Negotiating beauty duty: Beauty practices and gendered power dynamics in China

In post-socialist China, beauty has emerged as a key site where gender, identity and power are negotiated within intimate and family life. While dominant discourses continue to promote beauty ideals such as ‘pale, young and slim’, Confucian expectations of moral femininity persist, positioning women as virtuous wives and good mothers. This article explores how beauty is understood, practised and negotiated within marriage and family life. Rather than viewing beauty as either oppressive or empowering, it examines beauty as a relational practice shaped by intimate recognition, familial surveillance, marketised consumer culture and household power. The findings show that participants both complied with and resisted beauty servitude, while drawing on ideas of inner beauty to negotiate alternative forms of worth. This study offers a localised account of beauty practices and shows how beauty operates as an unstable resource whose value shifts across different relational settings.