Paper short abstract:

Women's bodies are oscillating symbols of modernity and tradition. By investigating the "bodily constructions" of Chinese women in Lisbon, I seek to understand how they process rationalizations and emotions within broader structures of local, national and transnational moral economies.

Paper long abstract:

In 2021 the Chinese government's education minister issued a statement suggesting that young Chinese men were becoming too "feminine". The "Proposal to Prevent the Feminisation of Male Adolescents" pointed out that the country's male role models were no longer athletic figures, army heroes, but boy bands and television figures, who embodied a "weak and timid" Chinese man.

For the rulers of the Chinese nation, men should be masculine, and women feminine. There is a whole intense academic production on how women's bodies are seen as producers of a national ideology. As representatives of a nation, women are natural 'bearers of tradition' through their domesticity and motherhood (e.g. Chatterjee 1990; Gaitskell and Unterhalter 1989; Yuval-Davis 1997), but at the same time symbols of the country's modernization through discourses of labour power, political involvement and sexuality (e.g. Foucault 1988; Shilling 2003; Yuval-Davis 1997). These bodies, nevertheless, can also be medically produced (e.g. Edmonds 2007; Aizura 2009; Hua 2013). Working with Chinese women in Lisbon, some born in the country, others with different migratory paths, I try to understand how they manage the different social pressures to conquer a 'valid' body standard. How do you embody the modernity so popularized in China and recreate it in a European nation? How is the relationship of rationalizations and emotionalizations played out in practice? What are the broader structures of local, national and transnational moral economies that help us to better understand the processes of aesthetic body transformation they undergo? and to what end?