Wang Hong Fashion Culture and the Postfeminist Time in China

Abstract This study critically examines post-feminism in Chinese fashion culture through the lens of Wang Hong, young online celebrities and entrepreneurs who sell fashion products. The extensive discussion of post-feminism in the literature has thus far focused primarily on Western contexts, specifically those where young, white, middle-class women embrace the contradictory identity of a freely-choosing, self-pleasing, and empowering, yet calculating, regulatory, and disciplinary subject. I argue that, in the absence of the charged legacy of successive waves of feminist movements that have been the Western experience, Chinese women, exemplified by Wang Hong, are able to embrace post-feminism through their fashion culture and indeed are eager to do so. Through various self-fashioning activities and business endeavors, Wang Hong embody a certain type of femininity that is not only aesthetic and entrepreneurial in the lexicon of freedom and empowerment, but also patriotic in its witting complicity in the market-state nexus that propagates nationalistic sentiments in the pursuit of social and economic advantages. Though unaware of the fragmented feminist moments in China, Wang Hong, nonetheless, demonstrate that post-feminism can take root in local culture through the transnationality of the consumerist, entrepreneurial, and neoliberal yearnings of women around the world.