed, and participants legitimized these by emphasizing the instrumentality of such gender relations in childrearing and family development. Study limitations and implications for future research and practices related to rural Chinese fathers are discussed.

Colonial Stereotypes and Martialized Intellectual Masculinity in Late Qing and Early Republican China

This article adopts an intersectional approach incorporating gender, race, and colonialism to illuminate a martial trend among Chinese men of letters at the turn of the twentieth century. Within the late Qing reformist intellectual discourses championed by Liang Qichao, it analyzes three racialized colonialist stereotypes: the “effeminate” Confucian literatus, the “Sick Man of East Asia,” and the “Yellow Peril.” The purpose is to reveal these stereotypes as collateral elements of the ideological reconfigurations of the Chinese nation and Chinese masculinities. I argue that although the homology of Western colonialist logic and gender politics powerfully manipulated narratives on Chinese masculinities, male Chinese intellectuals did not passively adopt orientalized images of “Chinamen.” Rather, they strategically reappropriated these stereotypes and invented a new homology of racial and gender politics in order to address abiding concerns with race, nation, and male sexual potency.

(Un)Naturality and Chinese queer masculinities on Ailaibulai

ABSTRACT This study analyzes the discourses of desire featured on the online queer reality TV program Ailaibulai. The show aired on LeTV in 2016 and was co-produced by a Chinese corporation—Blue City—that targets queer groups. This paper illuminates the hierarchized masculinities and widespread effeminophobia that are represented on the show. My analysis suggests that the show’s participants use the discourse of (bu)ziran—“(un)naturality” in English—to distinguish and hierarchize masculinities through physicality, performance, and gender identification. Naturality is deemed a necessity for desirable masculinity, while perceived unnatural features marginalize participants’ masculinities. It also complicates the case by defining two types of unnaturality as the results of being damaged/polluted and being polished/elevated, respectively. Unnaturality as a result of polishing natural materials can nevertheless increase sexual capital, which can be achieved through men’s personal features such as a muscular physique. Additionally, this paper demonstrates how Chinese queer people contest certain types of white masculinity in the transnational context, because Ailaibulai participants only value a particular white masculinity.

Mastery of Words and Swords: Negotiating Intellectual Masculinities in Modern China 1890s-1930s by Jun Lei (review)

Jun Lei. Mastery of Words and Swords: Negotiating Intellectual Masculinities in Modern China, s-s. Series Transnational Asian Masculinities. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, . x,  pp. Hardcover HK$., ISBN ----. Jun Lei’s Mastery of Words and Swords draws on a range of literary and visual sources to analyze the complex construction of masculine identities by China’s intellectual and cultural elites during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her study is divided into two parts, the first of which contains a pair of chapters that establish disciplinary and theoretical frameworks for the four chapter-long case studies in the second. Chapter , “Performing Chinese Masculinities on the World Stage: An Introduction,” acknowledges Kam Louie’s pioneering role in extending the study of gender in Chinese literature and culture from its original focus on women to include the consideration of masculinities as well, and draws on Louie’s influential model of traditional Chinese masculinity as constructed through the negotiation of the categories of wen (civil, literary) and wu (military, martial). The premodern prioritization of wen qualities in the masculine ideal—both for the educated elite and for most of the society whose apex they occupied—was challenged during China’s encounters with global modernity in the form of Western imperialism. Racialized colonial discourse characterized scholarly models of masculinity as effeminate and associated them with the allegedly congenital weakness of the “sick man of Asia.” Internalization of this discourse by Chinese intellectuals led to a crisis in masculinity and calls for a more militant manhood. By opening her review of this familiar story with Lu Xun’s critique of female impersonator Mei Lanfang, Lei skillfully highlights the imbrication of what she sees as some of its most significant elements: the performativity of masculinity, the concern for the gaze of a global audience, and the national stakes in gender identity. She proposes that her own contributions will be threefold. Empirically, she will offer the first systematic study Chinese masculinities during the crucial transitional periods of the late Qing and the early Republic. Methodologically, she will venture beyond canonical literary texts to examine a wider archive of literary, print, and visual culture. And theoretically, she will develop a new set of models and categories that will facilitate a response to a key question: “Can we locate agency, or any form of Reviews©  by University of Hawai‘i Press counter-orientalist discourse in reconstructing Chinese masculinities in spite of the power imbalance in the semicolonial settings?” (p. ). The second introductory chapter, “Violence and Its Antidotes: Theorizing Modern Chinese Masculinities,” casts a wide net in gathering the materials from which Lei will construct her own theoretical apparatus. Lei duly notes the need to attend both to cultural difference and to cross-cultural commonalities in “drawing on strands of scholarship within and outside of China studies, more specifically, poststructuralist theories of gender and masculinities, scholarship on cosmopolitanism, and relevant postcolonial theories of uneven transcultural exchange between the East and the West” (p. ). Balancing Judith Butler’s ideas about subjugated performativity against Erving Goffman’s more agentdriven notion of performance, she argues that the masculinities of this period were characterized by a heightened degree of performativity and staged with reference to both the “elsewhen” of the Chinese past and the “elsewhere” of the West and Japan. She then outlines two strands that will inform the remainder of the study. The first is the “brutalization of scholars,” that is, the alignment of a new scholarly identity with hypermasculine traits, including violence, both physical and discursive. This “brutalization” both emulates and serves as a form of resistance to the hegemonic militaristic masculinity of nineteenth-century Western colonialism. The second is a complementary occupation or appropriation of what she calls “feminine space,” a discursive terrain accommodating qualities, emotions, and desires disallowed by the dominant constructions of masculinity. While this “feminine space” might seem to echo or recuperate some of the qualities of premodern wen masculinity, it differs from its predecessor in being shaped by the demands and limitations of the brutalized scholar-warrior model. In chapter , “The Sick, the Weak, and the Perilous: Colonial Stereotypes and Martialized Intellectual Masculinity in Late Qing...

Afro-Asian Connections in Latin America and the Caribbean ed. by Luisa Marcela Ossa and Debbie Lee-DiStefano

Reviewed by: Afro-Asian Connections in Latin America and the Caribbean ed. by Luisa Marcela Ossa and Debbie Lee-DiStefano Vanessa K. Valdés Ossa, Luisa Marcela, and Debbie Lee-DiStefano, editors. Afro-Asian Connections in Latin America and the Caribbean. Lexington, 2019. Pp. 240. ISBN 978-1-498-58708-2. With Afro-Asian Connections in Latin America and the Caribbean, editors Luisa Marcela Ossa and Debbie Lee-DiStefano have provided us an admirable collection of innovative and forward-thinking scholarship that destabilizes and therefore enlivens the disciplines of Latin American Studies, African Diaspora Studies, and Asian Studies. As Lisa Yun reminds us in her introduction, global Afro-Asian studies began in 1955 with the Bandung Conference; yet it has been marginalized within studies about the Americas. The contributions of peoples of African and Asian descent to Latin American and Caribbean nations have long gone ignored within regional imaginaries; this volume goes a long way to correcting this systematic erasure. The editors divide the collection into three parts, “Identity and National Discourses,” “Contact Zones, Solidarity, and Syncretism,” and “Bodies, Genders, and Identities,” with three essays in each and an interlude by Kathleen López introducing each section. López explains that the essays in the first part “reinterpret concepts of mestizaje to emphasize Afro-Asian centrality to nation-building, influence in national cultural icons, and cross-racial and transnational solidarities” (3). With the first essay, “Afro and Chinese Depictions in Peruvian Social Discourse at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Debbie Lee-DiStefano reminds us that Black and Asian presence in the Americas stems from their common histories in having “served as a commodity of labor to be used at the behest of others who sought economic gain at their expense” (7). She goes on to examine José Carlos Mariátegui’s Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (1928) to reveal how he privileges the indigenous over Black and Chinese populations in his proposal toward socioeconomic equity in the Peruvian nation. Mey-Yen Moriuchi convincingly argues for more scholarship emphasizing both the Asian and African heritages simultaneously of renowned Cuban artist Wifredo Lam in “Locating Chinese Culture and Aesthetics in the Art of Wifredo Lam.” In “Afro-Asian-Caribbean Connections in Transnational Circulation: The Harlem Ashram as Chronotope,” Malathi Iyengar calls our attention to a brownstone on 125th Street and Fifth Avenue as a critical site of South Asian, African American, and Puerto Rican political activism in the 1940s. The focus of the second section of the volume is representative cultural production resulting from Afro-Asian synthesis in the region. Examining four Japanese-Brazilian novels written in both Portuguese and Japanese within an almost sixty-year span, beginning in 1950, Zelideth María Rivas debunks the stereotype of Asian insularity within the Brazilian nation, focusing instead on representations of Afro-Asian intimacies and exchanges in “Merging the Transpacific with the Transatlantic: Afro-Asia in Japanese Brazilian Narratives.” Luisa Marcela Osso explores the parallel histories and fictionalized interactions of the Afro- and Sino-Cuban communities through the novels by Cristina García and Mayra Montero in “Parallels and Intersections: Afro-Chinese Relationships and Spiritual Connections in Monkey Hunting and Como un mensajero tuyo.” With her essay “Erased from Collective Memory: Dreadlocks Story Documentary Untangles the Hindu Legacy of Rastafari,” producer-director Linda Aïnouche reflects on the inspiration behind her 2014 documentary as well as highlights understudied influences of Hinduism on Rastafarianism in Jamaica. The third and final section interrogates stereotypes of the hypersexualized mulata and the non-sexual Asian male in the Caribbean. Dania Abreu-Torres’s “Body of Reconciliation: Aida [End Page 287] Petrinera Cheng’s Journey in Como un mensajero tuyo by Mayra Montero” contends that the portrait of the protagonist destabilizes the fetishized categorization of the mulata and is therefore suggestive of new renderings of gendered and racialized women within Cuban literature. In her essay “‘I Am Like One of those Women’: Chinese Masculinity as Feminist Writing Strategy in Three West Indian Novels,” Anne-Marie Lee-Loy puts forth that the effeminized representations of Asian masculinity in Elizabeth Nunez’s Bruised Hibiscus (1994/Trinidad); Margaret Cezair-Thompson’s The True History of Paradise (1999...

Masculinities and the Construction of Boyhood in Contemporary Chinese Popular Fiction for Young Readers

Masculinities and the Construction of Boyhood in Contemporary Chinese Popular Fiction for Young Readers Lisa Chu Shen (bio) The marriage between masculinity studies and children's literature is a fairly recent phenomenon. Compared with the attention received by femininity and female bodies in children's fiction, masculinity as an object of inquiry arrives rather late on the scene, not least because it was only toward the end of the twentieth century that masculinity studies emerged as an academic discipline. The problem with the continued focus on women and girls in children's literature could "run the risk of further naturalizing masculinity" (Wannamaker 122). Since manhood is a continuation of, rather than a flight from, boyhood, examining how boyhood is represented and constructed offers us insight into the kinds of masculine identities being propagated in children's books and the extent to which such identities conform to normative standards. Academic studies of gender in Chinese fiction, both modern and contemporary, have been largely confined to the study of women (Chow; Liu; Sang; Zhu). As Evans and Strauss note: "narratives on masculinity . . . are notably absent, in part reflecting how gender in academic studies of China is still largely associated with the study of women" (825). This imbalance is being redressed by an emerging body of studies on masculinity in modern and contemporary China, especially in the recent decade (Hird; Louie; Song; Xiao; Yang; Zhong). Nevertheless, in the field of Chinese children's fiction, studies of gender have been largely confined to the representation of femininity, with narratives on masculinities being almost nonexistent. As this essay will show, however, examining how masculinity is constructed in contemporary Chinese fiction for young readers reveals the continuing struggle between tradition and modernity, a topic of paramount importance in studies of Chinese literature and culture. On the one hand, [End Page 221] contemporary Chinese conceptions of masculinity, hegemonic masculinity in particular, have been largely Westernized in the process of modernization and globalization. On the other hand, there are alternative models that hinge upon the prospect of modernity but which reflect the persistent influence of the Chinese tradition. The Chinese case illuminates the intersections between masculinity studies, children's literature and modernity studies, intersections that have not yet been explored, due largely to the marginalized positions, in Chinese studies, of both masculinity studies and children's literature. As such, the Chinese case brings light to the role of children's literature in global studies of masculinities in patriarchal societies caught between tradition and modernity where gender categories are being constantly shaped and defined in relation to the tensions inherent in this ever-evolving dyad. Masculinity Studies and Chinese Masculinities Masculinity studies has emerged as a serious academic discipline in the past decades, as gender scholars in sociology, literature, and culture alike are regarding masculinity as a subject worthy of scholarly investigation. As with femininity, masculinity is now being recognized as a constructed concept, rather than innate or inherent (Gilmore; Connell; Kimmel). Manhood, rather than static or timeless, is historical, constructed in relation to "a set of 'others'" (Kimmel 182). Although masculinity is not the exclusive domain of men or manhood (for discussions of female masculinity, refer to Halberstam), it is usually in the context of men's/manhood studies that masculinity is taken as a serious object of inquiry. Since children's literature serves to prepare children for their future roles as gendered adults, it is understandable that authors tend to project their ideas of manhood onto their construction of boyhood. According to sociologist R. W. Connell, hegemonic masculinity is "the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women" (Masculinities 77). Rolf Romøren and John Stephens point out, with reference to Connell, that hegemonic masculinity is taken to be "the version of masculinity which is considered normative within a particular society's expressions of masculinity" (233). They argue that currently, within media images of global popular culture, forms of masculinity grounded in "domination, physical assertiveness, and egocentric individualism" dominate (217). What needs to be made clear is that these forms...

The Paradox of Gender Reversal: Dance Hosts and the Pursuit of Gender Ideals in Contemporary China

AbstractThis study examines the masculinity of Chinese male migrants who earn their living as “dance hosts.” Dance hosts partner middle-aged women in dance halls, sell experiences of intimacy and engage in ongoing romantic relationships with their female clients. This article seeks to capture an intimate and “up-close” portrait of (heterosexual) male dance hosting, and then further addresses dance hosts’ masculine subjectivity by examining the coping strategies they use to overcome the stigma attached to their profession and to assert their masculinity. Ultimately, the article argues that the process of masculine subjectivity formation in the case of male dance hosts is structured by dominant norms of Chinese masculinity. Although seemingly highly subversive, the relationship between dance hosts and clients in fact fulfils conventional gender ideals and encourages the perpetuation of traditional gender roles in China's patriarchal society. This work seeks to offer an understanding of traditional gender norms (or ideals) through the lens of normative Chinese masculinity within the context of a stigmatized occupation.

Be a Responsible and Respectable Man: Two Generations of Chinese Gay Men Accomplishing Masculinity in Hong Kong

This article seeks a dialogue between masculinity studies and generational sexuality studies by comparing two generations of gay men in Hong Kong through in-depth interviews with 15 older gay men born before the 1950s and 25 young gay men born after 1990 using a life course approach. The article highlights the sociohistorical and political changes shaping male identity, practice, and culture in colonial and postcolonial Hong Kong, and identifies responsibility and respectability as two key dimensions in the construction of Chinese masculinity. It argues that the two generations under study accomplish gay masculinities against changing Chinese masculine ideals and hetero/homonormativities sensitive to different social relations and institutions, as well as engage in constant negotiation with the dominant heteronormative life course and need to manage stigma. Drawing on the narratives of the participants from the two generations, the article examines continuity and change in the idealized and practiced forms of masculinity embedded in different institutions, thereby providing a nuanced understanding of the transformations of Chinese generational masculinities under broad social–historical changes.

The Cosmopolitan Dream: Transnational Chinese Masculinities in a Global Age, edited by Derek Hird and Geng Song, 2018

The Cosmopolitan Dream: Transnational Chinese Masculinities in a Global Age, edited by Derek Hird and Geng Song, 2018

Masculinizing Jianghu Spaces in the Past and Present: Homosociality, Nationalism and Chineseness

Abstract Jianghu (rivers and lakes) refers to the imagined spatial arena in Chinese literature and culture that is parallel to, or sometimes in a tangential relationship with, mainstream society. Inhabited by merchants, craftsmen, beggars and vagabonds, and later bandits, outlaws and gangsters, the jianghu space constitutes an interesting “field” (to borrow Pierre Bourdieu’s term) that produces alternative subjectivities in traditional Chinese culture. In most representations, jianghu is primarily a homosocial world of men, which honors masculine moral codes. By tracing changes of jianghu spaces over time, this paper attempts to set the spatial politics of masculinity in Chinese culture in a historical context. It unravels its dynamic interrelations with the tropes of class and nation, from the hosting of outlaws in the traditional masterpiece Shuihu zhuan (Water margin) to the resurgence of jianghu images and imaginaries as a symbol of Chineseness in post-socialist film and television. It argues that the widely referenced relationship between civil (wen) and martial (wu ) values in imperial China describes only gentry-class masculinities. By contrast, jianghu spaces lie at the margins of society and so invite an alternative conceptualization of lower-class masculinities. In contemporary China, jianghu has come to symbolize a new mode of Chinese masculinity in the global age. It can refer not only to fictional spaces in the martial arts genre, but also to social spaces that cement the “Chinese-style” relationships and networks needed for success in the reform market.

‘A Woman to Warm My Heart’: Low-Wage Mainland Chinese Migrant Men, Thrift and Desires for Intimacy in Singapore

ABSTRACTWhile work on gender and migration has grown significantly, it has mostly addressed the experiences of female migrants; the experiences of male migrants are still understudied. Even less attention has been paid to male migrants and their heterosexuality. This paper is interested in Chinese masculinities, which in the migration literature have been discussed largely in relation to migration to the West. Discussions of low-wage Chinese masculinities have similarly been limited, with a focus on rural-urban migration within China. Empirically, this paper aims to contribute by investigating Chinese masculinities outside of China but in a non-Western setting. The arrival of low-wage migrants from China into Singapore’s majority-‘Chinese’ population not only enables an investigation of the hierarchies of Chinese masculinities but also unsettles the ‘Chinese’ ethnic category. I consider low-wage mainland Chinese migrant men’s raced, gendered and classed subjectivities and show that low-wage mainland Chinese migrant men in Singapore encounter dilemmas in their desires to seek intimacies beyond paid sex. I show that their dilemmas are informed by the discourse of respectable manhood and thrift, a discourse that is extended through a juxtaposition against Singaporean men.

Paradoxical Associations of Masculine Ideology and Casual Sex Among Heterosexual Male Geosocial Networking App Users in China

Momo, the most popular geosocial networking app in China, is used as a common platform to seek casual sex. The present study, which is based on the social constructionist view of gender, examines how the endorsement of masculinity among heterosexual male Momo users is associated with the number of casual sex partners they meet on the app. The study also explores the mediating role of the sex motive for using Momo. Analyses of survey data from 125 heterosexual male Momo users showed that the endorsement of masculinity had an indirect positive relationship with the number of sex partners mediated by the sex motive; at the same time, it had a direct but negative association with the number of sex partners. These paradoxical associations were explained by different patterns across the individual dimensions of masculinity ideology. Specifically, the dimension of the Importance of Sex was responsible for the positive indirect association whereas the dimension of Avoidance of Femininity was responsible for the negative direct association. These findings are discussed in relation to the wen-wu dyad of Chinese masculinity. Because unsafe sex has been found to be associated with the use of geosocial networking apps, my study also calls for integrating the concept of practicing safer sex with the cultural ideal of masculinity.

Go Nation: Chinese Masculinities and the Game of Weiqi in China, written by Marc L. Moskowitz, 2013

Go Nation: Chinese Masculinities and the Game of Weiqi in China, written by Marc L. Moskowitz, 2013

Constructions of Masculinity and the Perception of Interracial Relationships Among Young Male Chinese International Students and Scholars in the United States

Relocating to the United States influences the perceptions of Chinese men on manhood and their attitudes toward interracial relationships between Chinese women and American men. In this study, we examined how the intersection of gender and race in a cross-cultural context shaped constructions of masculinity of young male Chinese international students and scholars, and how racialized masculinity experiences influenced their relationships with women and with peer U.S. men. We interviewed 18 Chinese men (Mean age = 26.06 years, range = 20-30) and used thematic analysis to analyze in-depth interview data. We found that some men adopted flexible, protective, and diverse strategies to reclaim their masculinity by reconciling American and Chinese masculinities. Others felt degraded and took a negative attitude toward the interracial relationship between Chinese women and American men. Despite the influence of cross-cultural contexts, the Chinese patriarchal Confucian tradition exerted a strong influence on participants’ masculinity construction.

Representation of Diasporic Chinese Wen Masculinities in A Native of Beijing in New York and A Free Life

Abstract This article mainly draws on Kam Louie’s wen/wu paradigm of Chinese masculinities and R. W. Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity to examine the representation of diasporic Chinese wen masculinities in the popular Chinese television drama A Native of Beijing in New York and Ha Jin’s novel A Free Life. The article argues that the two texts suggest there is no monolithic and static diasporic masculinity among contemporary immigrant Chinese wen men in the US; rather, immigrant Chinese wen men are constantly negotiating, forming and performing their diasporic masculinity according to their specific financial conditions, personal aspirations, as well as the economic situations in China.

Masculine Performance in Hong Kong Crime Films from Post-Bruce to the 2000s

Masculinity, in Lacan’s sense, is an imagination. To specifically theorise Chinese masculinity, Kam Louie examined the elements of wen (cultural attainment) and wu (martial valour) rendered through historical or artistic images, and Song Geng and Derek Hird guide the discussions about Chinese manhood represented in everyday life. With a Marxist perspective, Lo Kwai Cheung illustrated the dissolvability of Chinese masculinity under international capitalism. With reference to Aristotle, it is supposed that Chinese masculinity, similar to ‘tragicity’ in nature, can be represented through imitating actions and hence be perceived. Based on Aristotle’s understanding, we can regard actions as ‘iterable’ media (like Derrida’s understanding of written texts) which engender performances according to the genealogy of quantitative mimesis. Integrating theoretical discussions with a chronological approach, my full paper will go through following points in order to summarise the changes in Hong Kong crime films from the post-Bruce Lee era to the 2000s: (1) Hong Kong crime film inherited the martial side of masculinity from action films and became a popular genre since A Better Tomorrow was well received in the mid-1980s. (2) Many directors diversified the interpretation of crime in the late 1980s and the 1990s, but remained a focus on the strength, nimbleness and boldness of men. (3) After the decline of Hong Kong film industry for several years, Infernal Affairs’s success renewed the representation of manhood. (4) From the 2000s to now, male characters in crime films are preferably intelligent and wisely-romantic, like the fragile scholar in ancient China. (5) While globalisation seems to be eliminating the Chineseness of Chinese masculinity, I argue that geographical specificity and different speed of cultural development lead to the impossibility of synchronic masculine similarity. (6) Through a brief discussion concerning Hollywood’s adaptation of Hong Kong films, I argue that local masculinity is not transformable.

Is masculinity ‘deteriorating’ in China? Changes of masculinity representation in Chinese film posters from 1951 to 2016

This study attempts to briefly map the general changes of Chinese masculinities in media over time, and explain why these changes happened. Through visual content analysis, 471 film posters collected from 1951 to 2016 are examined and findings summarised as follows: 1) men are decreasingly depicted as manual workers or soldiers, and increasingly white-collar and urbane; 2) men are decreasingly delineated as aggressive or puissant, and increasingly gentle and civil; 3) men increasingly show their demand for sexuality; and finally, 4) the portrayals of men are more diverse. These changes demonstrate men to be ‘softer’, shifting masculinity from patriarchal control to consumerism power, from physical strength to economic superiority, and from hegemonic to a more inclusive version. However, men do not exclusively embody the economic power in modern China because women also express it. Thus, without the traditional masculine traits and new symbols of masculine power, the contemporary portrayals of men are regarded as ‘emasculated’ by some older generations.

Television’s “Leftover” Bachelors and Hegemonic Masculinity in Postsocialist China

ABSTRACTThis article looks at the renegotiation of Chinese masculinities by analyzing the gendered performances of participants of a popular TV dating show If You Are the One (Fei Cheng Wu Rao). As symptomatic media texts, the reality TV show points to the quandaries of evolving gender politics faced by singletons of China’s one-child generation within the country’s neoliberal restructuring. The textual evidence shows that male participants follow the rule of a market economic hierarchy and uphold the hegemonic ideal of versatile, successful, and upper-middle-class manhood, which hinges on the patriarchal, heteronormative model of love and marriage. Paradoxically, this disempowering ideal is reinforced by female participants in their relational reconstruction of masculinities. The article argues that the Chinese state media not only discipline masculinities but also naturalize a regressive gender mandate in alignment with neoliberal values and the state’s pursuit of capitalist economic development. Consequently, the multiple, hybridized versions of masculinities emerging in media discourse and popular parlance complicate the cultural repertoire of gender relations yet without challenging deeply entrenched structural gender inequality.

The Cosmopolitan Dream: Transnational Chinese Masculinities in a Global Age ed. by Derek Hird and Geng Song

The Cosmopolitan Dream: Transnational Chinese Masculinities in a Global Age ed. by Derek Hird and Geng Song

Chinese Masculinities in a Globalizing World, written by Kam Louie, 2015 and Changing Chinese Masculinities: From Imperial Pillars of State to Global Real Men, edited by Kam Louie, 2016

Chinese Masculinities in a Globalizing World, written by Kam Louie, 2015 and Changing Chinese Masculinities: From Imperial Pillars of State to Global Real Men, edited by Kam Louie, 2016