Celebrating women’s autonomy, embracing patriarchal norms: The transnational manifestation of postfeminism in China
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the transnational manifestation of postfeminism in China through an analysis of the popular TV drama Delicious Romance. Drawing on a transnational feminist perspective, it contributes to scholarship on postfeminism in non-Western contexts by exploring how postfeminist sensibilities uniquely manifest within China’s distinct socio-political and cultural environment. The study argues that contemporary Chinese postfeminist media simultaneously celebrate women’s autonomy, economic empowerment, and consumerist pleasure while subtly reinforcing traditional patriarchal values, particularly emphasizing marriage, family, and heterosexual norms. Despite promoting women’s individualism, the drama ultimately portrays marriage as essential to women’s fulfillment, illustrating how state-market complicity in China shapes gender narratives and obscures persistent structural inequalities under the guise of personal choice. The drama consistently attributes women’s successes or failures solely to their individual efforts, masking deeper systemic gender issues. Furthermore, the analysis demonstrates that Delicious Romance aligns closely with official state policies promoting traditional family values in response to declining marriage and birth rates. This alignment reveals how mediated narratives reinforce state-sanctioned gender norms and patriarchal expectations, highlighting the subtle yet powerful ways Chinese media sustains patriarchal structures, thus questioning the authenticity of apparent advances in women’s autonomy and equality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".