Embodied Suzhi: Constituting Middle-Class Subjectivity in Post-Socialist China

Abstract

Suzhi has grown into a key bio-policy that is crucial to governance and individual life in post-socialist China. Drawing upon Bourdieusian habitus, this article examines how millennial middle-class women live the class-based suzhi on a daily basis in the fields of education, marriage and real estate. Class divisions configure women’s habitual pursuit of cultural suzhi, and their embodied capital is reflected in practical situations. Women embody cultural suzhi and specific life experiences as middle-class daughters. They are inclined to have matched marriages to ensure personal happiness. But middle-class women demonstrate high neoliberal reflexivity in performing civil suzhi in the field of real estate. Neoliberal feminism is materialised through suzhi: Women exhibit reflexivity in their embodied experiences of suzhi while also internalising class structures and state power, thus reinforcing the insidious reproduction of social inequality.