Aesthetic Citizenship: Formations of the Gendered Self and Imaginations of Urban Modernity in the Chinese Periphery

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Claudia Liebelt
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 433753905

This research project analyses the relationship between body aesthetics and citizenship as a formation of gendered selves in the Chinese Western regions. While fashion and beauty were considered frivolous, decadent and Western during the Maoist era, in recent years the People's Republic of China emerged as one of the largest markets of the global beauty and cosmetics sector, as well as for cosmetic surgery. Jie Yang (2011) describes the growing investments in body aesthetics in post-Maoist China as part of an increasingly commercialised consumption behaviour as well as a biopolitical strategy of state governance. Within the growing beauty economy, this form of governance functions as an aesthetic and affective pedagogy, which creates dominant beauty norms within a heterogenous population and offers the technologies to put these into effect. Against this background the project seeks to analyse the particular power constellations, practices, technologies and affective imaginations of feminine beauty in a so-called peripheral region of the Chinese West, preferably in Lhasa, capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region. From a Han-Chinese perspective, the Western periphery, populated by state-recognized ethnic minorities, is considered backward, traditional and far from urban modernity. The scholarly literature on this region is largely comprised of studies on cultural values and ritual practices on the one hand, and conflicts and resistance towards the assimilation attempts by the Chinese state on the other. In contrast, the project analyses the embodied aspects of Chinese power politics, namely the relationship between the consumption of beauty products and services and interrelated processes of gendered formations of the self. Drawing on anthropological research in urban beauty salons, fitness studios and clinics, it sheds light on the relationship between the current boom in aesthetic products and services, transnational imaginaries of beauty and modernity as well as processes of biopolitical discipline and control. The concept of 'aesthetic citizenship' ties the global increase in the beauty and cosmetics industry to the embodied and social aspects of processes of biopolitical subjectivation, surveillance and discipline. In doing so, it draws on concepts that conceptualize citizenship as a somatic materialization of subjectivity and an embodied act of negotiating belonging, rather than formal status. The aim of this project is to fill gaps in the scholarly literature and contribute to conceptual debates on transnational beautyscapes, contemporary body politics and citizenship.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants