Fat, fatigue and the feminine: the changing cultural experience of women in Hong Kong

Abstract

This paper seeks to demonstrate that rapid economic development in Hong Kong has transformed not only social structures but also Chinese women's subjectivity and bodily experience, thereby producing new forms of identity, aesthetics and aspirations, in addition to novel patterns of distress. Evidence is assembled to show that women's being-thin-yet-feeling-fat and being-active-yet-feeling-tired reflect not so much psychopathology as transformation in embodied moral experience. Because such normative experiences are grounded in the conflicting demands of production and reproduction that recent social transformations have brought to bear on women's lives, "fat" and "fatigue" can be said to embody what it is to become a woman in contemporary Hong Kong.