From the Quest for Beauty to Fat-Shaming: Gender, Body and Politics of Desirability in Contemporary Taiwan

By focusing on both women's intense quest for beauty and the social stigma around female corpulence, this presentation aims to build a holistic view of the politics of desirability in Taiwan. On the one hand, the first part of the presentation focuses on the phenomenon of the valorisation of a hegemonic beauty canon, the zhenmei (very thin, white-skinned, wide-eyed, cute and docile women), and on the relations between body embellishments, local gender norms and the dynamics of subjectivation that such valorisation implies in Taiwan.

On the other hand, the second part analyses the various and multiple instances of size-based body discrimination that many women experience in their daily lives. It also documents the related and growing movement against fat shaming in contemporary Taiwan and examines the local appropriation of the international movement of fat activism in a non-Euro-American context. I argue that the quest for extreme thinness is the central piece that connects these opposing yet interrelated phenomena, as slenderness is the most important component of the beauty ideal and the valorisation of thinness creates and deepen bodily size discrimination.

This analysis is the result of several large-scale research projects from 2014 to 2022 and based on over 100 in-depth interviews with Taiwanese women and gender minorities. I mobilize the concept of "human capital" and “entrepreneur of the self” in Foucault's analysis of neoliberalism and contend that these interconnected phenomena should be better understood from a neoliberal rationality perspective: namely, that zhenmei embody the aspirational figure of a successful "aesthetic entrepreneur," while corpulent women and gender minorities are viewed by society as "failed entrepreneurs" of their appearance and health.