Gender and Postfeminism in Chinese Reality Dating Shows

This open access book explores the representation and reception of female subjectivity in contemporary Chinese reality dating shows. Conceptualising gender as discursively and performatively constructed, and dating as mediated through the reality television format, it examines how female subjectivity is circumscribed by gender norms, familial relationships, and matchmaking practices. The book further investigates how female audiences actively deconstruct these gendered narratives. Drawing on texts-in-action viewing sessions and interviews with twenty-three young women in China, this study demonstrates how reality dating shows reinforce patriarchal scripts by reinventing traditional matchmaking rituals and inciting women to sustain a postfeminist sensibility that conceals systemic, structural, and taken-for-granted inequalities. The book contributes theoretically and empirically to feminist audience studies, mediated intimacy, and debates on how postfeminism and neoliberalism are lived, experienced, and represented. It is relevant to readers curious about media and gender studies, feminist theory, and East Asian studies.