Enregisterment, Commodification, and the Biopolitics of Lifestyles: Analyzing Advertisements of Female-Targeted Adult Toys in China

Abstract

This study investigates how online advertisements for female-targeted sex toys in China discursively commodify sexual pleasure as part of neoliberal biopolitics of gender. Employing Asif Agha's framework of enregisterment, it examines 482 multimodal advertisements for 55 products on the e-commerce platform of Wave, a popular Chinese sex toy retailer. The analysis demonstrates how commercial discourses organize texts and semiotic emblems to reflexively link sex toys with three predominant lifestyle formations—romanticized self-pleasing, playful heteronormativity, and technologized inconspicuousness of sexual consumption—each framing sexual pleasure as an optimizable resource for performing idealized womanhoods such as cosmopolitanism and playful heterosexual intimacy. These lifestyle registers circulate online as value regimes to normalize sexual consumption as aspirational gendered conduct. The study argues that this process constitutes a distinctive biopolitics of gender in post-reform China, wherein liberalized market forces align sexual pleasure, consumerist lifestyles, and neoliberal self-regulating femininities to sustain economic growth while reproducing gendered, state-compatible subjects.