（這是我2014年12月4日在上海“Precariously Yours: Gender, Class, and Urbanity in Contemporary Shanghai” 上海都會女性工作坊中發表的主題演講。這個工作坊是歐盟HERA Joint Research Programme組織的，題目為 “Cultural Encounter－－Creating the ‘New’ Asian Woman: Entanglements of Urban Space, Cultural Encounters and Gendered Identities in Shanghai and Delhi.）[1]
Abstract: Concern over rapid social change in China tends to descend upon the great number of women who, enabled by life in the city, have ranged out of their embeddedness in traditional marriage and family structures. Easily transmuted to mistresses or sluts who are said to bring havoc to peaceful coupledom and feminine virtues, or passionately converted to consumerism and Westernization that allegedly further erodes China’s professed ascetic socialism, the so-called “left-over women” are visibly problematized. Yet, defenders/sympathizers of the left-over women often converge with the critics on embracing a similarly liberal/libertarian view of the autonomy and choice that the women exercise. In this talk, I aim to call for a communitarian conception of self that may bring forth a more complex understanding of women living in the city.
…the story of my life is always embedded in the story of those communities from which I derive my identity. I am born with a past, and to try to cut myself off from that past, in an individualist mode, is to deform my present relationships. (MacIntyre 221)
I would like to thank the organizers for inviting me to this workshop where we could all exchange our thoughts and ideas, however tentative or experimental, for this prospering line of research. Unlike you, I myself have done only limited and scattered research in relation to women and sexuality in the city. So instead of talking about research findings, I have chosen to share with you some questions that may have framed our research in the first place.
First, a small self-reflection. I have learned from my own research that studies of select populations in particular national contexts at particular historical moments often resonate with specific concerns in national and transnational politics. Women, in particular, have been consistently constructed as site, target, or vantage point for theorisations of modernity, where it is believed that dramatic social change or levels of social development of a nation could be gauged and evaluated. Hence, the status of women, now taken as a barometer of social progress and customarily conceived in Western indices of gender equality (in terms of their rates of education, employment, income, political participation, property rights, reproductive freedom, personal safety, etc.) has, more often than not, been used to call upon developing countries and cultures to further align themselves with Western standards of gender equality and, by implication, Western systems of democracy. Within this framework of knowledge production, the study of women and their lives may lend itself easily to interpretations powered by concerns and purposes of transnational politics and global norms, as seen from media interest in studies of women’s participation and roles in popular uprisings such as the Arab Spring, the Taiwan Sunflower Movement, and the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement–but significantly not the crowd movement in Ferguson, Missouri, USA over the fatal shooting of a black man.
Two weeks ago I received the program of the workshop in its poster format and saw for the first time the Chinese title of the workshop, 搖搖欲墜. I was a little surprised because a few months before when I read the English title “Precariously Yours,” I had understood it to be referring to the widespread condition of work uncertainty and life uncertainty brought about by neoliberal economic globalization, and how the lack of security and stability would impact upon intimate lives of women in the city. But the Chinese title pictures a situation much more critical than uncertainty; in fact, it reads, literally, that gender and class and the urban way of life are on the verge of collapse.[1] I wondered if it’s the translator’s prophetic take on Chinese precarity? Or, have things gotten a lot worse in Shanghai since a few months before, and this translation is inadvertently expressing a thinly-veiled worry, warning, or wish?[2]
Jasbir Puar has used the conceptual framework of “homonationalism” to point to the complexities of how “acceptance” and “tolerance” for gay and lesbian subjects have recently become a barometer “by which the right to and capacity for national sovereignty is evaluated” (336). Only a couple of decades before, it has been “respect” for and “protection” of women that served the same purpose. And now, gender has become a crucial formation in the requirement for proper modern and democratic performance both nationally and trans-nationally, as the image of gender equality in advanced countries, often embodied in UN protocols and global covenants, is employed as a rule to frame developing countries in civilizational terms measured by their progress toward gender modernity. I think it is in this context that I am sensitive about the possible implications of 搖搖欲墜, as I wonder about how this rapidly-growing pool of analyses of women’s lives in newly prospering economies such as China or India would play out in this context of transnational politics. If we take Puar’s suggestion seriously, then on top of observing actual practices of women in the metropolises, gender and sexuality should also be studied “as an assemblage of geopolitical and historical forces, as neoliberal interests in capitalist accumulation both cultural and material, as biopolitical state practices of population control, and as affective investments in discourses of freedom, liberation, and rights” (337).
Some of these approaches have already been taken up by recent investigations that concentrated on women’s changing life trajectories in regard to the marriage institution, and the compounded pressure women face from both traditional Chinese patriarchy and the state’s biopolitical concerns, as embodied in media campaigns against educated women and their delay of marriage, hence the derogatory term surplus or left-over women (Sheng-nu剩女). From Hong Kong researcher 杜先致Sandy To’s 2013 research of marriage-age professional and managerial women and the gender constraints that circumscribe their marriage views and partner choices, to Singapore researchers計迎春Yingchun Ji and楊李唯君Wei-Jun Jean Yeung’ 2014 study of the persistence of status hypergamy in China and the skewed sex ratio of China’s one-child policy that is now maturing into an excess population of left-over men, to 洪理達Leta Hong Fincher’s 2014 book that reads new amendments to Chinese marriage laws as consolidating an economically-framed masculinity in sync with China’s neoliberal economic boom, and in the meantime keeping home ownership and financial autonomy out of the equation for women’s status and their bargaining power in marriage—one after another, these studies highlight the persistent, and even worsening, gender inequality in marriage, forged by a Chinese patriarchy that is now increasingly tempered with neoliberal economics.
But what about a broader view of women’s lives in the city that is not geared toward marriage? And what about situating women’s daily existence not only in the gendered national context, but also in the global context of increasing precarity that is rippling across ever-widening circles of social life? I believe this is what the organizers had in mind when they conceived this workshop, and I read my assignment as that of introducing the issue of women’s sexuality into this discussion of Chinese precarity.
Changes in women’s sexuality have often been enabled by an atmosphere of economic prosperity as well as political relaxation, which makes possible jobs, income, mobility, consumption, and a spirit of adventurism, all conducive to a broadening of women’s life possibilities, including sexual ones. In the 1990s, a derogatory term, 單身公害“the singles menace,” had been created by one popular male writer[3] in Taiwan to describe the emergence of a massive number of single women of marriageable age. Notably, the denigration was not addressed to the fact that the women were living outside the bond of marriage, but that they posed a serious threat to existing monogamous marriages. With rampant sexualization in the sudden relaxation of social control following the lifting of the Taiwanese martial-law, and saturation by a concomitant political atmosphere that sought to affirm national, and by extension, individual autonomy, independent-minded single women were beginning to exercise less inhibition in carrying on illicit affairs with married men, and hence were viewed as menacing to the family and the society.[4] Similar social uproar also emerged in post-reform China right before and after the year 2000, when the open affirmation of female sexuality, and most notably, female promiscuity, in the sexually explicit writings of women writers themselves, ranging from Wei Hui (衛慧：上海寶貝) to Mu Dz-Mei (木子美：遺情書), provoked state bans and waves of attack on women’s obvious decadence. The incidents were quickly picked up by Western media and turned into international fame for these authors, and Chinese cultural critics read them as signs of a “thawing of the freeze on Chinese sexuality” that “echoes a global movement for sex emancipation and sexual hedonism” (Zhu)[5]. Such heated discussions were certain to impact on the whole Chinese society and not the least upon the multitude of women who were already living on the fringe of social decency. The massive existence since the 1990s of contract-second-wives (Er-Nai二奶) in the cities of the special economic zones of China, and the eventual rise of the Association for the Other Women中國關愛小三協會 and their staunchly self-asserting website for “xiao-san” (三情網)[6] in 2010, both demonstrate women’s inventive use of their love and sex, despite social stigma, in an age of growing affluence as well as increasingly precarity.[7]
In public discourses, sexually assertive women are usually characterized as individualistic, willful, and selfish, immersed in their self-consuming indulgences that are corrosive of traditional values. Interestingly, pro-women discourses in the (neo-)liberal framework also tend to phrase conceptions of modern-day city women and their sexual choices in voluntaristic terms: that is, in the context of the liberating city, sexual aims and values are there for women to choose, and in choosing them, women are encouraged to exercise their power of agency and autonomy. But, for the Chinese cultural context, are women’s decisions or strategies about sex merely personal choices based on their immediate individualistic existence in the city? What are the conditions that enable women to feel confident enough to seek love or sex in the unfamiliar city? What kind of relationship networks constitutes their social circles in the city? What kind of support system can different classes of women build up in the supposedly alienating isolating urban space? How do traditional obligations and attachments to parents and clansmen feature in the lives of the women who grew up out of the one-child policy era and are at the marriageable age now? Or, to turn the questions the other way around, is it possible that the concept of precarity derives its captivating power exactly because we all accept that we are individuals segregated by and at the mercy of capitalism’s logic of competition and self-interest and hence can only suffer being jettisoned here and there? Are there other layers of Chinese sociality that are working at least to stave off the full force of global precarity?
I am in no capacity to answer these questions up front, but I am proposing a communitarian approach that I believe could help us keep a more complicated picture in sight as we observe the transformation of women and their sexuality in China.[8]
To come straight to the heart of the matter, instead of treating people as “the unadulterated, ‘essentially unencumbered’ subjects” (Sandel 92) who are independent and hence free to exercise genuine choice and strategizing in various issues, the communitarian view argues for situated and constituted selves, constructed by our place in a tradition and our roles in our communities, with identities that are socially embodied, where the bounds of the self are not individuated in advance but implicated in the traditions and practices of a larger collectivity (Sandel 183). In that sense, a self is first of all defined and constituted by various communal attachments (e.g., ties to the family, the clan, a religion, or to a cultural tradition), so close that they can only be set aside at great cost, if at all. Such communal attachments give order and intelligibility to our actions through narratives that describe us not as individuals but as bears of particular social identities and belonging, which we inherit from our past as the given of our lives. Yet the communitarians are in no way fatalists, for, as communitarian philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre explains, “the narratives which we live out have both an unpredictable and a partially teleological character” (216). In other words, while there are contingent affiliations that are open to self-reflexive revision, political struggle, and the subversive power of counter-narratives well-iterated by late-modernist and post-modernist theorists, MacIntyre highlights the teleological and legitimizing dimensions of the act of narrativity itself: inclusive, historically stable, unified community based on shared values, common traditions, and respected practices. If the liberal view has focused exclusively on the openness of individual choices and decisions and the liberating effects of life in the city enabled by economic globalization, the communitarian view reminds that we should not lose sight of the constitutedness of subjects and the embeddedness that situates them in circles of possible support and, of course, possible constraint.
This emphasis on the historical constitutedness and connectedness of the subject, with the possibility of layers of affiliations and social bonding, better describes, I think, a large part of the realities of transitioning reform China than the liberal free-standing subject. I am not at all denying the alienating, isolating, individuating effects of massive migration and relocation. Nor am I denying the mobility, freedom, independence, and autonomy that have been demonstrated by many women in the city. But I also can see the entangled web of old hometown relations that continue to be quite significant in the women’s lives as well as numerous pockets of liaisons that still help them feel connected and supported. The neo-liberal setting thrives on the ideology of the autonomous self, disembedded from family, clan, and nation, torn away from its original community in the process of detraditionalization, capitalization, and dispossession, and inserted in a drive upward toward further individualization. Yet, however disembedded or displaced women may become, they are first of all always already constituted by ties of history, tradition, inherited status, and even moral ties that they did not choose, and they often continue to bear the marks of the communities from which they derive their sense of being. As Will Kymlicka puts it, “community already exists, in the form of common social practices, cultural traditions, and shared social understandings”; in other words, “humans are inevitably embedded in particular historical practices and relationships” (209). This embeddedness, rootedness, is not to be understood as solely constricting, for as often as it happens, it is both constricting and enabling. It functions as the starting point as well as the support system for many as they venture into the city. And this rootedness is built upon old relations and old affiliations that constitute a form of social attachment still viable and crucial to many Chinese’s sense of well-being. I will come to more examples later.
The most significant community from which one derives such constituting and oftentimes constraining relationships and practices is undoubtedly the family, understood here as the form of extended family unique to the Chinese culture. In the drive toward modernity, the family, defined by the institutions of heterosexual marriage and genetic generational relationship, is often characterized as oppressive and patriarchal, nothing but a confining force that obstructs women’s battle for personal liberation from the stifling social roles of housewives and mothers. That’s why feminists have encouraged women to leave their homes and families in pursuit of the untrammeled life in the city. But, must a politics of difference and equality leave behind everything that is related to the allegedly normative and unifying home and family?[9] If we are willing to look and think, many families themselves are partial, contingent structures, vulnerable both to internal and external pressures, and exactly because of that, they are also open to revisions. The boundaries of home can hence be subject to renegotiation and may be much more permeable than we are willing to admit. Should we or can we divest ourselves of all the familial heritage that we are carrying just to replace constraining duties and obligations with relentless self-interest and egocentrism? Or, perhaps more creative ways and means are already attempted so that we could live with the multiple social contradictions that have sedimented into our struggles with our family?
In a way, communitarian thought intersects with feminist theory, as they both emphasize interconnectedness and communities of women, so perhaps this is where the two could begin to work together and think of new answers. One thing for sure: as market forces have nearly annihilated older forms of social existence and replaced them with atomistic ways of life, they have also obscured the emotional and social needs the family continues, however fitfully, to fulfill for many in the Chinese society. As one feminist reflects, “As more and more areas of social life are subjected to decisions made along the lines of a narrowly construed theory of policy science, it is families and the remnants of traditional communities that have worked to preserve meanings and embody relations that cannot be settled by impersonal standards” (Elshtain 266). This is where responsibility, family tradition, and self-sacrifice are still practiced, all the more true in large parts of the Chinese cultural context where the family and even the hated nation-state are still significant establishments, where human relationships have not been reduced to the purely contractual but are still imbued with significant meanings. In that sense, the individualism that life in the city generates is at most “imperfect, tempered by older constraints and loyalties, by stable patterns of local, ethnic, religious, or class relationships” (Walzer 323). Still, most of the studies that surround us tend to forego these inconvenient complexities and abide by a linear view of modern development.
A communitarian approach is especially appropriate for our study of women and sexuality in the Chinese metropolis, all the more for women of the lower classes. After all, these new dwellers of the city are not necessarily meeting total strangers there; more often than not, they congregate to specific cities exactly because their fellow townspeople or provincials have already relocated there, where little circles of familiarity could be created within a metropolis of strangers. In most big cities, parochial groups dot the alleys and side-streets, and people flock together—much like the Chinatowns in major global cities—on the foundation of previous geographical connections, where a dense or loose web of human ties provides the initial possibility of settlement and security for new comers who depend on fellow provincials for temporary lodging, for information on job opportunities, for new friends and acquaintances, for familiar dietary supplies, and often also for sexual liaisons. In China, for the lowers classes that flock to the city, pure individuality is most likely only fantasy.
Nor can the more privileged classes do without webs of old relationships. In Tiny Times小時代, the film that is heralded as the Chinese version of Sex and the City, the four women characters may be fighting their own way through the city toward their own happiness, but they were deeply connected because of old high school relations. The women were never truly free from one another’s support, or hurt. Despite their closeness and friendship, illicit sex takes place between one of the women and the boyfriends of the other women. In China, even one-night-stands, one-time-sex, depend on existing relationships. Pan Sui-Ming and Huang Ying-Ying’s 2010 longitudinal study of sex revolution in China shows that 40% of one-night-stands take place not among strangers but among acquaintances (311), and all the more for women as the percentage rises to over 50% (312). Instead of viewing women as finding sexual encounters in a city of strangers, it may be much truer to see them as making do with whoever is supplied through their circle of friends and connections—at least half of the time. Of course, sex between strangers is still more prevalent in the city than in the country. Thanks to wide-spread cellphone social media APPs that hook people up through a mere shake of the cellphone, or internet-enabled sexual encounters[10] and wide-spread visualization of sex on the web,[11] sex and women can be entangled in many unexpected ways in the city, or outside it. One note of caution: in a metropolis like Shanghai, tens of thousands of women of different age groups live the singles lifestyle without necessarily revealing the true story about their marital status or sex lives. Relocation in the city gives one the opportunity to re-narrate one’s life stories if one chooses to do so. Few would bother or be able to verify, and narratives are the only stories that people live by.
Unless we keep our eyes only on the middle-class white-collar population, the picture of women’s sexuality in the city would not be complete without investigations into the elephant in the room—that is, commercial sex work. And, there, old relations and affiliations are more than useful, as tens of thousands of women find their way into working for the intimate consumption industry that proliferated with economic development. Better-known examples include the popular Triple Escorts (三陪)[12], singers and dancers in night clubs and KTVs, massage parlor girls, foot-washing parlor girls,[13] and many other forms of services that could easily evolve into sexual transactions if circumstances allow. Of course, straight sex work also abound. Little name cards are pasted all over the city’s public and commercial spaces to advertize door-to-door delivery of sexual services. Text messages, junk emails, and box advertising that pronounce the promise of a good time have become regular appearances on our cellphone, tablet, and computer screens. While the underlying human connections are regularly indicted by the authorities as rings of traffickers, in reality, many are no more organized than the pockets of provincial connections that facilitate the settlement of new comers to the city. Such connectedness is most obvious in the low-skilled service jobs or labor-intensive jobs where people rely upon introductions to find easy footing in employment. The same tendency is plainly in sight among the under-class of women who provide sexual services for lower-class labor. They can be found lodged in regular neighborhoods near all major industrial parks that make up state-designated special economic zones and the metropolises that have risen in their vicinity. Most have entered the trade through the introduction of fellow towns people who have already made their footing there on the edge of the city. Similar practices are also noted in 百度’s definition for Ur-Nai: in China’s special economic zones, Ur-Nai villages are created by the congregation of existing Ur-Nai bringing in more girls from their home villages and crafting the latter into new Ur-Nai. All forms of such occasional or professional sex work find their existence and prosperity, and sometimes perishing, squarely in the ups and downs of neoliberal precarity, but, if lucky, cushioned with layers of provincial networks of interpersonal connections, however feeble.
The city serves as the backdrop and the context in which neo-liberal precarity puts its victims and heroes to test with economic uncertainties and existential anxieties.[14] Be it victims or heroines, women living in the precarity of the modern city are generally conceived as lonely subjects being tossed about by the whims of capital and the violence of patriarchy. While this picture may speak of some realities of women’s life in reform China, I am hoping that the communitarian view can pose other questions to help us not lose sight of, or even work to revitalize, the historical specificities of Chinese social fabric as it strives to endure the twirling and whirling of neoliberal precarity. Stable and overlaying social bonds may be disintegrating in some areas and some classes of the Chinese society, helped in no small way by China’s own one child policy, but in other areas and other classes, old relations and affiliation still sustain some meaning and support, helped in no small way by the continuous consolidation of affective formations that resonate between devotion to the family, love for the hometown, and loyalty to the nation. The largest annual human migration in the world during Chinese New Year春運 attests to the continued draw of the family and the hometown and the human network that sustains—sometimes pragmatically, but more importantly emotionally—those who struggle in the city. I believe it is to understanding this complicated struggle that this workshop is devoted, and I am sure we will see invaluable work being produced here. Thank you.
Endnotes
[1] 百度的解釋：「形容十分危險，很快就要掉下來，或不穩固，很快就要垮臺」。
[2] At least for some, the experience of precarity would not be inherently or completely negative. The “positive” components of precarity—the sense that it provides for the freedom of flexibility, rewards certain kinds of creativity and opportunism, promotes a kind of absolute individualism that can be taken for dignity, and accommodates or even requires a degree of social and geographic mobility—are what have made neoliberalism’s implementation possible in the first place.
[3] The writer (苦苓) himself was later found to have an illicit affair with a singe woman and ended up in a divorce.
[4] Fortunately, post-sex-revolution feminism was already on hand to provide sex-positive discourses to support women and their sexual practices. My own books, The Gallant Women: Feminism and Sex Emancipation 豪爽女人：女性主義與性解放(1994) and Sexual Moods: A Therapeutic and Liberatory Report on Female Sexuality 性心情：治療與解放的新性學報告 (1996), that spearheaded feminism-informed discourse on women’s right to sexual pleasure as an important part of women’s liberation were already widely read in Greater China.
[5] 「越過長期的意識形態封凍，西方中產階級正在沿著性解放和性享樂的道路疾行。中國情欲的自我解凍，回應了與這一盛大的全球化進程。」朱大可，〈從衛慧到木子美：肉身敍事的文化邏輯〉，《新民週刊》，2004年6月1日。http://women.sohu.com/2004/06/11/56/article220495691.shtml
[7] The rise and fall and migration of the 二奶村, as well as the fate of the 二奶, are closely in sync with shifts in Chinese economic development. See 〈深圳二奶村寒流下瑟縮〉，《香港文匯報》2008年12月14日，http://paper.wenweipo.com/2008/12/14/HT0812140001.htm
[8] While the communitarian view has been conceived mainly for theories of justice, I am more interested in its implications for a theory of subject formation as we approach the question of women and sexuality.
[9] Judith Stacey’s historical essay “Are Feminists Afraid to Leave Home?” pointed to genuine social problems and problems in feminist theory itself that stalled re-conceptualizations of the family and intimate life. Her call for further and deeper development in theorizing the staying power of heterosexuality, in rethinking feminist ideas about child-rearing, and in the compatibility between egalitarianism and intimate relations is yet to be answered.
[10] As early as the year 2000, western periodicals were already reporting on a perceivable sex revolution in China because of the internet. See “Looking for Love Online,” Time 156.16 (October 23, 2000).
[11] Rapid development in China’s internet services, relatively relaxed censorship on sexual matters, and weaker sexual inhibition and sexual shame have made the internet fertile ground for displays of sexually explicit self-portraits and exchange of sexual invitations.
[12] There are different forms of Triple Escort practices: in night clubs the escort services may refer to drinking, singing and dancing with the patrons, but more popular arrangements would refer to eating, drinking, and sleeping with the patrons.
[13] Many of these intimate consumptions resort to traditional practices to acquire legitimacy and attraction. Massage parlors often advertise themselves as belonging to Chinese traditional medicine, treatment, or health maintenance. Widely practiced foot therapy has little to do with Chinese medicine, yet uses the soothing of tendons and mobilization of blood flow舒筋活血 to justify its practices. New forms of pleasure needs to present its roots in ancient traditions in order to win over the widest market that the public can identify with (Pan & Huang 99).
[14] In the context of contemporary precarity, Guy Standing points to the existence of “a creative tension between the precariat as victims, penalised and demonised by mainstream institutions and policies, and the precariat as heroes, rejecting those institutions in a concerted act of intellectual and emotional defiance” (2).
Endnotes
[1] This is a keynote speech presented on Dec. 4, 2014 at the workshop “Precariously Yours: Gender, Class, and Urbanity in Contemporary Shanghai” (上海都會女性工作坊) organized by HERA Joint Research Programme “Cultural Encounter”—“Creating the ‘New’ Asian Woman: Entanglements of Urban Space, Cultural Encounters and Gendered Identities in Shanghai and Delhi.”
[2] 百度的解釋：「形容十分危險，很快就要掉下來，或不穩固，很快就要垮臺」。
[3] At least for some, the experience of precarity would not be inherently or completely negative. The “positive” components of precarity—the sense that it provides for the freedom of flexibility, rewards certain kinds of creativity and opportunism, promotes a kind of absolute individualism that can be taken for dignity, and accommodates or even requires a degree of social and geographic mobility—are what have made neoliberalism’s implementation possible in the first place.
[4] The writer (苦苓) himself was later found to have an illicit affair with a singe woman and ended up in a divorce.
[5] Fortunately, post-sex-revolution feminism was already on hand to provide sex-positive discourses to support women and their sexual practices. My own books, The Gallant Women: Feminism and Sex Emancipation 豪爽女人：女性主義與性解放(1994) and Sexual Moods: A Therapeutic and Liberatory Report on Female Sexuality 性心情：治療與解放的新性學報告 (1996), that spearheaded feminism-informed discourse on women’s right to sexual pleasure as an important part of women’s liberation were already widely read in Greater China.
[6] 「越過長期的意識形態封凍，西方中產階級正在沿著性解放和性享樂的道路疾行。中國情欲的自我解凍，回應了與這一盛大的全球化進程。」朱大可，〈從衛慧到木子美：肉身敍事的文化邏輯〉，《新民週刊》，2004年6月1日。http://women.sohu.com/2004/06/11/56/article220495691.shtml
[8] The rise and fall and migration of the 二奶村, as well as the fate of the 二奶, are closely in sync with shifts in Chinese economic development. See 〈深圳二奶村寒流下瑟縮〉，《香港文匯報》2008年12月14日，http://paper.wenweipo.com/2008/12/14/HT0812140001.htm
[9] While the communitarian view has been conceived mainly for theories of justice, I am more interested in its implications for a theory of subject formation as we approach the question of women and sexuality.
[10] Judith Stacey’s historical essay “Are Feminists Afraid to Leave Home?” pointed to genuine social problems and problems in feminist theory itself that stalled re-conceptualizations of the family and intimate life. Her call for further and deeper development in theorizing the staying power of heterosexuality, in rethinking feminist ideas about child-rearing, and in the compatibility between egalitarianism and intimate relations is yet to be answered.
[11] As early as the year 2000, western periodicals were already reporting on a perceivable sex revolution in China because of the internet. See “Looking for Love Online,” Time 156.16 (October 23, 2000).
[12] Rapid development in China’s internet services, relatively relaxed censorship on sexual matters, and weaker sexual inhibition and sexual shame have made the internet fertile ground for displays of sexually explicit self-portraits and exchange of sexual invitations.
[13] There are different forms of Triple Escort practices: in night clubs the escort services may refer to drinking, singing and dancing with the patrons, but more popular arrangements would refer to eating, drinking, and sleeping with the patrons.
[14] Many of these intimate consumptions resort to traditional practices to acquire legitimacy and attraction. Massage parlors often advertise themselves as belonging to Chinese traditional medicine, treatment, or health maintenance. Widely practiced foot therapy has little to do with Chinese medicine, yet uses the soothing of tendons and mobilization of blood flow舒筋活血 to justify its practices. New forms of pleasure needs to present its roots in ancient traditions in order to win over the widest market that the public can identify with (Pan & Huang 99).
[15] In the context of contemporary precarity, Guy Standing points to the existence of “a creative tension between the precariat as victims, penalised and demonised by mainstream institutions and policies, and the precariat as heroes, rejecting those institutions in a concerted act of intellectual and emotional defiance” (2).
Works Cited
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Fincher, Leta Hong. Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China. Zed Books, 2014.
Ji, Yingchun & Wei-Jun Jean Yeung. “Heterogeneity in Contemporary Chinese Marriage.” Journal of Family Issues Vol. 35 no. 12 (October 2014): 1662-1682.
Kymlicka, Will. Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction. Second Edition. New York: Oxford UP, 2002.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Second Edition. Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P: 1984.
Pan, Sui-ming and YinYin Huang. Revolutions in Sexuality: Sex Life of the Chinese in 21st Century. Beijing: People’s University of China Press, 2013.潘綏銘、黃盈盈。《性之變：21世紀中國人的性生活》，北京：中國人民大學出版社，2013。
Puar, Jasbir. “Rethinking Homonationalism.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45 (2013): 336-339.
Sandel, Michael J. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982.
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