White-collar men and masculinities in contemporary urban China

This work investigates the characteristics of masculinity that are at the symbolic heart of China’s economic success, and of which the figure of the white-collar man is emblematic. Based on fieldwork observations, interview and media publications, it examines the gendered practices, aspirations and attitudes of men who identify with or aspire to white-collar status alongside discursive representations of the Chinese white-collar man, interrogating the links between practice and discourse. Drawing on various approaches to theorizing subjectivity, it argues that white-collar masculinity is performed in ways that suggest both radical shifts and continuities in understandings of gender, which challenge the prevalent teleological narrative of China’s modernization. The first chapter sets the scene for white-collar masculinity in the reform era and discusses fieldwork methodologies. Chapter two sets out the theoretical framework adopted to analyse the gendered white-collar subject, and examines academic literature on masculinities in China. Chapter three examines the ‘body culture’ of informants, and how they ‘bring themselves’ to white-collar discourse through attention to their bodies in areas of daily life such as dress, movement and hygiene. Chapters four and five look respectively at the production of corporate masculinity both inside and outside the office, through an exploration of business and leisure practices, and their overlap. Chapter six takes a close look at the young white-collar man as (heterosexual) boyfriend and husband and the final chapter investigates sexualisations of young urban middle-class males, and comments on their transformative possibilities

Community in Chinese Street Music: Sound, Song and Social Life

Jiqing guangchang is a form of amateur music performance event in Wuhan, a major city in central China. Groups of singers take turns to perform well-known Chinese popular songs for a few hours each afternoon and evening in squares, on street corners, and in parks around the city. Audiences take an active part by offering performers cash tips. Certain discourses surrounding contemporary urban life have portrayed experiences with popular music in these modern city contexts as distant from communal meaning. My ethnography of these performances and their surrounding social worlds is geared towards assessing the significance of community here, while also contributing to an understanding of the notion in contemporary urban China. Musical activity in jiqing guangchang is mundane, mainstream and rarely inspires fervent commitment or responses from participants. I analyse material from its spatial and sonic, economic, performative and social sides to look beyond understandings of community that are based on ideologies of kinship and belonging. I develop the discussion towards community’s embodied and material-level foundations, manifest in the mutual orientation and coexistence strategies of participants, their modes of sociability, and the designation and sharing of social territories. Thus, various limitations in current discourses of music and community can be transcended, particularly those tied to binary understandings of community’s position in relation to society, individualism, and several other key concepts. I aim to highlight that in contemporary urban situations, music’s ability to engender collective meaning is not only tied to ritualised contexts or those where divisive identity issues are prominent. Instead, my analysis of jiqing guangchang brings to the fore underlying and everyday modes of collective engagement that may be of deep-seated significance in interpreting all kinds of musical contexts

The performance of identity in Chinese popular music

Popular music in Chinese languages both reflects and influences how its audiences perceive themselves and their position in the world around them. This book analyses the role of popular music in identity formation through detailed comparisons of the pop star Faye Wong, the rock band Second Hand Rose and the electrofolk artist Xiao He, in five thematic chapters. Chapter 1, Place, follows the history of popular music through Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei and Beijing, concluding that language is defining. Chapter 2, Genre and Classification, argues that genre distinctions, and by extension class identities, are secondary to affiliations along region, gender, generation and marketability. The psycho-analytical approach of chapter 3, Sex, Gender, and Desire, explores how popular music reiterate and challenge stereotypes surrounding the passive beauty, coolness and brotherhood. Chapter 4, Theatricality, argues that theatrical performances negotiate the boundary between stage world and ordinary reality through make-believe and reflectiveness. Finally, chapter 5, Organizing Music, submits that music happens through reproduction, variation and selection, and in constant interaction with ecologies and collectives. In the end, this book itself strives to make these sounds, images and texts available for the incessant, piecemeal work of worldmaking.LEI Universiteit LeidenThe Hulsewé-Wazniewski Foundation for the advancement of teaching and research in the archeology, art and material culture of China at Leiden UniversityAsian Studie

Humanity from African Naissance to Coming Millennia

Humanity From African Naissance to Coming Millennia arises out of the world's first Dual Congress that was held at Sun City (South Africa) in 1998 that refers to a conjoint, integrated meeting of two international scientific associations, the International Association for the Study of Human Palaeontology - IV Congress - and the International Association of Human Biologists. The volume includes 39 refereed papers covering a wide range of topics, from Human Biology, Human Evolution (Emerging Homo, Evolving Homo, Early Modern Humans), Dating, Taxonomy and Systematics, Diet, Brain Evolution, offering the most recent analyses and interpretations in different areas of evolutionary anthropology.Humanity From African Naissance to Coming Millennia arises out of the world's first Dual Congress that was held at Sun City (South Africa) in 1998 that refers to a conjoint, integrated meeting of two international scientific associations, the International Association for the Study of Human Palaeontology - IV Congress - and the International Association of Human Biologists. The volume includes 39 refereed papers covering a wide range of topics, from Human Biology, Human Evolution (Emerging Homo, Evolving Homo, Early Modern Humans), Dating, Taxonomy and Systematics, Diet, Brain Evolution, offering the most recent analyses and interpretations in different areas of evolutionary anthropology

The First Little Emperors in the Postmodern(East) Mall - China

This is an interpretive study that explores the potency of consumption culture in China through a selected group that belongs to the first generation of the one-child policy – the ‘Little Emperors’. This is a population that is unprecedented, not only in China but also in human history. The dawning of postmodernity has ushered in a consumption culture. Fashion and brands are chosen as the consumption sites in this study in view of their significance: they are accessible and inundated with symbolic meanings for the construction of identities. In the vertigo of postmodernity, there is a sudden excess of commodities and signs in the marketplace. Anchored in traditional Chinese values and operating from a holistic perspective, this first generation of Little Emperors has cultured a different kind of consumption literacy in the ‘Postmodern(Eas)t Mall’. They are brand raisers, in the context, there is a salient socio-cultural logic in symbolic consumption, an outside-in dialectical process in the self construct, a layered self with a strong institutional influence and discipline ascribed or imagined, they are happy consumers, even though they may not know fashion or brands very well