ABSTRACT
Jin Xing has been the only transgender celebrity in present China since the late 1990s, and her media image is an important popular reader for Chinese on gender, especially femininity. This study is a discourse analysis of one of her public speeches titled “How to Intelligently Get along with the Male-Dominated Society”. It reveals that Jin endorses two types of conflicting femininities: independent and individualistic professional vs. submissive and caring housewife. The coexistence of two femininities indicates the opposite directions along which Chinese women’s status are changing, but both show strong influence from neoliberalism. For social elites, neoliberalism is empowering because they are well-resourced to take the full use of the free market; but for women from less advantaged background, the lack of capital restrains them from engaging in market competition and they have to comply with familism which has pushed many women out of the labour market. This study reveals that in deeply stratified China, there is no homogeneous femininity across social classes, and the controversy over Jin’s gender discourse needs to be situated in a particular context for interpretation.
