“I want to look as if I am my child’s big sister”: Self-satisfaction and the yummy mummy in Taiwan

Beauty, neoliberal subjectivity and the flux of psychic return

To theoretically understand stay-fit maternity, I consider the work of beauty as “aesthetic entrepreneurship,” following Elias et al. (2017, p. 37). The notion of “entrepreneurship” comes from Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism in which he states that neoliberalism redefines an individual as an “entrepreneur” who attentively and constantly invests, manages and improves their “human capital” in order to produce some kind of “return.” When Foucault (2004) talks about the benefits of capital, he distinguishes two main kinds of returns: “economic profit” and “psychological profit” or “psychic return” (p. 249). In his analysis, psychic return is central, since the neoliberal subject seeks to produce “his [her] own satisfaction” (Foucault, 2004, p. 232). Feher (2009) also emphasizes that such subjects care about “not only monetary earning but satisfaction of all kinds” (pp. 26–7). Therefore, the psychological aspect is crucial in Foucault’s reasoning since, by definition, “human capital” means that the capital and the return of capital, and the human being who “possesses” them, are inseparable (Foucault, 2004, p. 232). The capital is the individual herself: “[M]y human capital is me” (Feher, 2009, p. 26).

Feher (2019) explains that human capital as a mode of governmentality is less about wealth accumulation than it is about the process of asset appreciation, where “self” functions as an all-embracing asset, but is always put to the test. He adds two crucial points to better understand the relation to the self under neoliberalism: (1) “the subjects that it [human capital] defines seek to appreciate and to value themselves, such that their life may be thought of as a strategy aimed at self-appreciation”; (2) “all of their behaviors and all events affecting them (in any existential register) are liable to cause the subjects either to appreciate or to depreciate themselves” (Feher, 2009, p. 28).

Furthermore, Foucault (2004) calls attention to the dynamic character of such entrepreneurship: First, he qualifies such neoliberal subjects using the dynamic term “enterprise” (p. 231), assuming that their continuing duty increases the value of their capital. Second, he emphasizes the changing character of the return, arguing that return is always in a state of flux (Foucault, 2004). Hence, if all kinds of income are in a state of flux—a state of becoming—his analysis helps to reveal the flux of psychic return in neoliberal subjectivity. I suggest that the flux of psychic return is central to the neoliberal logic of self-improvement and is indispensable in the functioning of self-transformation under neoliberalism. Under the imperative of maximization of one’s own capital, the neoliberal subject is always in some kind of emotional state and in a flux of affects, including self-satisfaction and self-depreciation, which support and accompany the cadence of their material and immaterial incomings. Therefore, as Hall and O’Shea (2013) accurately point out, such “affective dimensions” are the “structural consequence of neoliberalism” (p. 12). Therefore, under the neoliberal imperative of continually improving one’s own assets, being in psychic flux is characteristic of the subject redefined as human capital.

Given the above, appearance is an excellent example of an embodied human capital. In fact, the aesthetic labor of bodily grooming should be seen as a technology of the self (Foucault, 2001) that remodels women’s subjectivity. This perspective helps challenge the distinction between the inner and outer world through the notion of subjectivation. If beauty is a determinant part of women’s human capital, as I shall explore below, neoliberal subjects must then continually carry out important aesthetic labor in order to keep their capital attractive. I contend that it is this continuing duty to maximize all kinds of benefits or, at least, to fight depreciation, that motivates women’s aesthetic labor during and after pregnancy.

Context of the study

Drastic social change over the last few decades has had a profound impact on gender and family systems in Taiwan. The interplay of traditions and the Western influence of modern ideologies is particularly notable. On one hand, traditional cultural norms continue to shape everyday life. As Yi and Chang (2019) note, “From filial obligation, mating gradient to family inheritance or conjugal power structure, the patriarchal society has granted men the superior status and privileges in the family as well as in the work context” (p. 251). On the other hand, due in large part to the women’s movement, gender equality has become more accepted over the past few decades. Significant improvements in education and employment opportunities for women have increased their status both in work and at home. Thus, highly-educated Taiwanese women are likely to remain fully employed even after marriage and childbirth (Brinton, 2001). Meanwhile, there has been a drastic rise in late marriage and a continuous decline in fertility (Yi & Chang, 2019). Yi and Chang (2019, p. 220) point out that “Salient factors such as increasing human capital, rising dual-earner families and the ideological shift of gender equality are proposed to explain why married couples postpone or do not want children.”

If, as Lu (2010) describes, there is an ongoing ideological shift from collectivism to individualism, changing attitudes toward maternity associated with the growing importance of women’s appearance is a notable example. My earlier research (Keyser-Verreault, 2018a) indicated that the association between motherhood and the quest for beauty is a recent phenomenon, since the ideal of bouncing back after childbirth is completely absent—even forbidden—in traditional Taiwanese postpartum practices in which highly caloric foods are served to new mothers. Moreover, the long-established discourse about what is “good mothering” has been highly child-centered (Chen, 2010, p. 54). However, in my previous work (Keyser-Verreault, 2018b), I found that in major maternity magazines, a mother’s individuality—and particularly her appearance—is now represented to be as important as a child’s needs, or even more important. It is in the context of this culture of beauty that I analyzed the yummy mummy trend.

Methodology

This article is based on 33 months of ethnographic fieldwork, between 2014 and 2017, during which I conducted a large research project involving highly-educated, urban Taiwanese women’s beauty practices. For the purpose of this paper, I selected 30 in-depth open-ended interviews that I conducted with married women who were pregnant or who already had children. These women all hold master’s or PhD degrees from the most prestigious local universities or from foreign universities. Almost all of them live in the capital, Taipei, and are part of the main ethnic group (Han). They are all heterosexual and identify themselves as middle-class. The women in the study range in age from 29 to 39 and are employed in a wide range of positions. Four participants are stay-at-home mothers and all participants’ husbands have good jobs.

Although gender, age, ethnicity, social class, and other axes of inequality set the context of women’s lives, I chose a sample from the privileged class because the participants are in an advantageous position: they are young and highly-educated urban women who belong to the dominant ethnic group, the Han, and who have good social and economic positions. In doing so, I focused on the role of appearance in the lives of these elite women. This sample allowed me to observe how appearance competes or interacts with other capital, such as cultural capital or high spending capacity, and what the particularities are of those participants’ attitudes toward beauty and their own beauty practices. This study has limitations. Neoliberalism unevenly affects women, and aspirational, well-educated middle-class women, like those in this study, are positioned as ideal entrepreneurial subjects (e.g. Feher, 2009; Scharff, 2016). It is important to consider the implicit class connotations inherent in neoliberal discourse, and these findings cannot be applied automatically to women of other social classes.

I recruited women through personal networks and snowball sampling; this ethnographic work was all conducted through in-person interviews and in Mandarin Chinese, a language in which I am fluent. The in-depth interviews allowed participants to talk about their perceptions and feelings, and allowed me to observe diverse sources of information such as body language, clothing style, facial cues or tone of voice. Respondents were asked to talk about women's beauty in Taiwan and my questions covered the definition of beauty; the role of appearance in society and in their lives; their concrete beauty practices; their feelings about their pregnancy and postpartum body, and those of significant others and other people; their special beauty practice during and after pregnancy; and how they see and interpret their changing bodies. Particular emphasis was placed on various perceptions of the body during and after pregnancy and how these women feel about their own body’s changes.

Furthermore, I participated in a wide range of activities and specific events with some participants, including afternoon tea at a café, shopping in department stores and infant boutiques, a prenatal yoga class, meeting with participants and their relatives, attending a party for a one-month-old and a ceremony for an infant’s first haircut, and making an ink brush using the infant’s hair. Moreover, as a researcher who has lived in Taiwan for many years, is married to a Taiwanese man and who has in-laws in Taiwan, I myself have experienced some of the situations reported to me by the interviewees. During my research, I had a child and experienced body changes resulting from pregnancy. Because I was quite skinny before having my child, my body’s changes where very noticeable to my Taiwanese family, friends and acquaintances—their appraisal followed accordingly. Raised in Canada and taught that one’s body is a private matter, I was at first offended by everyone telling me how fat I had become and insisting that I must snap back into shape as quickly as possible. Those encounters enabled me to discuss the experience of body surveillance that we had in common, which mostly generated a climate of trust and complicity between me and the women I interviewed for this project.

I used thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2019) to classify and analyze the rich information I gained from these multiple qualitative data-collection methods. After collecting data, I did line-by-line open coding, which generated common themes and identification between categories. First employing constant comparative analysis, which moves back and forth between data collection and analysis, I then did axial and selective coding, creating several (often overlapping) categories and inserting quotes and/or summaries into them. I further refined and summarized these into fewer (and sometimes additional) categories as larger patterns emerged.

Ethics approval was given by my university and ethics issues such as anonymity, informed consent or the right to withdraw were addressed at the beginning of each interview. All names used in this article are pseudonyms.

A rigid gender norm: Motherhood under beauty pressure

Before continuing, it may be helpful to elucidate the social context that frames the maternal. For many women in Taiwan, beauty significantly contributes to a successful life (Keyser-Verreault, 2018a) and the study’s participants overwhelmingly agreed that beauty is regarded as women’s greatest asset, although some are critical of this gender inequality. What is striking is that, even for these highly-educated, urban women who have other forms of capital of value—such as cultural and symbolic capital—and often have a good job, I was repeatedly told of the paramount importance of physical appearance. “For most Taiwanese men, the personal quality of a woman is much less important than her appearance,” said Re-Lin. Xiao Ye told me, “For men, the beauty of a woman is her main value.” Qing emphasized that her husband’s opinion is very representative of men’s way of thinking in Taiwan: “For him, the most important thing for a girl is whether she is beautiful or not; other things, like personality, are merely secondary advantages.” Beauty was seen by most of my respondents as crucial for women and, I argue, one of the dominant aspects of their human capital.

It is now widely noted in related Western literature that women have less and less freedom than before to resist the ideal of the yummy mummy (Malatzky, 2017; Prinds et al., 2019; Stuart & Donahue, 2011). In this study, very few informants were critical of the ideal of getting one’s body back into shape. Some of them even presented this goal as an absolute social norm, emphasizing that all Taiwanese women expect to regain their figure if they have a child. As Wen (2013) points out, in Chinese culture, appearance is a gender expectation and a long-standing cultural value: “The obsession with female beauty is rooted in stereotypical gender roles for women” (p. 93). A conversation I had with Le-Le, during my fieldwork, was illustrative:

I’m someone who does not like taking care of my looks and I find choosing clothes or wearing makeup troublesome. Yet, this attitude brings me a lot of trouble. For instance, my sister-in-law is a very cute and coquettish woman. She is really feminine, and everyone is particularly attentive to her. My mother often complains about my looks and tells me that it’s only when my sister-in-law is home that she feels there is another woman in the house. If I am alone with my mother, she feels that she is the only woman in our house!!

First, the importance of beauty and the internalization of traditional expectations of womanhood are still very present, and I contend that the actual form of beauty pressure is the recolonization of local traditions by neoliberalism. Second, since corpulence simultaneously means “ugly” and “unhealthy” to the respondents, many of them told me that weight-loss practices equally involve beauty and the physical well-being of maintaining a “healthy” weight. Third, some women confessed that getting back into shape was motivated by pragmatic considerations. Chun-Fang told me:

There are a lot of gender inequalities in Taiwan, but it’s impossible to say no to everything! We should choose our battles. For example, I insist that my husband must do some house chores. Housekeeping tasks involve only him and me. But, since beauty is so linked to womanhood, if I don’t keep myself beautiful, everybody—even an unknown taxi driver—will advise or criticize you, saying that you should undertake a diet! I don’t want to fight with them and I can’t change everyone!

Due to dominant gender norms, it is difficult for Taiwanese women to choose not to conform to the beauty ideal. The few informants who were critical of such gender norms were pessimistic about reversing the mainstream ideal of beauty. Mei-Li, a postdoc fellow at a prestigious Canadian university, shared her dim view with me:

I am not thin enough given the Taiwanese standard, so there is always someone who criticizes my looks. For example, last time I returned to Taiwan, my aunt asked me: “Oh! My god! Why did you become such a fatty?” I answered “Oh! My god! Why did you become so old?” But my Mum blames me, saying that this kind of conduct is bad [….] Last year, while pregnant, I did not dare to return to Taiwan [.…] Compared with other women like me, I am very lucky because I can, and I will, stay in Canada.

In Taiwan, the necessity of keeping an attractive appearance and desirable body has shifted more deeply into pregnancy and motherhood (Keyser-Verreault, 2018a). Becoming a pregnant beauty and a yummy mummy after childbirth, and always looking good, has become a normative choice and an ongoing project of self-governance. Accordingly, as Widdows (2018, p. 35) cogently argues: “Importantly, as individuals we do not choose our beauty ideals. Arguably we choose the extent to which we conform to them, but the extent to which we can do this is limited by the dominance of the ideal.”

Bodily transformations and psychic returns under aesthetic entrepreneurship

Having mapped the discursive terrain upon which caring about beauty is situated, I turned to the issues of depreciation and resistance to depreciation, which are characteristic of the subjectivation of human capital. Here, my aim was to draw attention to the psychic gain of self-appreciation or the psyche’s loss of depreciation (Feher, 2009), from the perspective of this being lived or experienced by the participants.

As noted earlier, appearance is seen as women’s greatest asset; the apogee of appreciation of a women’s beauty, many participants told me, is crystallized in wedding pictures and in her own presentation at the wedding banquet (see Adrian, 2003, for an ethnography of wedding pictures in Taiwan). To be successful in such a marriage display, many women told me—in a tone showing great satisfaction—that they undertake dramatic diets to lose any possible extra weight and massively invest in beauty products such as creams and masks. They emphasized that these photos immortalize this ephemeral moment and render it eternal, a moment they described as “when I am the most beautiful,” which was repeated by many participants. In these pictures we can see zhenmei, which characterizes the local ideal of beauty: a very slender and cute (childish and docile femininity) woman with whitened skin, long silky hair, and big eyes. Here the image of a woman represents the peak of her pride and narcissistic achievement as well as the collective recognition endorsed by the whole of society; in addition, these also produce self-appreciation.

Generally, in Taiwan, women will quickly have a child after marriage (Yi & Chang, 2019). Yet, pregnancy and its virtually inevitable weight gain were seen as a depreciation of women’s beauty. One of the strong themes that emerged from the interviews was that pregnancy was seen as incompatible with the ideal of beauty. Some of my participants literally said that pregnancy “breaks” (pohuai) women’s bodies—that is, their beauty. Thus, pregnancy is seen as a deterioration of women’s major asset. Bodily changes such as getting fat, having a big belly, getting stretch marks, and changes in the breast’s texture or shape and the areola’s color are incompatible with the Taiwanese ideal of feminine desirability. For these women, the zhenmei ideal is definitely undermined by the reality of a pregnant body.

It should be noted that in Taiwan the constant, hard-work maintenance of the body starts at the beginning of pregnancy, not after childbirth, as many participants told me and as I was advised by local maternity magazines (see my previous work; Keyser-Verreault, 2018b). From the very beginning, women in this study constantly sought to keep track of their weight and of what they were eating. In other words, getting the body back into shape after childbirth meant maintaining a (relatively) slim body during pregnancy. Fei-Liu summarized what many other women think and do: “The less weight you gain during pregnancy, the less effort you’ll have to make after the delivery.” To better understand the beauty-pressure atmosphere in which Taiwanese women live, I quote Lara:

Now that I am pregnant my husband lets me eat, but he said that I must quickly slim down after giving birth. He wants me to be […] “like before” as fast as possible. I could not eat sweets or have fast food and I had to weigh myself every day. For Taiwanese women it is very important to look as slim and young after pregnancy as before. I am so scared of not getting into shape.

Lara’s experience was quite common among the women I interviewed. Here one can see the fear that Lara has about those bodily changes and the pressure she has endured not to get fat.

Momo explained how her colleagues at work warned her to gain as little weight as possible during her pregnancy:

I was two months pregnant and my coworkers had already started to tell me how to slim down as quickly as possible after the birth. They had already started to tell me to gain as little weight as possible and to eat as little as possible during the pregnancy. The pressure to stay thin is crazy!

Even Lara, feeling angry about those unfair demands on her own body, didn’t challenge the skinny pregnancy norm:

We have to be skinny even while pregnant [….] Sometimes I’m getting sick of that. I have mood swings—there are the hormones. Why do I have to be skinny! I want to eat! […] But for us it is very important to get into shape very quickly after the pregnancy.

Lara’s ambivalent attitude toward the dominant ideal of beauty isn’t an isolated case. For example, Malatzky’s study (2017, p. 31) reveals that “The participants’ accounts demonstrate they are critical of media representations of the ideal body while at the same time desirous of the ideal which they know is impossible and injurious.”

Yet, the new norm of getting back into shape is taken for granted and is seen as the personal responsibility of a woman, as Lara’s statement indicated: “If a woman doesn’t get into shape after pregnancy, it must be her fault.” Linda told me: “Now, beauty is your duty and your responsibility. There are no ugly women, only lazy ones. If you are not good looking it is your fault and it means your efforts are insufficient.” Hache (2007) argues that the notion of responsibility is a central tool of neoliberal governmentality: “Our subjection to this new style of (neo-liberal) power is based on the internalization of this injunction to seek autonomy and self-responsibility” (p. 56).

When a pregnant body is negatively described as out of control, it generates discontent. Qing is representative of many of the women in this study who experienced the conflict between a pregnant body and the dominant ideal of beauty, and she summarized her feelings: “I found myself ugly while pregnant. I got fat and had a dull complexion.” Echoing her, Fei-Liu said: “I felt bad with my body while pregnant. When I look at my body, I’m not comfortable with myself.”

Qing had more to say. After giving birth to a boy, bodily changes resulting from childbirth led to huge frustration with her postpartum body. A feeling of depression swamped her: “After childbirth, my body was completely demolished. I was depressed. It’s really tough for me and I was in bad spirits.” She further explained: “Before becoming a mother, I made myself beautiful in a complex way, I took time and I read the Japanese fashion magazines. [….] After childbirth, I have no time for myself. Now when I try to make myself beautiful, it is never satisfying. I do not find myself beautiful.” It is under such social circumstances that the depreciation of women’s pregnant bodies means a psychic loss or self-depreciation.

However, it should be noted that there were variations in the women’s reactions to pregnancy, and these women pay attention to things other than physical appearance. Shi-Liu’s stance was especially important because it indicated that, under some life circumstances, pregnancy can become an experience of empowerment. She told me, with a proud smile:

By becoming a mother, I felt less attractive, but I am more confident. We had tried to have a child for years without success. From being an infertile woman to becoming a mother of three kids gives me a lot of confidence.

Yet, simultaneously, she felt that her beauty had been “scarified”: “I was in huge fear of gaining weight while pregnant. I do not have white skin or big eyes, so my figure is my major advantage. If I gain weight, I lose my big plus!”

The contrast between these two reactions suggests that these women’s circumstances were related to their feelings about pregnancy. However, given a strictly regulatory gaze and the surveillance of women’s appearance, many women in this study resented their society’s unfavorable judgement of their bodies. They were unable to overcome the objectification of the pregnant body in others’ eyes.

Re-Lin made a remark that was typical: “The body of a woman who did not have kids is better and everybody agrees with that.” Almost all of the women I interviewed reiterated the same perception and told me that people around them agreed on this point of view. The idea that pregnancy caused discontent was a pervasive theme that resonated in the narratives of many women, and they were convinced that this aesthetic judgement is approved by others and sanctioned by the whole of society. This perception is similar to that of Sara Ahmed, whose work concludes that “emotions should not be regarded as psychological states, but as social and cultural practices” (2004, p. 9).

In summary, as the interview accounts have shown, women had a series of negative feelings about their pregnant and postpartum bodies including anxiety, frustration, fear, and depression. Zhen-Qiu made an emblematic assertion about this particular psychic deprecation due to pregnancy: “Pregnancy and motherhood are not things that give good feelings.” My analysis showed that the depreciation of beauty capital causes a huge diminution of psychic returns.

Transforming the weight of pregnancy into self-satisfaction

As indicated above, women in the study are bombarded with the message that getting back into shape is normal and of paramount importance, and almost all participants did tremendous aesthetic labor to regain their attractive bodies, although some succeeded and some failed. Thus, Upton and Han (2003) raise crucial questions in their study: “The larger question is why does it matter? Why do women struggle to regain a particular kind of self after childbirth?” (p. 689). Without a definitive response, they suggest that “the impetus to get the body back was a social one” (Upton & Han, 2003, p. 687). Accordingly, beauty pressure becomes salient when women face their return to paid work.

Nonetheless, their analysis cannot explain the case of the “stay-at-home mother,” who equally pursues intense beautification (De Benedictis & Orgad, 2017). A few of the women in this study stopped working after childbirth, but their appearance remained important for them. I identified no significant difference between the working mother and the stay-at-home mother. For instance, Fei-Liu worked as a flight attendant and then stopped working after becoming the mother of two children. She is a strong advocate for the new, slender Taiwanese mother. She described other women who seem to have abandoned the pursuit of thinness in very condemnatory terms: “I did not change any beauty practices after having two children. I think it is important to continue making oneself charming. I do not like these women who let their appearance run down.”

Another possible explanation in the context of East Asia is the “culture of conformity” (Kim, 2003, p. 105), in particular that the “high level of uniformity in fashion is due to lack of subjecthood” (Kim, 2013, p. 106). I also confirm a similar phenomenon of unanimity in Taiwan (Keyser-Verreault, 2018a, pp. 85–6). Yet, many informants clearly indicated that their bodily grooming had been done for their partner or spouse, but that they now do it for their own sake. For example, Yixian told me that “the quest to look good is for me—it makes me more cheerful. It doesn’t matter if no one looks at me. The most important thing is that I’m happy because of my looks.” On-Ru criticized other women equally for blindly following fashion and said that sometimes she wondered what “true” Taiwanese beauty will be—compared to other countries—if they cease to copy fashion. Thus, informants were self-conscious and self-reflexive about their aesthetic choices.

Another probable answer concerns the attitude of a spouse. Research shows that a husband’s acceptance of a woman’s postpartum body is crucial for Taiwanese mothers (Chang et al., 2006, p. 150; Keyser-Verreault, 2018a, p. 97). For some women in this study, their husband’s acceptance of their new body was decisive. However, there was divergence in women’s reactions to their partners’ comments. For instance, Zhi-Tong wanted to resort to cosmetic surgery to repair her “bizarre” chin:

Look at this, my chin is weird, and it looks so ugly. But my husband definitely refuses such an idea! He is a doctor and he knows that all surgeries are somewhat risky. For him, any operation without a serious medical reason is absurd. And, he told me that my chin is cute!!

Yixian provided another example: “My spouse loves me. After childbirth, I gained 8 kg! I am quite angry that he still loves me!! I am so fat!” While all these investigations tended to disagree on the reasons for such intensified aesthetic labor, there is general agreement in the existing literature that it results from external pressure. In fact, when asked why beauty is important to them, a repeated but convincing justification emerged from my interviews: Despite other diverse reasons, beauty is also seen as important for one’s own self. I was repeatedly told that appearance is necessary for self-love or, that by making oneself beautiful, one becomes happy. Shi-Liu told me: “Neither my husband nor other people pressure me. It is me who cares about my figure very much and this is how I have always been. For me, my face and body shape are very important.” This comment illustrated clearly that, for Shi-Liu, the motor of such beautification was not only external pressure; it comes from the inner world of these women. Echoing Foucault’s assertion that a neoliberal subject seeks to produce its own satisfaction, LuZhen articulated what many indicated: “Beauty is important for oneself, for self-appreciation and pleasure.” Moreover, many informants used the justifying discourse of “love yourself.” Lara, like many other women, often told herself that “Bouncing back is difficult, but if you love yourself, you should do it and you can do it!!” or, in the negative form, “don’t give up on yourself.”

Feminist scholars have highly criticized the increasing bodily control and aesthetic labor expected of pregnant women. For example, Dworkin and Wachs (2004) note: “Asked to simultaneously prepare the body for a smooth birth in order to be a good mother but to show no physical signifiers of this process, a never-ending shift of body work emerges” (p. 618). Equally, Tyler (2011) sees this neoliberal project as “another site of feminine performance anxiety and thus ironically a new kind of confinement for women” (p. 29). My analysis partially supports their arguments but also determined them to be more complicated. In the neoliberal project of bouncing back, beauty pressure functions not merely as “confinement.” There is also one crucial reason for this “never-ending” body work—to produce self-appreciation. In Taiwan’s case, if these mothers seek to “erase the physical evidence of motherhood so as to ‘resemble’ the prepregnancy self” (Dworkin & Wachs, 2004, p. 616), it should not be seen as direct patriarchal coercion. Rather than a naively straightforward explanation that describes body work as a task under constraint, it may be more helpful to see such intensified aesthetic labor as a process for transforming the unbearable weight of bodily beautification during pregnancy into tremendous self-satisfaction.

I also want to mention the case of San Xiao, a public service employee at an important museum near Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. Unlike expectations concerning appearance in the private sector, one’s looks do not provide any professional advantages in the public sector. San Xiao’s spouse does not care about her appearance and, she said, this hurts her very much because she wishes her husband would appreciate her beauty. According to San Xiao, her partner prefers that she keeps her figure because, if she does not, she will complain constantly about it. He was annoyed by his wife’s constant self-criticism. She also told me there are many Western visitors in the museum and that she likes observing and pondering cultural differences she notices between them and Taiwanese women. Obviously, she is someone with cultural capital, a critical and reflective woman. San Xiao is a good example of the insufficiency of justifications of beautification based on external factors, since she told me clearly that her figure is of paramount importance for her own sake. As her comment indicated, we cannot underestimate that a determinant of the goal of beautification is the self-satisfaction it generates.

Consequently, I suggest that the ultimate reward that beautification brings takes the form of an immaterial return: self-satisfaction. In fact, the importance of self-satisfaction is a logical consequence of the figuration of human beings as human capital—my capital is me, and the rise and fall of one’s capital causes subjects either to appreciate or depreciate themselves. Even if pregnant beauty is an outcome of external pressure, an approach that underlines merely external pressure misses the important factor of self-satisfaction in the pursuit of beauty. Without denying the causes of various external pressures, I want to stress that these external factors are overdetermined by an affective economy seeking to decrease self-depreciation and to increase self-satisfaction. This is not to say that external pressures do not play an important role in body work, but that such forces alone do not account for the immense investment in the pursuit of beauty.

Neoliberalism and the tangled knot of self-satisfaction

The link between the quest for beauty and the production of self-satisfaction raises the following questions: What is the nature of such pleasure? What motivates self-approval? Are there different kinds of self-appreciation? My analysis finds complex and overlapping relations concerning self-satisfaction and neoliberal rationality. I contend that this interrelationship comprises multi-factors; I will explain three points, given this tangled knot in the production of self-satisfaction. First, due to the penetration of neoliberal individualism, valorization of personal assets has become an imperative, especially for women. As Oksala (2013, p. 39) argues:

[…] the spread and intensification of neoliberal governmentality has meant that women too have come to be seen, and to see themselves, increasingly as neoliberal subjects—egoistical subjects of interest making free choices based on rational economic calculations. No more do women only want a happy home; they too want money, power and success.

In Taiwan’s neoliberal context, where appearance is considered one of the most important personal assets for women, this means that beauty is a dominant capital which could be converted to many advantages. As Mears (2014) insightfully suggests in her analysis of aesthetic labor in the workplace: “In the absence of wages, scholars should consider aesthetic laborers’ motivations and non-monetary system of compensation, including the ambivalent pleasures of embodying a recognized state of aesthetic desirability” (p. 1340). My findings support her analysis but also demonstrate that the role of such immaterial benefits is not confined to the labor market. I contend that, in societies influenced by neoliberalism and its related discourse of empowerment, the pleasure of achieving a recognized ideal of beauty is a crucial aspect in the production of self-satisfaction.

Second, in neoliberal discourse, “fat”—no matter how you gain it—is considered a flaw and shows a lack of determination as well as moral weakness. Since thinness is the most crucial component of Taiwan’s beauty ideal, being thin means being “beautiful.” The project of getting back into shape involves not only the maintenance of one’s own attractiveness, but also a battle against possible self-devaluation. Malatzky (2017, p. 25) explains that, according to neoliberal rationalities, “[…] fat is interpreted as ‘personal inadequacy’ or ‘lack of will,’ which are increasingly applied to the postnatal body.” Winch (2016, p. 899) also argues that fat is:

framed as an object of fear [….] Having or gaining fat is constructed as a disempowered state and linked to the emotion of disgust, shame and failure. In contrast, being seen to be in the process of erasing, fighting, controlling fat is privileged as an essential element of woman’s labor in a neoliberal economy.

Thus, some informants clearly asserted that looking good is not necessarily done under the constraint of men’s gaze, but rather in order to “have a healthy glow or to make myself look healthy,” or to look “energetic” and “high-spirited.” Winch (2016) concludes that “control is erotic” and pleasure is accumulated through the body’s control and surveillance of fat. I contend that women are not only constantly haunted by the fear of weight gain but also by overcoming difficult capital devaluation—in this context, “bouncing back” gives women intense self-appreciation. Combatting “undisciplined flesh” materializes an empowered individualism and contributes to the production of self-satisfaction.

Third, many informants said that, despite myriad difficulties, success in regaining their former figure gave them a lot of self-confidence. During my fieldwork, I observed the phenomenon of the game of trompe l’oeil, which produces immense self-satisfaction. Besides being thin, youth is the second most important criterion of ideal beauty—a great compliment to a woman is to call her “zhenmei,” which means literally “pretty little sister.” In the Taiwanese context, maternity is seen as the end of youth and this symbolic change of social status has a real impact on people’s perception and aesthetic judgement. Thus, the indicator of failed femininity and deteriorated beauty capital is being identified as a mother, as Lara’s comment indicated: “It is very important to get one’s figure back as soon as possible in order to look like a young woman without children. It is important not to look like a mummy.” In contrast, the summit of pleasure-seeking is reached when a mother is mistaken for a pretty young girl. It is akin to what Prinds et al. (2019), in their study of the “yummy mummy” phenomenon in Denmark, refer to as the “ideal of not looking like a mother.”

Based on my observations, due to their physical differences and combined with a different style of dressing, Asian women can look as if they are much younger than Western woman of the same age. Lara’s comment was especially interesting because she told me that the apogee of confidence-boosting after becoming a mother is that a woman could look like her child’s “big sister”:

[The] ideal of beauty in Taiwan holds that women remain young forever. We all want to look like a young girl. Women who become a mother like to be mistaken for a young lady by others. Being called Miss gives us a lot of joy since it means we still look pretty. I want that, when my child is a little bigger—to look as if I’m his big sister!

This is what McRobbie (2015) refers to as the “tyranny of perfect”. Fei-Lui summarized her feelings: “On the road to keeping a beautiful look, never-ending efforts must be made.”

Those words from a yummy mummy made me think of a conversation I had with Mei-Li: “Here, the gender norm is hegemonic but very simple: men should have money and women should be pretty. But men’s pressure to earn money will end one day because not all men always have this pressure. For example, some are born into rich families, while others become rich.” She continued, emphasizing that “for us women, pressure never ends! We’ll always have our bodies and we are always being told to fix it, as if all faults come from women’s bodies.”

Conclusion

By extending the literature on the yummy mummy phenomenon under neoliberalism, this analysis attempts to illustrate a process of continual interaction between outer appearance and the inner world.

By turning to the role of psychic return in Foucault’s critique of the theory of human capital, this analysis attempts to elucidate the vicissitudes of Taiwanese women’s quest for beauty. I contend that women are always on the road to bodily grooming and scholars should analyze this phenomenon in a dynamic way. Using the perspective of the flux of psychic return in order to grasp these women’s aesthetic and entrepreneurial labor, I note the importance of corporeal changes affecting women’s feelings about themselves. I also point out the functioning of an affective economy which supports and overdetermines their bodily discipline. My analysis shows that, in some cases, immaterial return is much more important than financial income—a point that has not been addressed in preceding works. Analysis of these Taiwanese women’s accounts demonstrates that self-satisfaction is a crucial factor in women’s pursuit of beauty, and that the production of self-approval is tightly intertwined with the neoliberal discourse which promotes an egoistic, disciplined and empowered individualism based on the maximization of one’s own capital and self-appreciation.

In fact, getting back into shape quickly after pregnancy is seen as an indispensable part of a successful maternity by many participants. Such intense aesthetic labor is also a new way through which women seek to secure their social status and distinguish themselves from others. If, as Littler (2013) argues, “The yummy mummy is profoundly classed” (p. 231) and she endorses an “upper-class aspirationalism” (p. 239), I would suggest that, in Taiwan’s case, the performance of maternity is “status discrimination within the middle class and with classed others” (Jackson & Benson, 2014, p. 1198). Potentially, it would be of interest to see how working-class women negotiate motherhood and a quest for beauty, especially how they manage material return and psychic return in their bodily beautification.

Finally, emphasis on a dynamic process of such beauty work is due to the interaction between social norms and a woman’s life cycle. In Taiwan, marriage, childbirth and motherhood are crucial events influencing women’s aesthetic labor and self-perception. In fact, childbirth is not the end of the neoliberal project of staying attractive and, in Taiwan, the quest for prettiness seems to be an open-ended imperative, since many informants talk about the ideal of the “beautiful witch” for mothers whose children are already teenagers or adults. A beautiful witch is praised for her magic powers to resist the natural aging process, which is, in fact, the result of huge aesthetic labor. Thus, it is relevant to observe how these Taiwanese mothers deal with their anxiety about aging. In the long run, it will be interesting to observe the flux of psychic return for these women who live and age in a culture of beauty.