ABSTRACT
This chapter explores cultural representations of gender in Chinese self-help books on matters of fitness, physical wellbeing and exercise. In the context of China’s socio-cultural opening in the post-socialist period, popular psychology has become widely successful in the country, to the point that Chinese readers are now its largest group of consumers worldwide. Advice books on matters of fitness and physical wellbeing articulate a hybrid mix of Western psychological notions and historically deeply rooted assumptions about gender, women, men, the body and the meanings of physical wellbeing. The present chapter explores these themes through the narrative analysis of a set of Chinese self-help books. It shows that, while these books ostensibly espouse a gender-neutral approach to physical fitness, they implicitly articulate a range of gendered notions of fitness and exercise that may serve to reproduce extant gender inequalities.
