Shanghai Baby as a Chinese Chick-Lit: Female Empowerment and Neoliberal Consumerist Agency
Shanghai Baby as a Chinese Chick-Lit: Female Empowerment and Neoliberal Consumerist Agency
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《上海宝贝》作为中国小妞：女性赋权和新自由主义消费主义机构
DOI：
10.1080/12259276.2009.11666061
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发表时间：
2009
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
E. Chen
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
E. Chen
摘要本文认为，《上海宝宝》以新自由主义市场的积极选择和个人自由的方式表达了对女性性和经济独立的积极、赋权形式的庆祝，标志着与早期中国女性表现的重要背离，并在叙事、主题和意识形态方面与当代英美女性文学有相似之处。中国城市社会与全球消费文化的融合程度比以前要大得多。小说还借用了女性赋权和女性能动性等女权主义术语，颂扬了新一代受过良好教育、外表迷人的城市女性在性和经济方面的自信。它还强调了她们有意疏远作为社会运动的女权主义。应在个人消费主义力量中，并通过充分参与日益全球化的商品文化来寻求赋予妇女权力和能动性，这种文化将这些妇女视为具有不受限制选择的积极消费者。本文指出，这种代理主义和个人主义的修辞反映了新自由主义市场理性的影响。这已经超越了利润最大化的经济维度，进入了主体形成的社会和文化领域。因此，这些妇女被认为是积极选择和自我负责的消费者，社会差异被美化为生活方式。我认为《上海宝贝》也包含了复杂而矛盾的信息，这有助于对后女性主义和消费主义的双重话语进行批判。通过挪用女权主义赋予权力的术语，也通过强调女性应该接受和适应主流父权文化及其传统的情色美话语，小说揭示了一定程度的焦虑、沮丧和持续的自律压力。这最终破坏了女性性次物化的语言。通过庆祝上海融入全球消费文化，同时暗示隐藏的种族和阶级等级和排斥，小说在一定程度上揭穿了不受约束的自由和代理的消费主义修辞，揭示了不平等权力关系的运作。
Abstract This paper argues that Shanghai Baby's celebration of an active, empowering form of female sexual and economic independence, voiced in neo-liberal market terms of active choice and individual freedom, signals an important departure from earlier representations of Chinese women and points to affinities both in narrative, thematic and ideological dimensions with the contemporary Anglo-American chick lit. The novel is anchored in the last years of the 1990s, when integration of the Chinese urban society in a global consumer culture are much greater than before. The novel also appropriates feminist terms of female empowerment and agency to celebrate the sexual and economic confidence of a new urban, me- first generation of well-educated and physically attractive women. It also stresses their deliberate alienation from feminism as a social movement. Empowerment and agency are to be sought in individual consumerist power and via full participation in an increasingly globalized commodity culture that addresses these women as active consumers with unconstrained choice. This paper points out that such rhetoric of agency and individualism reflects the impact of the neoliberal market rationality. This has moved beyond the economic dimension of maximized profit-making into the social and cultural area of subject formation. These women are thereby interpellated as actively choosing and self-responsible consumers and social differences are aestheticized as lifestyles. I argue that Shanghai Baby also contains complex and contradictory messages which help to cast a critical light on the twin discourses of post-feminism and consumerism of the chick lit genre. By appropriating feminist terms of empowerment and also by stressing that women should embrace and adjust to mainstream patriarchal culture and its conventional discourses of erotic beauty, the novel reveals a level of anxiety, frustration, and constant pressure of self-discipline. This eventually undermines its language of female sexual sub- jectification. By celebrating Shanghai's integration into a global consumer culture, while hinting at the hidden race and class hierarchies and exclusions, the novel partly debunks the consumerist rhetoric of unconstrained freedom and agency and reveals the working of unequal power relations.