“From Sparrow to Phoenix”: Imagining Gender Transformation through Taiwanese Women's Variety TV

Feminist analysis of gendered subject in modern Chinese cultures has illustrated that at different times in history, available categories of gendered personhood have been formed through a range of distinct though sometimes interlocking cultural systems, including the patrilineal family (, jia), feminism(s), sexology, nationalism and the state, elite literature, and commercial popular culture.1 In the spirit of this strand of genealogical analysis, this article presents an investigation of a novel feminine identity category invented in Taiwan in 2005: qingshounü (, lit. young-mature woman). Following such feminist genealogy, I understand the category qingshounü not simply as a novel linguistic packaging of a preexisting essential entity (such as "women"), but rather as a qualitatively new way of representing, understanding, and producing gendered subjecthood. It is 24:2 doi 10.1215/10679847-3458661 Copyright 2016 by Duke University Press 24:2 May 2016 less a concrete demographic category than a novel epistemology for imagining gendered identity. In that sense, as Tani E. Barlow has argued for the category "women" ( funü, nüxing), qingshounü operates as a catachresis: a concept-metaphor that lacks a proper referent but that functions as a "legible repository of social experience" whose investigation yields insight into the social norms of the present.2 Qingshounü is a category fashioned by the parallel systems of commodity culture and commercial entertainment media. It belongs in a discursive constellation with other terms currently circulating in Sinophone media cultures that have been produced by these same systems, including shounü (, mature woman), xingnan (, metrosexual), xiaozi (, yuppie), and like these terms, qingshounü designates a target market and a style as much as a subjectivity. Invented by Shiseido Taiwan as part of the campaign to launch its Maquillage line of cosmetics, the term...