Overview

Why elite Chinese women find themselves caught in a cycle of burnout. Burnout Market Feminism explores the lives of elite urban businesswomen in the Internet Age. Burnout market feminism combines Han Byung-Chul's concept of the Burnout Society and feminist Li Xiaojiang's market feminism theory. To unravel the puzzle of how women in China have thrived in business despite state crackdowns on feminism, Ling Tang argues that it is important to examine the role of the market in postsocialist China and the evolving interplay between illiberal politics and a neoliberal economy. Drawing on multisited ethnography conducted primarily in Shenzhen and Hefei during the Xi era, the author looks at the multiplicity and nuance of the lived experiences of businesswomen and their negotiations with patriarchy across different sociocultural contexts, particularly their confrontations with hetero-patriarchal intimacy norms and male-dominated guanxi business practices. Despite following diverse paths, these women share a common pursuit of achievement and growth-a pursuit that paradoxically narrows their market feminist efforts and leads to burnout, as these negotiations are often reduced to contingent bargains within a neoliberal framework. The book also extends the discussion of burnout beyond that framework, incorporating feminist critiques of women's burnout under patriarchy and postcolonial critiques of burnout within a rhetorically socialist authoritarian state.

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9780262051880

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Reviews

ENDORSEMENTS ""In this remarkable book, Tang honors the thrill female agents feel when establishing online abundance while pitilessly uncovering its cost to bodies, spirit, emotions, and life force. Tang exhorts feminist labor studies to see our real world and to work on a feminist critique appropriate to it."" —Tani Barlow, Rice University; author of The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism and In the Event of Women ""This well-written book captures women entrepreneurs’ empowerment and burnout in China’s digital economy, highlighting how market reforms shape their achievements and struggles amid shifting sociopolitical contexts, feminist activism, gender relations, and subjectivity."" —Susanne Choi, Chinese University of Hong Kong; lead author of Masculine Compromise

Author Information

Ling Tang is an artist-activist-academic who views sociology as art and vice versa. They are a Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne and a singer-songwriter under the name Lyn Dawn (Spotify, YouTube) or _x5510__x51CC_ (QQ Music, NetEase Music).

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