Postfeminist Beautification: Embracing Pleasures and Personal Choice
摘要
This chapter seeks to understand the participants’ reasons for beautifying themselves and how the findings relate to postfeminist discourse regarding the themes of women’s individualism, choice, and empowerment. This analysis demonstrates how young Chinese women employ postfeminist logic when they discuss their experiences engaging in beauty practices. The data shows several key postfeminist sensibilities, such as participants perceiving themselves as freely choosing subjects, liberation from male objectification, and gaining pleasure from beauty practices. Discussion about how young Chinese women’s pleasure of beautification is constructed through three different stages, including the consumption of beauty products, the process of beautification, and the end results of beautification. The analysis seeks to avoid a traditional binary approach, which argues between pleasure and oppression. Instead, it illustrates the complexity of young women’s experiences of pleasure regarding beautification in relation to consumerism, aesthetics, skills, career development, and sisterhood bonding.