Gendered discourses of entrepreneurialism in Chinese reality dating television

This article examines the entrepreneurial femininities embodied by female contestants on the Chinese reality dating show New Blind Date Conference. The show stages an entanglement of traditional and progressive elements: family members appear on set to advise and evaluate potential matches, while privileged young women are portrayed as empowered post-feminist subjects. Framing gender as discursively and performatively constructed and dating as a competitive media spectacle, the article explores how femininities are shaped by heteronormativity and neoliberal aspirations and anxieties about upward mobility, as well as the mechanisms of reality television. Drawing on textual analysis of the show and interviews with twenty-three female viewers in Xi’an, China, I argue that the show reinforces patriarchal discipline by reinventing traditional matchmaking rituals and encouraging women to perform entrepreneurial sensibilities. The analysis demonstrates how a uniquely Chinese entrepreneurial subject embodies the self-as-project as simultaneously individualised and self-responsible. This article contributes to scholarship on entrepreneurial femininity and feminist audience reception, while interrogating how post-feminism and neoliberalism are represented, embodied and interpreted in contemporary China.