Chinese women’s makeover shows: idealised femininity, self-presentation and body maintenance
Abstract
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Chinese television
industry has witnessed the rise of a new form of television programme, Chinese
Women’s Makeover Shows. These programmes have quickly become a great success
and have received enormous attention from growing audiences. The shows are
themed on educating and demonstrating to the audiences the information and
methods needed to beautify their faces and bodies and consume products
accordingly. The shows are different from earlier Chinese fashion television
programmes in format, and are also different from western makeover shows that
have personal transformations of external appearance as their subject. The
importance of adopting these shows as a research topic lies in the fact that the shows
not only represent the images of contemporary Chinese women and propose a series
of standards that a modern Chinese woman is advised to abide by in terms of body
presentation and appearance, but also reflect the characteristics of Chinese female
consumers and the rising consumer culture of China in general. It concerns the
challenges and anxieties that have been brought to every woman in China.
The thesis starts with an overview analysis of this flourishing genre of
television programme and outlines its status quo, format and production techniques.
In the following three chapters, it takes three years (2010-2012) of episodes of the
three most popular Chinese Women’s Makeover Shows, Queen, Pretty Women, and I
am a Great Beauty as the main samples for analysis, aiming to scrutinise 1) the
idealised femininity represented in the shows and the cultural context from which the
features derive; 2) the self-presentation promoted as appropriate in the shows and
how it relates to the reality of Chinese women’s daily life; 3) the body maintenance
that the shows urge upon their audiences as regards consumption for the female body
and to what extent this epitomises and functions in constructing a consumer society
with Chinese characteristics. The thesis intends to fill a gap in academic research
with a systematic analysis of the prevailing phenomenon of the Chinese Women’s
Makeover Shows and an in-depth study concerning the shows’ meaning-making
process within their cultural context.