ABSTRACT
This chapter moves on to explore the potentially heterogeneous nature of gender as a social category, seeking to unravel this heterogeneity in terms of gender identities that Chinese men and women can take vis-a-vis modernity and localness. The meanings and expectations attached to femininity are found to have gone through considerable changes and become variable, while its opposition is still being preserved almost the same as before. Although the boundaries demarcating what is permissible for women may have substantially changed, the way the bilingual advertising discourse used for defining women’s sexuality in relation to men remains almost the same as before. The findings also suggest that the “normal” and “natural” standard of masculinity and femininity in contemporary China seems to have been largely assessed and refashioned against the templates of aggressive and violent masculinity and of beauty norms in the West respectively. The role English plays in the representation of gender is much more polyvalent than often assumed and generalizable, but it is not infrequently used to ensure that only dominant and binary versions of masculinity and femininity are subtly maintained.
