This project explores how young heterosexual Chinese women use makeup to conceptualize their gender identity, drawing on a convergence of global, feminist, and queer social mediascape by examining popular makeup styles created by the beauty community in Bilibili, a youth-oriented platform in China, as case studies. These makeups were named after regions, like "Japanese and Korean makeup" and "European and American makeup", and sexual relationships, like "Men-conquering makeup" and "Women-conquering makeup". Rather than interrogate these homogenized styles’ validity, this research concerns how makeup functions as a meaning system through which young women make sense of themselves and their surrounding environments and how such practice contributes to their conceptualizations of gender, geography, and modernity. A ‘victim and heroine’ model (Cobbett; Beta) dominates current studies on beauty and young women from developing countries, in which beauty is theorized as backlashes against feminism (Elias et al.; Xu and Qian) or as the embodiment of female agency (Wen). However, the existing scholarships, situating women’s beauty practices in the heterosexual and feminist discourses of their localities, miss two crucial aspects – the transnational and queer flows among heterosexual women and their online existences. Building on the theoretical framework of queer Sinophone and transnational media, this project reveals the role the transnational and queer representations and the online community play in how young Chinese women navigate the contemporary moment. It also demonstrates that makeup presents an exciting opportunity to intervene at the intersection of feminist studies, queer studies, media studies, and studies in globalization and transnationalism.

Authors:
Lu Luo, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

About the Presenter(s)
LUO Lu is a cultural studies student working at the intersections of beauty, gender, sexuality, and transnational media, focusing on contemporary China. She was educated at the University of Hong Kong and graduated with a master’s degree in Literary

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lu-luo-751638166/

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