What is the point of studying privileged women and their feminism(s)? This is the uneasy question at the heart of Burnout Market Feminism, and one I first encountered in a feminist media studies seminar: why do the “less oppressed” so often seem less worthy of scholarly attention? Ling Tang’s book offers a persuasive answer. By tracing the lives of elite urban businesswomen in post-socialist China, Tang shows that privilege does not exempt women from feminist contradiction or suffering; instead, it produces a particular configuration of growth, hope, self-making and exhaustion that demands close study.
Tang’s key concept, “burnout market feminism,” names this configuration. On one level, she insists – following Li Xiaojiang – that feminist liberation and political engagement in authoritarian socialist China can and do take place in the market, through minjian practices understood as “the spontaneous and voluntary actions that people take from within and below” to capture heterogeneous gendered subjectivities (p. 31). On another, she brings Han Byung-Chul’s critique of neoliberal burnout into conversation with Chinese feminist theory to show how digital economies intensify demands for self-exploitation, particularly among women framed as “makers,” “entrepreneurs” and “businesswomen” in the internet age.
Empirically, the book is grounded in multi-sited ethnography in Shenzhen and Hefei, participant observation and semi-structured interviews with middle- and upper-class businesswomen, many working in e-commerce and adjacent ventures. Tang is attentive to how interlocutors are recruited, where interviews and observations take place, and how these women’s mobile lives are organized, noting that “It wasn’t the platform that connected them but, rather, their lifestyles and social circles” (p. 14). This focus on lifestyle and social circles is methodologically significant: it situates business practices and digital entrepreneurship within a broader milieu of class, urbanity and relationality rather than treating “the digital” or “the Internet Age” as self-contained worlds.
Conceptually, chapters two to four build the scaffolding for burnout market feminism. Chapter two elaborates Li’s market feminism and, drawing from Chinese philosophy, introduces “paradoxical integration” as a way to understand how ostensible binaries are not clear-cut and that feminist practices can be woven into the market to yield renewed, nuanced understandings. Chapter three applies market feminism to a panorama of businesswomen and their “feminist hope,” including comparative discussion of US and Chinese platforms (Amazon versus Taobao) and the emotional labour they demand. Chapter four brings Han’s theorization of burnout to bear on women’s double burden under neoliberalism and patriarchy in China. An interesting thread in chapter three is Tang’s engagement with “misery porn” – the tendency in research to overemphasize hardship and neglect pleasure and the good life. Her decision to foreground happiness, pride and achievement in her interview data is important and refreshing. At the same time, the subsequent conceptual separation between “market feminism in China” as a hopeful, even “good,” neoliberalism and “burnout market feminism” as its darker counterpart can be confusing. Li’s notions of market feminism and paradoxical integration already suggest that happiness and exhaustion, empowerment and exploitation, freedom and constraint are inseparable. If burnout is inherent to practising market feminism under current conditions, then bright market feminism in one chapter and darker burnout in another risk fragmenting what is meant to be understood as a paradoxical whole, rather than insisting more explicitly that hope and burnout are co-constitutive.
Chapters five and six form the empirical core and are the highlight of the book. Chapter five compares middle-aged businesswomen and a new generation of entrepreneurs in Shenzhen, examining how “market feminism comes at the price of burning out” (p. 88). Against the backdrop of Shenzhen’s status as a special economic zone and its business vibrancy, Tang’s analysis of the new generation of businesswomen is particularly sharp: cultural capital, cosmopolitanism and repackaged feminism fuel business models that both critique and reproduce patriarchal norms. This group enjoy sexualized consumption of men as resistance to social morality and their own subordination in the patriarchal business world; they uncritically pursue surrogacy as a marker of class, exploiting transnational hierarchies of class, gender and reproductive power; and they claim and practise queerness while conforming to homonormativity precisely because their class privilege enables them to perform “good neoliberalism.” Here Tang’s writing is at its most fluent, and the argument that a distinctly Chinese configuration of power and desire functions as burnout market feminism is clear and convincing.
Chapter six, centred on guanxi (enduring interpersonal relationships) and yingchou (work-related after-hours activities) in Hefei, is arguably the most analytically cohesive chapter. Tang’s ethnographic eye is sharpest here: business banquets, ritualized drinking, post-banquet activities and her own experiences of harassment are narrated in ways that vividly illustrate the relational choreography of Chinese business culture and its gendered logics. Intimacy becomes a resource to be exchanged; women’s roles – as wives, mistresses, business partners, hosts – are instrumentalized within male-dominated networks. Crucially, this chapter makes clear that the internet age is comprised of broader sociotechnical assemblages in which commerce infrastructures, gendered guanxi and people’s everyday practices are tightly entangled. Complex business cultures and gendered relationships are not flattened into their online fronts; they remain grounded in embodied experiences in which women are perpetually negotiating, and often burning out within, these assemblages.
The conclusion returns to the figure of the daughter, as businesswomen articulate visions of market feminism without burnout for the next generation. This is an evocative move that resonates with the opening question about “privileged daughters”: the women in Tang’s study are not simply reproducing burnout market feminism, they also imagine futures where happiness is no longer tethered to growth, development, capital and patriotism. As a conclusion, however, the chapter feels overextended. Its detailed contextualization of post-COVID politics in the 2020s, while rich, dilutes the clarity of this final gesture. The core insight – that the promise of happiness is losing credibility and people are beginning to reject voluntary burnout – would be sharper if some of this context were condensed and moved earlier in the chapter, allowing the conclusion to focus more squarely on a forward-looking vision of feminist life beyond burnout market feminism.
Overall, Burnout Market Feminism is an original and often deeply moving study of elite urban Chinese businesswomen. Its insistence on paradox is compelling: burnout market feminism is never simply good or bad, liberating or damaging, but a form of feminist striving permeated by contradiction and cost. The book’s strongest analytic moments show how feminist and queer aspirations are simultaneously enabled and hollowed out by neoliberal rationalities and authoritarian patriarchy that promise growth and freedom, as buffers against entrenched gendered inequalities (most powerfully illustrated in her analysis of burnout queerness). At times, Tang’s own conceptual voice could be more prominent: the discussion of a broad range of theories in feminism, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, digital culture and political economy is impressive, yet the original theoretical contribution – burnout market feminism – occasionally feels submerged within this dense scaffolding rather than clearly distilled from it. Relatedly, several chapters adopt a familiar pattern – extensive theoretical exposition followed by vivid empirical stories and only a brief return to the conceptual frame – so that these otherwise compelling narratives can feel more illustrative than fully woven into the book’s central argument. Nonetheless, the book’s insights remain important for Chinese studies, feminist and queer studies, digital culture studies, and the broader study of gender, sexuality, neoliberalism and authoritarianism.
As readers might note, pedagogically, different chapters would work well in graduate seminars on feminist theory, Chinese media and society, and platform capitalism, especially when paired with texts by Li Xiaojiang, Tani Barlow, Lauren Berlant and Han Byung-Chul, and with scholarship on neoliberal and popular feminisms. The book is particularly useful for class discussions about why privileged women – not only those most visibly oppressed – are crucial to understanding contemporary feminist politics, showing how power travels through hope as much as through violence and how intersectionality must account for both similarity and difference in structuring burnout across class, nation and digital regimes.
