Sex, Love and Feminism in the Asia Pacific by Chilla Bulbeck

Author:Chilla Bulbeck [Bulbeck, Chilla]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415590372
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2010-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

I’m an eastern person and I like secretive, sweet, charming but still profound, mischievous [representations of Vietnamese women]

(female, university student, Hanoi)

In China, the Mao era consumer desirables of transistor radio, bicycle and sewing machine have been replaced by a telephone, a car and a privately owned apartment (Hooper 1998:168). Women are represented in advertisements as ‘flower vases’, luxuriously adorned and promoting household consumer products, for example lovingly addressing a vacuum cleaner with ‘I love Little Swan’ (Hooper 1998:167, 181). Deploying the ‘rice bowl of youth’ (qingchunfan), ‘vivacious, young’ urban women employed in the service sector represent ‘a fresh labor force, a model of social mobility, and the rise of a consumer culture’. Older women and rural women are associated with ‘the drab poverty and immobility of China’s old planned economy’ and its ‘iron rice bowl’ (state-guaranteed subsistence for everyone) (tie fanwan) (Hanser 2005:585; see also Mallee 2000:73 and Friedman 2006 on the sexualization of China’s female workforce).

Although China might provide the most remarkable story of recent commodification and consumerism, this refrain can be sung about all the countries in this study, including the Anglophone samples (e.g. see Sunindyo 1996:133 for Indonesia; Pettus 2003:176–7 and Fahey 1998:227–8 for Vietnam; Stivens 1998:5 on middle class Asia). In this context, it is patriotic to shop, as the US teenager quoted above asserts. We become increasingly ‘branded’ (Quart 2003); for example half the ‘world’s urban tweens’ in one study state ‘that the clothes and brands they wear describe who they are and define their social status’, such brand identification being highest among the US and Indian samples and lowest among the Japanese sample (Lindstrom and Seybold 2004:77, 312). These tweens are ‘passionate’ about drinking ‘classic Coke’; indeed they are almost three times as passionate about wearing their favourite t-shirt as they are about their public school (Lindstrom and Seybold 2004:113). ‘By adulthood the average American can identify 1000 corporate logos…but only ten plants’ (Kilbourne 2003:7). Young Australians aged 8 to 12 combine national identity with consumer citizenship when they claim Australia is the ‘best country in the world’ because ‘you can get everything here’ (Langer and Farrer 2003:126).

In China, too, consumerism is now viewed as an expression of nationalism. One Chinese beauty product manufacturer describes her goal as ‘making China an accepted member of the First World by the beauty labour of its women’ (Johansson 2001:110). In Vietnam the official rhetoric proclaims we make ‘ourselves beautiful [and thus] we make society beautiful and we enhance the image of our nation in the world’ (in Pettus 2003:97). Young Chinese cosmopolitan subjects reject the excessive passions and repressions of their parents’ lives of self-sacrifice and immersion in politics, filial kinship and communalism to embrace profit-making as an expression of interests and desires (Rofel 2007:123, 139). Young Chinese speak of ‘the importance of having wide-ranging aspirations, hopes, needs and passions’ within the post-socialist frame of neoliberal economics (Rofel 2007:4, 6). This desire for ‘a novel cosmopolitan humanity’ (Rofel 2007:13) is a national project, much of it taking place in public spaces (Rofel 2007:20–1).

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