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Continuing the exploration of individualization and gender, chapter 8 surveys women’s lifestyle-advice shows from China and Taiwan, drawing on audience research on the reception of these shows across China, Taiwan, and Singapore to explore transforming models of feminine identity in the transnational Sinophone world. The Chinese example analyzed in this chapter foregrounds the normative definition of adult femininity as an identity focused on familial care work. In contrast, an alternative subcategory of women’s lifestyle television, originating in Taiwan, centers on an emergent and idealized feminine identity in Sinophone East Asia, the “young-mature lady”: urban, unmarried, white-collar women who are seen as individualistic in attitude, with a high level of education and a penchant for beauty and fashion consumption. Based on audience research, this chapter shows that the idealization of this emergent form of feminine identity provides imaginative resources for contesting the cultural hegemony of patriarchal familialism.

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