服美役 (Fu Mei Yi)
#Metoo movement’s spread to East Asia has led to the rise of a new wave of feminist movements in these societies. In mainland China, Luo Xixi, a former student of Beihang University, published a #MeToo inspired an allegation on 1 January 2018 against her then- supervisor, professor Chen Xiaowu (Lindberg 2021, 5). After publishing, her post garnered millions of views and inspired more women to join the #Metoo movement in mainland China. However, the feminist movement in China has faced significant challenges due to government censorship of social media and other online platforms. While many feminist accounts have been created and feminist ideas have been shared more widely, the movement has been hampered by restrictions on free expression and censorship of terms associated with feminist activism. In Spring 2021, many nationalist bloggers “accused feminist accounts of being ‘separatists’ and ‘traitors’, while reporting them to Weibo moderators, claiming that some posts had “illegal” or “harmful” content.” This resulted in Chinese social media platforms removing about 15 accounts of prominent feminists, part of a general campaign to silence feminist voices. Platforms like Douban justify this censorship “citing extremism, ideological content, and radical political views” (Lindberg 2021, 4). Yet the impact of feminism cannot be retracted or silenced. As Xue and Rose argue in the book Weibo Feminism “Me Too has been a catalyst for Chinese feminism to grow into a mainstream public movement” (Xue and Rose, 5), the aftermath of #Metoo movement in China is the continuous feminist discourse on these social media platforms. This keyword entry would focus specifically on the debates around 服美役(fu mei yi), which can be translated into “enslaved by beauty standards” or “in the work of being beautiful,” depending on whether yi here is translated into labor (lao yi) or enslavement (nu yi).
The feminist discourses against beauty standards are also happening in other East Asian societies. In Korea, the feminist movement called tal-corset (Anti-corset/Escape the Corset) has been connected to both the radical feminist movement of 4B, and later 6b4t (a list of standards for gender separatism). Both the videos that were uploaded by Korean feminists on smashing their beauty products and shaving their hair and the feminist protests have been spread on Chinese social media. Meanwhile, the #Kutoo movement in Japan advocates for the freedom of not wearing high heels during work for women. Even though both of these movements are essentially about breaking beauty standards or beauty requirements for women, tal-corset affected Chinese feminists on a more general level (including many students), whereas the #Kutoo movement was more targeted towards working women.
Legend Zhu, with buzz-cut hair. Legend Zhu during her time as a model.
Photo provided by Legend Zhu Photo provided by Legend Zhu
To understand the definition of “fu mei yi,” this comparison posted by Legend Zhu on Xiaohongshu (one of the major social media platforms in China) shows the difference between “natural women” and “women who are fu mei yi” (in this specific case, it is through modeling). This comparison both identifies what it cost in the process of fu mei yi and offers an example of rejecting fu mei yi. In an interview in a New York Times article, a Chinese woman states “To stay beautiful, you need to constantly invest time, money and energy, most men are free of this. It is unfair.” The article also defines this trend of rejecting fu mei yi as “a growing trend of rejecting what is known in Chinese internet parlance as “beauty duty”: the costly and sometimes painful devotion to mainstream notions of attractiveness. The idea is to spend time and resources not on beauty standards, but on personal development, including education and career growth” (Wang,2023). Therefore, the premise of identifying fu mei yi is closely related to feminist ideologies and movements in general. However, even though the rejection of fu mei yi seems to create a utopian understanding of women’s reaction to patriarchal capitalism, there is pushback against this trend. The debates around fu mei yi are mainly focused on the vague distinction between dressing up for oneself and dressing up for the heteropatriarchal requirements/expectations. Moreover, there are also debates about whether one really wants to use the way that they dress to express themselves and if one internalizes heteropatriarchal ideas so that they believe they are making an effort to dress up for themselves. The debates of whether one is dressing up for themselves or not for men can also be considered together with the intersection of class and sexual orientation. For class specifically, in chapter 5 of Pun Ngai’s book Made in China, she mentions that “consumption bound them into a collectivity through their shared dreams and desires to become a new kind of gendered subject. ‘‘Dressing up’’ is perhaps the most common of these practices” (Pun, 158). In this way, dressing up becomes a way of community building and creation of a potential escape to the dream of becoming a “modern girl.” What “fu mei yi” can represent thus can be a way of achieving “modernity,” which is largely constructed by consumerism and patriarchy. For sexual orientation, the debates around whether lesbians are dressing up because of the internalization of beauty in patriarchal culture/society or whether they can be excluded from this critique of repetitive practices of patriarchal consumerism. One of the examples is that a specific video posted by a lesbian influencer on Weibo about her view on wearing make-up was criticized by radical feminists online by arguing that “it is meaningless to argue that whether one has the right to become beautiful when the idea of beauty is deeply rooted in patriarchy and capitalism and transformed into a form of consumerism” (Weibo 2023). Thus, the question of who are the ones that can be truly “free” from internalizations is raised through such debates. What are the impacts of non-heterosexual women’s practices of beauty and what do these practices mean to these women themselves? And how do we understand individuals’ agencies when an idea is so intertwined with certain dominant ideologies and forces?
The rise of criticizing fu mei yi can also be related to the popularity of social media platforms like Xiaohongshu, which are more focused on sharing images and videos. On Xiaohongshu, different trends in women's fashion are shared. Within those fashion styles, traces of globalization can be found: #American high school fashion, #Chinese American fashion, #Korean make-up, #Thailand make-up, etc. The rise of these hashtags and the general fashion styles can be traced to certain influencers’ posts and the creation of a sub-genre fashion under a more general fashion style that is already popular on social media in China. The image of the “modern girl” is further complicated with different approaches and connected to Chinese interpretations of different cultures, which internalizes certain cultural hierarchies as well. Thus the adoption of specific kinds of fu mei yi is reflecting certain cultural presumptions and preferences. But at the same time, the repetition of the way of interpreting and representing other cultures in fashion can also be seen as a repetitive practice of Chinese readings on specific women in other cultures while also a way of imitating other cultures’ certain performativity of femininity. The imagination of another culture through consumption and performativity of imagined femininity in fu mei yi also reflects the construction of the “other” cultures in relation to a limited way of encountering information through the internet. In our class discussion on the topic of “diaspora,” we talked about how “elsewhere” is ultimately an imagined space and how in Ikeuchi’s book, religion was used as a way to create time for oneself and “re-humanize” the docile bodies. I think the idea of achieving a certain imagined figure, no matter if it is the “modern girl” or the different women in other cultures, is essentially related to the desire to become something more than reality. This process of becoming is at the same time closely related to gender hierarchies and cultural hierarchies (between the rural and urban within China and between China and other cultures). Who are the ones that certain groups of Chinese women are trying to become? What are the represented elements behind these abstractions of women in other cultures? With hashtags like #xianchengmeixue (countryside beauty) arise, do these debates between what is real countryside life and what is not alluding to the separation and projection between the rural and urban regions in China? Ultimately, the discussion around who is included in the conversations of all these beauty trends and fashion styles and who is included in the feminist discourses and specifically rejecting these beauty standards is closely related to the further exploration of these different hierarchies. The debates around fu mei yi are essentially challenging both of these hierarchies and reflecting a desire for solidarity within the restrictive context of Chinese society.
Citation:
Rose, Kate, and Aviva Wei Xue. 2022. Weibo Feminism : Expression, Activism, and Social Media in China. New York, Ny: Bloomsbury Academic, Bloomsbury Publishing.
Lindberg, Frida. “Women's Rights in China and Feminism on Chinese Social Media.” Institute for Security and Development Policy, June 21, 2021. https://isdp.se/publication/womens- rights-in-china-and-feminism-on-chinese-social-media/.
Pun Ngai. 2005. Made in China : Women Factory Workers in Global Workplace. Durham ; London: Duke University Press ; Hong Kong.
Wang, Olivia. 2023. “Buzz-Cut and Brave: The Chinese Women Who Defy ‘Beauty Duty.’” The New York Times, October 8, 2023, sec. World. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/08/world/asia/china-women-defying-beauty.html.