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Article Excerpt
Virtuous women belong to history. Women of the present are independent
and beautiful.... Some men say that they do not love women who are not bad. --"Bad Girls," Marie Claire, May 2000
IN SHAMPOO COMMERCIALS, NATIONAL BEST-SELLERS, MTV, and women's magazines, the image of a beautiful-and-bad woman, as described above, has been touted as the spokeswoman of the new feminism in twenty-first century Taiwan. Bazaar's 2001 portrayal of Chang Hsioa-hung, a well-known Taiwanese feminist activist, offered an emblematic example of the way this feminist image is used in popular culture. In an unsigned Bazaar piece, "Out of the Closet: Chang Hsiaohung's View on Fashion," featured three black-and-white photos of Chang, demonstrating her elegant appearance and her lifestyle (with bookcases in the background). The article begins with this introduction: "Inside our body there exists an unconscious passion for fashion.... Dressed in white shirt, long black skirt, and a green scarf, Chang joyfully talks about 'women's irrational passion for fashion.'" In the article, Chang was quoted as saying: "It is a good thing to like fashion because it brings me a lot of pleasure. I am not going to feel guilty about it because I am worth it." As for sexual politics, "men who wear Armani take on a more feminine aura and women, more masculine. A kind of androgynous ambiguity is born when one wears Armani." Here, "coming out of the closet" evokes not gay politics but rather consumption--the consumption of very expensive Western clothing brands as a tool for fighting strict gender boundaries. (1)
Chang stands for the beautiful-and-bad feminist--beautiful, because she cares about her appearance; bad, because through Armani, she asserts her autonomy by breaking gender boundaries. This feminism, with its emphasis on individualism and consumerism, is built upon the premise that, as Chen Li-ling in the United Daily News (Taiwan) put it in 1999, "women have achieved equality in the new times ... there is no need to fight against male power." This kind of "new times" mentality was echoed in a Corolla ad in Non-no magazine in April 1996, which claimed to end the gender wars: "Men have freedom and women have independence; they now live happily hereafter." In other words, the beautiful-and-bad feminist uses consumption as a way of achieving harmonious female-male relationships. (2)
The figure of the beautiful-and-bad woman as feminist is grounded in a particular vision of history that celebrates the end of patriarchy and women's coming of age. This "feminist" image has emerged out of the media's construction of women's rights movements over the past twenty years. Through their coverage of feminist movements worldwide, international women's magazines have played a significant role in shaping popular knowledge about feminism in Taiwan. However, as these magazines focus on women as consumers, the kind of feminism that is constructed is necessarily constrained by the logic of global capital. In this essay, I aim to examine the politics of this construction through the image of the beautiful-and-bad woman. The material under analysis is mostly from the Taiwanese editions of international women's magazines from 1985 to 2002, including Non-no, Elle, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Vogue, and Bazaar. Supported by advertisers, they are composed mostly of fashion spreads, self-help and informative articles, and advertisements. I analyze those that explicitly engage with feminism or women's movements. I also supplement my analysis with a discussion of such best-selling books, in Taiwan, as Beautiful and Bad Women's Key to Success, A Manual for Women Who Want to Be Beautiful and Bad, and Everybody Loves Bad Girls plus articles from the "Women's Page," a supplementary section of the United Daily News, one of the most widely circulated daily newspapers in Taiwan. The "Women's Page" deals with the know-how of consumption and family management. All these texts are designed to help women manage their everyday lives, including how to attract men, achieve career success, and look fashionable and pretty.
My argument is that the media in Taiwan have promoted two images of feminists and feminism: the beautiful and the bad. Beautiful feminism is grounded in feminine difference while bad feminism is located within a discourse of sameness. These seemingly contradictory rhetorical strategies together construct a female subject to support global production and consumption. Forms of difference other than gender are ignored. Thus, the image of the beautiful-and-bad woman makes use of certain elements from liberal feminism and cultural feminism from the U.S. Second Wave while labeling its undesirable parts as the Other, or "the Western Second Wave." This selective appropriation of Western feminism has to be explained within the larger context of neocolonialism, which sells the Western lifestyle as local women's redemption from patriarchal oppression and defines feminism as a personal lifestyle choice, rather than a political practice. It thus limits feminist politics to the personal sphere and ignores the heterogeneity of women's movements.
The first part of this article offers a history of the relationship between women's movements and women's magazines in Taiwan. Here, I emphasize the way global capital through international women's magazines has given rise to the fantasy of the beautiful-and-bad feminist subject. In the second part, I discuss Joan Scott's notion of fantasy to underscore that identity is constructed through ideological exclusion. The third part of the article investigates how media feminism is formed along the two axes of sexual difference and sameness through appropriations from liberal feminism and cultural feminism. The fourth part uses the translation of "postfeminism" in Taiwan to illustrate the mechanism of ideological inclusion/exclusion in constructing a beautiful-and-bad feminist fantasy. The fifth part investigates the excluded Other of the fantasy, the "Western Second Wave." The creation and elimination of this Other justifies the legitimacy of a man-loving lifestyle feminism conducive to global capitalism. In the final part, I discuss the politics of this lifestyle feminism and argue that media feminism in Taiwan needs to be theorized within the context of neocolonialism.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: WOMEN'S MAGAZINES AND WOMEN'S MOVEMENTS
The lifting of martial law in 1987 as well as other factors such as the formation of a service economy with women entering into the workplace en masse, the liberalizing of the economy that opened Taiwan's domestic market to foreign goods, the lifting of restrictions on foreign-owned advertising companies, and the enforcement of intellectual property law made it possible for international women's magazines to come to Taiwan, changing Taiwan's women's magazine market as well as the content of the magazines. (3) Before then, the political climate was authoritarian and repressive. Women's magazines were either supported by the state or censored to promote state ideology. However, despite strict censorship, (underground) magazine publishing allowed a space for democratic movements to flourish. For example, in the early 1980s, the feminist and democratic Awakening group used magazines to spread their ideas and raise women's consciousness, despite the fact that their publishing house was constantly raided by the police. (4)
The liberalization policy adopted in the 1980s as a response to U.S. pressure to open up Taiwan's market for foreign (mostly U.S.) goods allowed Western ad agencies such as Ogilvy & Mather, J. Walter Thompson, and Saatchi & Saatchi to take over the market for advertising in Taiwan. These ad agencies used international women's magazines as forums to sell Western goods to women, with one-third to one-half of these magazines filled with advertisements from Christian Dior, Lancome, Estee Lauder, and so on. The power of women as consumers in Taiwan meant that it was a lucrative market, and Chinese-language versions of Cosmopolitan, Elle, Marie Claire, and Bazaar all started to appear in bookstores and on...
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