Achieving Beauty and Health: Exploring Public and Private Aesthetic Medicine in Xiamen, China

Abstract

Based on 14 months of fieldwork, this dissertation explores women’s changing understanding and practices of beauty and health enhancement in Xiamen City, China. It argues that women’s beauty and health enhancement is not completed by limited treatments and plastic surgery procedures but reflects women’s living and becoming in the world. Beauty perceptions involve women’s imaginations of themselves and their relations to the socialist state, the capitalist market, biomedicine, Minnan patriarchal family, and ethnic minority identities. My research data is colleted by conducting participant observations and semi-structured interviews in and outside local public and private hospitals. My dissertation begins with exploring the complexities of Whiteness with a focus on Chinese competing beauty ideals such as Bai You Shou 白幼瘦 (whiteness, youth, and slimness) in a context of long-standing globalization. Whiteness in Xiamen is related to skin condition (smoothness and flawlessness), diets, age, working or living environment, and not necessarily connected with the spread of European values or racial categories. The dissertation then shows how the Chinese medical system (public medicine and private medicine) makes women’s pursuit of these beauty ideals an individual option rather than a citizen’s compulsory responsibility. My dissertation also explains how beauty was intervened upon by biomedical standards of health differently in Xiamen’s public and private hospitals. The Chinese biomedical system offers a special case to study the construction of biomedical authority without eliminating other medical systems, such as Chinese medicine, facilitated with Renqing 人情 (debts, duties, favours, etc.) and Guanxi 关系 (social relations, connections, networking). Finally, my dissertation demonstrates how some Chinese women realize their beauty and health ideals outside clinical settings. I show that though beauty and health are configured as individual pursuits, women incorporated beauty and health enhancement into their lifelong projects in relation to their gender and family roles, aesthetic citizenship, and aspirations for the future.