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Moving, sensing intersectionality: a case study of Miss China Europe.
- Source :
-
Signs [Signs (Chic)] 2011; Vol. 36 (2), pp. 411-37. - Publication Year :
- 2011
-
Abstract
- Every year, Miss China Europe, a transnational beauty pageant organized for the Chinese diaspora, is held in the Netherlands. The hypervisuality of Chinese diasporic women at the event stands in painful contrast to their everyday invisibility, whether in the Netherlands, China, or elsewhere in the world. Informed by intersectional and transnational feminist scholarship, this empirical study zooms in on one group of women, ethnic Chinese born and/or growing up in the Netherlands, to identify and recuperate their neglected lived experience in a particular historical-cultural context. It takes their own voices as central, hopefully to contribute to their visibility. It aims to provide an understanding of diasporic Chinese women as living in the dynamics not only of their multiple subordinations but also of their subjective consciousness, experienced autonomy, and agency. Drawing insights from the subjective accounts of both contestants and audiences of Miss China Europe, I suggest that one way to foreground marginalized women's agency is to understand their intersectionality in terms of movements and sensory experiences. On the one hand, while the contestants articulated a readiness to perform their modern and yet Chinese selves, they were making movements along two intersecting axes of inequality and power relations - Chineseness and Dutchness - precisely to negotiate their sense of inequality and power relations. On the other hand, among the audiences, two major topics - the blood issue (or whether Chineseness should be defined by ancestry) and the language problem (or whether Chineseness should be defined by the ability to speak Chinese) - were raised regularly, underscoring a complex viewing experience of seeing and hearing, of the tension between visual and audio identifications.
- Subjects :
- China ethnology
Europe ethnology
History, 20th Century
History, 21st Century
Humans
Interpersonal Relations history
Netherlands ethnology
Social Alienation psychology
Social Conditions economics
Social Conditions history
Social Conditions legislation & jurisprudence
Social Identification
Beauty Culture economics
Beauty Culture education
Beauty Culture history
Cross-Cultural Comparison
Ethnicity education
Ethnicity ethnology
Ethnicity history
Ethnicity legislation & jurisprudence
Ethnicity psychology
Individuality
Women education
Women history
Women psychology
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 0097-9740
- Volume :
- 36
- Issue :
- 2
- Database :
- MEDLINE
- Journal :
- Signs
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 21114082
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1086/656023