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Gender, neoliberal rationality, and anti-aspirational temporality: women's resistance to the quest for beauty in Taiwan.
- Source :
- Asian Anthropology (1683478X); Jun2024, Vol. 23 Issue 2, p111-127, 17p
- Publication Year :
- 2024
-
Abstract
- This paper examines urban and well-educated Taiwanese women's resistance to the dominance of the valorization of female appearance, providing ethnography of undoing beauty in East Asia's era of post-developmentalism. Findings reveal the importance of the factor of time in their resistance to bodily grooming. First, participants have a "holistic" understanding of "doing beauty"; they consider this set of gender inequalities "chrono-normativity," which serves as a vector of social control. Second, the burden of long-term sustainability of aesthetic investment often turns into an unbearable weight that includes an endless quest for extreme slenderness, the exhausting immaterial labor of enacting cuteness and hetero-likability, and the difficulty of long-term financial affordability. Third, due to a bleak economic outlook and strong gender inequalities, disapproval of the quest for beauty showcases women's rejection of pursuing market success based on an aspirational and future-oriented temporality. Participants' "lying down" attitude and their emphasis on "assured little happiness" are witness to an anti-aspirational temporality, since women seek a present-focused and non-dominated experience of temporality. I argue that this anti-aspirationalism should be seen as an alternative configuration of neoliberal rationality where the care of the self and its ethos of individualism eclipse the pursuit of economic productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 1683478X
- Volume :
- 23
- Issue :
- 2
- Database :
- Complementary Index
- Journal :
- Asian Anthropology (1683478X)
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 177840042
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1080/1683478X.2024.2331267