Paper short abstract:

Based on research into the aesthetic transformations of Chinese women in Lisbon, I question how these 'yummy mummies’ construct their body projects, navigating between traditions, aesthetic imperatives that dictate the success of the maternity project, ideas of modernity and family pressures.

Paper long abstract:

The pressure of beauty for women in contemporary societies is already well documented, but with the extraordinary proliferation of representations of motherhood and celebrity motherhood, mothers are now in the crosshairs of this growing cult of beauty. The expansion of ‘aesthetic entrepreneurship’ (Elias et al. 2017) during pregnancy, the imperative to recover the body and the ideal of the "yummi mummy" have become the new norms in many Western and non-Western societies. This body ideal involves the period leading up to childbirth, but goes beyond controlling weight gain. Maintaining a desirable body is muldimensional and encompasses many stages, like diet during pregnancy, type of delivery, breastfeeding, physical activity and beauty procedures.

From a transnational feminist perspective, this presentation steams from research into the aesthetic transformations of Chinese women in Lisbon. Crossing the arenas of migration, transnationalism and critical beauty studies, I question how Chinese migrants 'yummy mummies’ construct their body projects, navigating between traditions (such as the practice of zuo yue zi), aesthetic imperatives that dictate the success of the maternity project, ideas of modernity and family pressures (close and distant).

Contrary to the rigid agency/structure dichotomy, ethnography is valuable for understanding these multivalent and sometimes contradictory articulations that exist between individuals, the local culture of appearance and global neoliberal ideology (as Keyser-Verreault 2022 properly suggests). My analysis covers this phenomenon at the intersection of individualism, class manifestations, patriarchal and gender appearance norms – and, above all, questioning the “ultimate modern woman” (Litter 2013) as a code of femininity.