The continuum of regaining one’s body: Childbirth and reproductive choice under beauty pressure in Taiwan

Abstract

This article explores the phenomenon of regaining one’s body, by nuancing the Western feminist analysis of the cult of beauty and the ideal of the ‘yummy mummy’ in a non-Euro-American society, Taiwan. While existing studies of bouncing back after childbirth have focused mainly on losing weight during the postpartum period, this article examines a continuum of the beauty-related deliberations and different forms of aesthetic labor of Taiwanese women before, during and after pregnancy. Drawing on 62 in-depth interviews, my analysis shows that not only do women include the project of regaining their body in their plans for pregnancy and giving birth, but that beauty becomes a controlling claim that can compete with a child’s well-being or mother’s health. Moreover, this task should be viewed as a holistic and multidimensional concept because it involves not only body shape but also keeping desirability vibrant and dealing with delicate interpersonal relationships.

Introduction

In this article, I seek to inaugurate a discussion on the relationship between childbirth and the quest for beauty in Taiwan’s neoliberal context, focusing on analyzing how women include the project of regaining their (former) body in their plans for pregnancy and giving birth. By dissociating the task of bouncing back from the postpartum period, I highlight that this bodily project already plays a key role in women’s reproductive choices and is the determining factor in women’s decisions about childbirth. Thus, I show that, in the case of Taiwan, regaining one’s body is a continuum encompassing procreative choice, pregnancy and the postpartum period.

In fact, some authors have already stressed that the strong and enduring association between femininity and body work implied by the ideal of beauty exists in different countries (e.g. Wen, 2013; Widdows, 2018). However, what is new and striking is not this association in itself but the increasing intensity of its linkage. Recent feminist research on women’s experience of body transformation underscores that beauty pressure exists on an unprecedented scale in contemporary societies (e.g. Elias et al., 2017). As Widdows (2018) points out, ‘[. . .] the gradual increase in minimum standards in the context of a dominant and ethical beauty ideal is significant in that what is required to be normal is increasingly demanding’ (p. 121). Thus, staying fit and looking good continually play key roles in the contemporary production of the gendered body. Moreover, with the extraordinary proliferation of representations of celebrity maternity and motherhood, mothers are constantly and massively under the influence of this growing cult of beauty. Expanding one’s aesthetic labor during pregnancy, the imperative of regaining one’s body and the ideal of the ‘yummy mummy’ have become the new norms in many Western and non-Western societies.

While much has been said in recent years about bouncing back after childbirth, still especially marginal is research on the decolonial perspective (e.g. Liu, 2017: 4) on maternal beautification with particular attention to local and non-Euro-American contexts. From a transnational feminist perspective, this article thus aims to explore and analyze the phenomenon of regaining one’s body in East Asian societies, where gendered norms of appearance are particularly demanding, such as China (e.g. Wen, 2013), Japan (e.g. Kinsella, 1995), South Korea (e.g. Kim, 2003) and Taiwan (Chuang, 2005; Keyser-Verreault, 2018a). Examining the case of Taiwan, I want to show that, although bouncing back necessarily involves the after-pregnancy period, it is highly problematic that we take for granted that bouncing back concerns only the postpartum period. In other words, the dominant approach to research on this topic assumes an automatic connection and fusion between the undertaking of regaining one’s body and the postpartum period. For instance, Upton and Han (2013) describe their work as an examination of ‘how the idea of getting the body back is significant in the lives of postpartum women’ (p. 671). However, in the context of Taiwan, time-based dimensions and multiple tasks involved in such bodily beautification are more complex and more numerous than in the classic understanding of bouncing back, which is mainly an effort to control weight during and after pregnancy. Yet, I will show that not only does this project involve the period before childbirth, but also, in addition to controlling weight gain, keeping a desirable body is multidimensional and penetrates many steps of childbirth such as breastfeeding and other crucial decisions about childbirth. As I demonstrate below, the project of regaining one’s body is often a continuum that forms an integral part of women’s procreative choice; expectant mothers assimilate this goal into their personal birth plan during pregnancy and continue it in the postpartum period.

Context of the study

The Taiwanese context is characterized as a ‘compressed modernity’ (Lan, 2014), a civilizational condition in which political, economic and sociocultural changes occur in an extremely condensed manner in respect to both time and space, and in which the dynamic coexistence of mutually disparate historical and social elements leads to the reconstruction of a highly complex and fluid social system (Chang and Song, 2010). While most developed countries have undergone gradual change over stages of industrialization, urbanization and individualization, many East Asian countries ‘combine pre-modern (traditional), agricultural, industrial and modern practices in a mixed bag’ (Ma, 2012: 304). For example, in modern Taiwan, Confucianism and the discourse of filial piety are still strong while neoliberal individualism and Western feminism, among others, penetrate public and private spheres.

In this climate of polycentrism and hybridization, traditional cultural norms continue to shape everyday life. Taiwanese womanhood is generally associated with housework, childbirth, childrearing and emotions (as opposed to reason). In addition, docility and ‘cuteness’ are also becoming gender expectations (Chuang, 2005). Even though ‘complementarity’ and ‘harmony’ between the two genders are pursued in a classical yin-yang ontological model of gender (Liu, 2017), this ‘binary’ gender system has, in reality, generated many gendered inequalities. As Yi and Chang (2019) note, ‘From filial obligation [and] mating gradient to family inheritance or conjugal power structure, the patriarchal society has granted men the superior status and privileges in the family as well as in the work context’ (p. 251). Meanwhile, in large part due to the women’s movement, gender equality has been accepted more widely over the past few decades; the significant increase in educational and employment opportunities for women has elevated their status at work and at home. Thus, some scholars suggest that Taiwanese society is also experiencing an ideological shift from collectivism to individualism (Lu, 2010).

In this context of ‘compressed modernity’, women’s quest for beauty is a good example, illustrating this ongoing interplay between old and new, local and global, and cultural heritage and its metamorphosis. Although Wen (2013: 93) points out that ‘[t]he obsession with female beauty is rooted in stereotypical gender roles for women’, it is important to emphasize that such behaviors are not principally performed to conform to the male gaze and gendered expectations. Rather, they should be seen largely as women’s quest for freedom and autonomy, upheld and fuelled by Western individualism (Keyser-Verreault, 2018a, 2020, 2022). As Oksala (2013) argues,

Women too have come to be seen, and to see themselves, increasingly as neoliberal subjects – egoistical subjects of interest making free choices based on rational economic calculations. No more do women only want a happy home; they too want money, power and success. (p. 39)

In this context, women count on their bodies and physical attractiveness to materialize their desire for liberty. Similarly, while the tradition of yuezi is a long-established practice within Chinese culture, Keyser-Verreault (2018a) underlines that the association between motherhood and the quest for beauty is a recent phenomenon; the idea of undertaking a diet or losing weight during pregnancy and the ideal of bouncing back after childbirth are completely absent in traditional Taiwanese postpartum practices. Yet, under the influence of beauty culture, maternity has been colonized by an endless quest for beauty. For example, in major Taiwanese maternity magazines, the traditional approach to the postpartum month is characterized as sidestepping a mother’s concern for her postpartum figure (Keyser- Verreault, 2018b). Thus, women’s beautification often showcases the endless interplay of traditions and the Western influence of modern ideologies, and it exemplifies the individual’s constant negotiation and reappropriation of competing discourses. It is in the context of this culture of beauty that I analyze women’s behaviors concerning maternity and their quests for beauty.

Theoretical orientations

Regarding the theoretical framework, it is useful to discuss some concepts around individual beautification. Some researchers use larger concepts like ‘body work’ (Gimlin, 2007) or ‘body labour’ (Kang, 2003) and, although these notions include appearance-related practices, they refer to a wide range of experience such as female care work. Kwan and Trautner (2009: 50) argue for more precise and restricted notions; they say that ‘beauty work and beauty labour are narrower terms that reflect specific appearance and beauty practices performed on oneself and on others, respectively’. Yet, while it is legitimate and necessary to distinguish individual beautification from expensive and far-reaching body-related behaviors in the workplace and the private sphere, what Kwan and Trautner (2009) include in this concept is a narrow part of beautification, ranging merely from ‘makeup’, ‘body hair removal’, ‘body size and body shape’ to ‘cosmetic surgery’ (p. 54). Despite its merits, this conception’s applicability is inappropriately narrowed to a small part of women’s beautification, and it misses the ways in which beauty is differently and diversely invested. This rigid concept cannot grasp or explain highly complex and fluid beauty-related behavior, for example, sajiao (撒嬌), the central component of ‘being cute’ or ‘enacting cutesy’ in East Asian countries (Chuang, 2005; Keyser- and Verreault, 2018a), which is an ultra-feminine body language which serves – among other things – to butter up women’s partners (Yueh, 2017) or the still-important Confucian discourse of ‘inner beauty’ (Wei, 2013). Nor can ‘beauty labor’ include many beautification practices that are based on the notions of ‘relatability’ (Kanai, 2019), ‘confidence cult(ure)’ (Gill and Orgad, 2015), beauty as a ‘mind/body/feeling set’ (Kanai and Gill, 2020), or, more precisely, ‘positivity discourse’ or ‘affective practices’ in the postfeminist rhetoric of beautification (for emphasis on ‘affective’ and ‘affirmative’ turn in beauty studies, see Elias et al., 2017: 16–22).

Second, and most important to my argument in this article, the concept of ‘beauty work’ is a rather static concept and cannot offer a dynamic and temporally agile account of beauty. For instance, Coleman and Figueroa (2010: 358) understand beauty as a ‘process’ rather than a static property, stressing that ‘it is not only necessary to examine specific beauty practices (of make-up, hair styling, diet and cosmetic surgery, for example), but it is also important to see beauty as an embodied social, cultural and economic process’. As this article will show, temporality and time-related factors are determinants in women’s beautification and it is absolutely necessary to include prospective momentum or an individual’s proactive stand in the analysis of women’s pursuit of beauty.

Another important concept to mention is Hakim’s (2010) ‘erotic capital’. This notion is more comprehensive than Kwan and Trautner’s concept of ‘beauty labour’ since it includes other components than the physical. Indeed, Hakim includes the crucial factors of ‘liveliness’ and ‘social skills in interactions’ in her definition of erotic capital. Yet, without entering into a detailed discussion, I emphasize that, on the one hand, one of Hakim’s goals concerning this notion is to break the ‘moral’ patriarchal framework that inhibits women from exploiting their erotic capital to achieve socio-economic benefits and, on the other, she strongly emphasizes the importance of ‘sexual attractiveness’ and ‘sexual competence, energy, erotic imagination, playfulness, and everything else that makes for a sexually satisfying partner’ (Hakim, 2010: 500–501). Yet, in a non-Western context, many Taiwanese women, like many women in East Asia, strive to achieve an appropriate balance between being beautiful and caring about desexualization, and Liu (2017: 90–92) cogently emphasizes the importance of ‘being pretty but not sexy’. In Taiwan’s context, in order to maximize the benefits of beauty, beauty and sexual charm must be embodied with restraint and women should make judicious use of their aesthetic appeal and, to some extent, respect the ‘moral’ framework regarding femininity. Emphasis on ‘respectability’ (Skeggs, 1997) is still the determinant in contemporary Taiwanese society and the notion of erotic capital is not the best concept for understanding East Asian women’s beautification.

To understand the phenomenon of regaining one’s body, I first mobilize Elias et al. (2017)’s concept of ‘aesthetic entrepreneurship’. Here, the notion of entrepreneurship originates with Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism within which an individual is redefined as an ‘entrepreneur of the self’ who constantly invests, manages and improves their ‘human capital’ in order to produce some kind of ‘return’. The concept of ‘human capital’ signifies that ‘my human capital is me, as a set of skills and capacities that is modified by all that affects me and all that I effect’ (Feher, 2009: 26). One of the major differences between classical liberalism and neoliberalism is that while the former maintains a distinction between public and private spheres, in neoliberalism the separations and oppositions between professional and domestic or production and reproduction become meaningless, because the ‘various things I do, in any existential domain (dietary, erotic, religious, etc.), all contribute to either appreciating or depreciating the human capital that is me’ (Feher, 2009: 30). Hence, Foucault (2004: 230) argues that ‘capital is anything that can, in one way or another, be a source of return in the future’ and that one’s own human capital includes all kinds of physical and psychological factors.

Moreover, we should pay special attention to the dynamic character of this all-embracing concept and to the factor of temporality in managing one’s own human capital. First, Foucault (2004) qualifies such neoliberal subjects using the dynamic term ‘enterprise’ (p. 231), and this enterprising self assumes the continuing duty of increasing the value of his or her/their capital. Second, Foucault (2004) emphasizes the changing character of capital and its return, stressing that capital produces a ‘flux of return, not only return’ (p. 230). Hence, if ‘human capital’ means that capital and the return of capital, and the human being who ‘possesses’ them, are inseparable (Foucault, 2004: 232), it implies that capital, the expected return and the self or the appreciation of the self are always in a state of flux. In other words, the entrepreneurial self is in a perpetual mode of becoming (Bröckling, 2005; Scharff, 2016). Third, although the notion of human capital is a seemingly all-inclusive idea – it is true from some points of view and its conceptual flexibility has merit compared to other notions such as ‘beauty work’ or ‘erotic capital’ – this notion is tightly related to and inseparable from another notion: the ‘market’. According to the neoliberal logic of self-optimizing, all forms of capital must be deployed as marketable assets and any asset without exchange value is meaningless to entrepreneurs; as Bröckling (2016) aptly stresses, ‘Entrepreneurs only exist where there are markets; entrepreneurial activity is aimed at market success’ (p. 43). All neoliberal subjects’ capital management is based upon the ‘future marketability of a conduct’ (Feher, 2009: 28). Therefore, in this process of redefining the individual as human capital, Rottenberg (2017: 338–339) argues,

While many political and cultural theorists have convincingly illustrated how neoliberal rationality is producing subjects as entrepreneurial actors, [. . .] much less attention has been paid to the particular temporality of neoliberal rationality and an avowed emphasis on futurity or future returns may increasingly be serving as a new modality of what Michel Foucault has famously called technologies of the self.

In other words, the neoliberal logic of self-transformation is not only a never-ending process but, most important, an entrepreneur of the self is dominated by forward-thinking, seeking constantly to protect and enlarge her return of human capital in the future. Hence, the ceaseless renewal of the entrepreneur of the self is not a reflexive and disorganized metamorphosis but a reflective and planned self-transformation dominated by a look-forward mentality and long-term thinking. In short, an individual’s entrepreneurial activities intertwine with the care of one’s own future market value.

Some further points deserved mention; most important for this article, apprehension about coming changes favors and necessarily brings about constancy and continuity of entrepreneurial performance. Thus, I contend that this aspirational logic of self-transformation and special care of perdurable capital return imply in reality a continuum of capital managing. Moreover, this characteristic of neoliberal rationality seems to persist in different sociocultural contexts since, in Taiwan, scholars (Wang, 2017) equally stress that ‘the vision of the future is embedded in neoliberalism as a structure of feeling, or rather as an existential imperative that compels one to ‘invest’ in oneself, to compete relentlessly so as to arrive at a future of prosperity’ (p. 179). Finally, not only is appearance an excellent example of embodied human capital for many women but, as Rottenberg (2017) points out, the future-oriented character of neoliberal rationality heavily concerns women’s choices about reproduction and maternity. In fact, many feminist analyses emphasize the influence of neoliberalism in changing maternity practices and causing intensified beauty pressure. For example, Musial (2014) argues that the figure of the yummy mummy is a celebration of young, affluent, able-bodied heterosexual maternity aesthetics and lifestyle promoting self-sufficiency and planned mothering, while Tyler (2011) describes the phenomenon of ‘pregnant beauty’ as a directed and managed bodily project of the self within disciplinary neoliberalism (see also Elias et al., 2017; Littler, 2013; Malatzky, 2017). This article is written in the same vein. However, I contribute to these debates by extending them to a non-Western context and nuancing the existing literature.

In sum, the aesthetic entrepreneurship that leads to a future-oriented continuum of capital management is an appropriate theoretical framework with which to analyze women’s procreative choices and the phenomenon of regaining one’s body in Taiwan.

Methodology

The narratives I use in this article emerge from a large research project involving highly educated, urban Taiwanese women’s beauty practices. Between 2014 and 2017, I conducted 33 months of ethnographic fieldwork and, for this article, I selected 62 in-depth, open-ended interviews and divided my sample into two categories: married or unmarried women who had not yet had a child (27 in total, Group A) and women who were pregnant or already had children (35 in total, Group B). These women all hold master’s or PhD degrees from the best local universities or from foreign universities. The women in the study ranged in age from 29 to 39 and they were employed in a wide range of positions. Almost all of them were living in the capital, Taipei, and are part of the main ethnic group (Han). They are all heterosexual and self-identify as middle class.

For this study focused on the role of appearance in the lives of women, I chose a sample of women from the privileged class because they are in a favorable position – they belong to the dominant (Han) ethnic group and are young, highly educated urban women who have good social and economic positions. While gender, age, ethnicity, social class and other axes of inequality set the context of women’s lives, choosing a sample from the privileged class can be justified in two ways. First, this sample allows me to observe how appearance competes with other forms of capital, such as cultural capital or high spending capacity, and what are the particularities of those participants’ attitudes toward beauty. Second, the resources to become an entrepreneurial subject are unevenly distributed and the link between youth, femininity, self-transformation and neoliberalism is emphasized in the existing literature, confirming that well-educated middle-class women, like those in this study, are positioned as ideal entrepreneurial subjects (e.g. Feher, 2009; Scharff, 2016). It is crucial to consider the implicit class connotations of neoliberal discourse. In doing so, I admit that this sample reflects selection bias and the findings cannot be extrapolated to women of other social classes.

Participants in the project were found using a snowball sampling process and this ethnographic work was all conducted through in-person interviews and in Mandarin Chinese, a language in which I am fluent. I conducted participant-centered conversations that were about 1 hour in length, in which the women were asked a loosely structured set of questions. I asked women to discuss a range of issues such as their definition of beauty, the role of appearance in society and in their lives, their concrete beauty practices, the beauty factor in their procreative choices, their perceptions of the body during and after pregnancy, how they think about the ideal of regaining one’s body, their feelings about pregnancy and the postpartum body and so on. In addition to conducting interviews, data were also gathered through close ethnographic participation, especially through popular media representations of mothers and motherhood.

Regarding interpretation of the data, a thematic analysis was undertaken, which is a ‘method for identifying, analyzing, and reporting patterns (themes) within data’ (Braun and Clarke, 2006: 79). After data collection, line-by-line open coding was done through generation of common themes and identification between categories. By employing constant comparative analysis, which moves back and forth between data collection and analysis, I then did axial and selective coding, which led to some further development of themes and categories. I further refined and summarized these into fewer categories (and sometimes additional ones) as larger patterns emerged.

Ethics approval was given by my university; all informants signed a declaration of consent, which included an information page and ensured confidentiality, anonymity and the right to withdraw.

Findings

Changing maternity under the culture of beauty

Many scholars highlight the increase in beauty pressure for women in contemporary society (e.g. Widdows, 2018); this culture of beauty penetrates deeply into maternity, as Elias et al. (2017) argue, ‘If, at one point, pregnancy represented, for some women, an escape from or relaxation of the demand of beauty, this is no longer the case, at least in the West’ (p. 29). In fact, this statement is also true for many non-Western societies. In Taiwan, the necessity of keeping a desirable appearance has shifted more deeply into pregnancy and motherhood. As Chang et al. (2006) point out, ‘[. . .] social standards of body size, shape, and appearance that apply to women throughout their adult lives persevere during pregnancy’ (p. 149). Becoming a pregnant beauty and a yummy mummy after childbirth, and always looking good, has become a normative choice. Moreover, although weight control during pregnancy can be observed in many Western countries (e.g. Musial, 2014; Tyler, 2011), what is striking in Taiwan is the intensity and fervency of this stay-fit compulsion. Like many other participants, Lara emphasized that this recent stay-fit pregnancy ideal is a painful but demanding mission.

Now that I am pregnant, my husband lets me eat, but he said that I must quickly slim down after giving birth. He wants me to be [. . .] ‘like before’ as fast as possible. There is a book, Pregnant and Skinny (瘦孕 Shou Yun), which is very influential. Now it is kind of a concept to be pregnant and skinny. We should not gain more than 8 kg during pregnancy!!

Accordingly, a Taiwanese scholar, Chen (2010), reported the following:

The ideal weight gain during pregnancy promoted by the mass media and so-called health specialists, i.e. 10-12 kg, is a totally impossible mission. In my own example, I weighed 48 kg before pregnancy; in each of my pregnancies, whether I controlled what I ate or not, I gained more than 16 kg. I am not an unusual case among other mothers. (p. 65)

If a weight gain of only 10–12 kg was an impossible mission for Chen, then we can say without exaggeration that the skinny pregnancy fashion that advocates only an 8 kg weight gain is generalized ‘pregorexia’ (Tyler, 2011: 29). Another example of the intensification of beauty pressure can be found in the rhetoric surrounding Bony Beauty, ¹ a recent fashion that materialized regarding an expectant mother who, throughout her entire pregnancy, looked exactly like a slender young girl, except for a small belly. Besides these bodily fashions, many participants also mentioned that not only is regaining one’s pre-pregnant shape considered necessary and normal, but mothers who are ahead of the game are those who weigh even less than before their pregnancies. As one woman told me, ‘If you weigh less than before the pregnancy, you are a winner and everybody will admire you’.

Thus, under the influence of the ideal of the skinny pregnancy, combined with the duty to quickly bounce back, it is not surprising that this increasing culture of beauty cautions Taiwanese women not to embark on maternity before they are ready to accomplish the difficult bodily project of keeping one’s own physical capital. As I will show below, in Taiwan, unprecedented beauty pressure works increasingly as an effective deterrent to contemplating maternity before women have a well-prepared and organized performant pregnancy. Fear of embodying the prejudicial image of an ugly and unkept mother after childbirth has become a real disincentive for many young women. In a major maternity magazine, Mummy and Baby (2016), the editor wrote the following:

The figure is always the most important concern for women, no matter how old they are. I read an Internet survey conducted by clinics offering aesthetic surgery; women have huge worries about their postpartum appearance. The survey shows that the most important concern of 70% of mothers is the problem of being overweight after childbirth, and that they want to use aesthetic surgery to remove surplus fat [. . .] Many of my good friends are married but postpone maternity – among their major reasons, the fear of losing their figure is the most common and important argument. (p. 18)

Accordingly, maternal success now requires a mother to preserve her slenderness, which is seen as dutiful femininity in Taiwan. Below, I explore how beauty pressure becomes and works as a crucial factor influencing women’s procreative choices and their decisions about pregnancy and childbirth.

Motherhood as the loss of desirability

Fear of, and anxiety about, becoming a mother

Under a dominant culture of beauty, many informants consider that remaining good looking is extremely important and advantageous for women. However, almost all of the participants, including mothers and unmarried women, consider that maternity is a huge threat to women’s beauty. Re-Lin made a remark that was pervasive: ‘The body of a woman who did not have kids is better and everybody agrees with that’. Many participants told me that the people surrounding them agree on this point of view. Simultaneously, Keyser-Verreault (2018b) points out that, in major maternity magazines, all bodily changes during pregnancy are described negatively and that this new ‘ugliness’ requires correction (ranging from beauty products and services to cosmetic surgery). Maternity is therefore seen by many as a great loss of beauty capital.

For participants in Group A, maternity was anticipated as a huge devaluation of women’s beauty capital; one of the strong themes that emerged from these interviews was women’s fear and anxiety about becoming a mother. Many women who had not yet had a child had strongly prejudged the impact of maternity on women’s appearance. For instance, Wen Pei reported that when her friends are pregnant, they do not feel good about themselves; they think that they are heavy and not at all pretty. She emphasized that, even after childbirth, they still felt fat, and they do not like their changed breasts because they are deformed and their color is darker, and so on. She confessed that

for me, a woman who becomes a mother is really ugly. Her belly looks like a watermelon and it never regains its former shape, her breasts sag, nipples become bigger and darker, and her skin becomes something like orange bark.

For many participants, becoming a mother means, among other disadvantages, suffering from the loss of one’s physical attractiveness and many gendered advantages relating to women’s beauty.

Another typical situation derives from concerns about a spouse’s negative judgment. Many married informants told me that, because of bodily changes during pregnancy, they are afraid they will not be accepted by their husbands. Liu Xue-Qiu made a remark that echoed most of those interviewed, as follows:

If I choose to have a child, I’ll fear gaining weight. During the pregnancy or after childbirth, I should eat for the well-being of my baby. But if I eat too much, how would I lose weight? [. . .] Having a kid is very terrifying for me because my husband doesn’t like fat women. Even now he tells me directly, ‘Do some exercise! You should lose weight!’ Then I won’t know what to do if he doesn’t like my changing body.

Fen-Fen also reported that, to her spouse, her figure is crucial, and he always wants her to get a little slimmer. She highlighted that ‘my husband caresses my belly and then tells me that I should very carefully watch my weight’. All this makes Fen-Fen fearful of having a child so that, in her words, ‘If I am pregnant and I gain weight – oh my God – I can’t imagine what his reaction would be . . . ’.

While most participants express fear and anxiety about their changing maternal bodies, they are also under pressure to have a child – a filial obligation for men and a strong social expectation for woman still present in this patriarchal society (see Yi and Chang, 2019). Liu-Fen said the following:

On the one hand, I’m very worried about pregnancy because I don’t want to deform my figure. But, on the other, I’m afraid of not having a child because there are a lot of infertility problems in Taiwan. My parents-in-law put a lot of pressure on me, always asking me when I want to have a kid. They keep repeating that they – the older generation – want to have grandchildren as quickly as possible. It’s a real dilemma!

As previously stated, women maintain that remaining attractive is essential when becoming a mother. While actually looking good means something different to each woman, there are no women in this study who consider beauty to be only a minor aspect of motherhood. From the perspective of a future-oriented continuum of aesthetic entrepreneurship, women’s fear and anxiety can be translated into concerns about the coming devaluation of their physical attractiveness which results from childbirth. Confronting this dilemma of maternity or the devaluation of their beauty, a very common solution for women is to include regaining their figures in their personal plans for giving birth.

Orchestrated pregnancy under beauty pressure

Women’s narratives and my field observations indicate that women carefully prepare their pregnancy and maternity. The excerpt below, from La-La, captures and explains women’s meticulous supervision of their own maternity:

In Taiwan, there are still many gender inequalities. Since we can’t change the whole world or change everyone, it is imperative to make the right decision regarding the only thing we women have the power to decide. For us, having a child always looms on the horizon and raising a child is exhausting, especially when men get involved so little. You know, the secret of many successful women is that they control and arrange their lives – especially regarding maternity – as precisely and as strictly as they can a laboratory test. If you want to have a child, every detail should be extremely controlled and examined. You should oversee and adjust everything; otherwise, it is always women who will be blamed for and suffer from the wrong decisions.

Thus, many participants who plan to have a child integrate the goal of bouncing back into their procreative choices and parenthood planning. A majority of my informants reported that it is common for expectant mothers to have a clear plan to bounce back after childbirth and they will buy related products or beauty services before their delivery. In other words, the project of getting one’s body back into shape should not be understood as simply a task after the delivery; in Taiwan’s context, it is also a crucial part of a well-prepared childbirth. For example, Xue-Qiu said that she could not enjoy being pregnant because she would be very anxious about gaining too much weight and remaining heavy after childbirth. In order to dispel this fear, she asked her husband to buy her a corset to compensate, in case she gets pregnant one day. Echoing this, Liu-Liu said the following:

I told my boyfriend, who became my spouse, that I was very scared and worried about being pregnant. I am frightened that I will not get my body back into shape after childbirth. So, I told to him that even if a corset is very expensive, if we decide to have a child, honey has to buy me a corset!

While almost all participants do some aesthetic preparation regarding their postpartum figures, a few of them take this preparation very seriously and perfect the art of laying the groundwork. Here, I want to mention Xiao Lin’s pregnancy box to illustrate how women anticipate bouncing back before becoming a mother.

I want to have a successful childbirth and I do not want to become a messy, self-neglecting mother, so I try to be well prepared for that and I have a big box for this purpose. Once it’s been decided that I will become pregnant in the near future, I start buying the necessary products like fat-burning cream, a corset and many other related items. Then, I put all of them into this box. You know, since the products are expensive, to find good prices I often wait for specials at department stores and beauty boutiques. Besides stocking up, I also gather all encouraging words about bouncing back from other mothers, from maternity magazines or from mothers on Facebook or Instagram. By doing this, I have the impression that this box is a piggy bank for my future success in bouncing back. Looking at this box as it increasingly fills up is reassuring for me and eases a lot of my anxiety about the difficult and painful task of pregnancy and maternity.

Thus, I highlight that not only are future-related utterances very present in participants’ language about maternity but that the groundwork of bouncing back is seen as a decisive part of a well-planned childbirth and often creates a continuum of aesthetic labor starting well before pregnancy. Stated differently, preoccupation with the future is always present for a neoliberal subject and the aesthetic entrepreneur is ‘autonomous, self-inventing and self-regulating in the pursuit of beauty practice’, ‘one that calculates about itself and work upon itself in order to better itself’ (Elias et al., 2017: 39). Such aspirational logic implies, in practice, a meticulous and long-term build-up and thus a continuum of regulation of personal assets.

Pregnancy, childbirth and the quest for beauty

Focusing on participants in Group B (pregnant women and mothers), I want to underscore two points. First, in Taiwan, the goal of getting the body back into shape is already intense at the moment a woman becomes pregnant, not just after the delivery; and second, considerations that concern maintaining one’s own physical attractiveness greatly impact expectant mothers’ various decisions about childbirth, because participants take into consideration other aspects of childbirth that also have a great influence on their future appearance. Thus, I contend that women have an extended conception of the meaning of regaining their body.

‘Nurturing the fetus, not the fat’

Almost all informants in Group B told me that to make the task of bouncing back easier, it is crucial to closely monitor what they eat during pregnancy and to gain as little weight as possible. This means that the project of losing weight, or at least of not gaining weight, is concomitant with pregnancy (and not with post-delivery), as Momo explained:

I was two months pregnant and my coworkers had already started to tell me how to slim down as quickly as possible after the birth. They had already started to tell me to gain as little weight as possible and to eat as little as possible during the pregnancy. The pressure to stay thin is crazy.

Although women know that bodily changes due to pregnancy are inevitable, especially weight gain, participants often considered weight gain to be only temporarily legitimate because a majority of the participants reported that all weight gained due to pregnancy should disappear after delivery.

In addition, it is crucial to mention that, under the pressure of intensive mothering, the women in this study are complex subjects who are influenced by multiple and conflicting norms. Their beauty and postpartum figure are not their only concerns. Many women told me that concern about their babies often competed tremendously with anxieties about appearance; but caring about their pregnant appearance did not erase women’s concern about the well-being of their babies, and there are multiple social demands on these new slender mothers. In addition to staying slender, this means that – among many other things – they should choose the food that is good for the baby. Therefore, the compromise concerning these competing demands or conflicting ideologies is to ‘nurture the fetus, not the fat’, which is a very popular slogan in Taiwan and an expression I heard frequently during my conversations with participants (sometimes expressed as, ‘nursing the baby, not the unnecessary flesh’). Many participants consider the task of nursing only the baby, not the fat to be tied with bouncing back after delivery, and that they are an inseparable continuity.

Thus, in order to ease fears and lay the groundwork for the future task of getting their body back into shape, expectant mothers do not consider gestation to be merely an antecedent of the project of bouncing back but that the ideas of a ‘skinny pregnancy’ or ‘nurturing the fetus, not the fat’ are witness to the fact that child-bearing is already a prelude to or the beginning of the act of getting one’s body back into shape.

An extensible and contextualized understanding of regaining one’s body

While losing the weight gained during pregnancy is the main battle for these women, like many mothers in a Western context (Jette and Rail, 2013), controlling weight is not the only major concern in successfully bouncing back. In their study, Upton and Han (2003) indicate that ‘it is not clear what is meant by getting the body back’, since ‘it may be that the body is irrevocably changed’ (p. 688). Therefore, they stress that such body work should be understood mainly as ‘a path, a trajectory toward a certain kind of ideal type’ (Upton and Han, 2003: 686). Echoing this, I equally hold that, despite the fact that the task involves regaining a pre-pregnant body size (‘we need to be fit to wear our old clothes’, as many women told me), participants have an expansive definition of what it means and what is involved when talking about getting one’s body back. For instance, according to public health campaigns, breastfeeding symbolizes a mother’s best care for her infant, while for many women in this study, the idea that breastfeeding is something that helps weight loss is a pervasive theme. For example, Lisa said ‘I chose breastfeeding because it supports me in my project to bounce back after being pregnant’. Many women affirm that they choose breastfeeding because they see it as an efficient weapon in bouncing back without much extra effort. Thus, when they talk about this subject, participants often mention precise calculations such as ‘every 100 cc of maternal milk produced = 70-75 calories burned’; ‘every 100 cc milk = 30 minutes of jogging or 60 minutes of housekeeping’; or, ‘breastfeeding women burn 500 more calories every day than mothers who bottle feed their babies’, and so on.

In the following sections, I provide a few examples of this flexible understanding of getting the body back.

First, re-establishing the genitals is also seen as part of bouncing back. Many informants told me that it is commonly said that a natural delivery has a negative impact on women’s future sex life since it is believed that the vagina becomes looser, therefore jeopardizing men’s sexual pleasure. Many participants hold that a C-section is more advantageous than a vaginal delivery and that it is considered by many to be better for retaining the firmness of vaginal muscles. While the majority of women in this study reported that they would not consider cosmetic surgery for vaginal rejuvenation, they had all seen this kind of advertising and were worried about their future intimate lives. Some women confessed that their husbands would prefer that they have a C-section because they think the vaginal muscles will stretch less than with a vaginal birth, and that their sex lives will not be too affected even if their wife has given birth. For example, I met Yu-Lin after childbirth; she told me that her delivery was painful because she first tried a natural delivery, which failed, and ended up with a C-section. However, she said that she consoled herself: ‘When the doctor advised me to have a C-section, I was sad because I wanted to have my baby without intervention. But I told myself that at least it’s good for my husband and for bouncing back’. This case indicates that some work (e.g. Kegel exercises) or intervention (e.g. surgery) to strengthen or tighten vaginal muscles, essentially for one’s (more exactly, the husband’s) sex life after childbirth, is often seen as an important part of regaining one’s body.

Second, another aspect that is particular to Taiwan’s context is that women’s goal of bouncing back largely influences ways of ‘doing the month’ (yuezi). The practice of resting during the postpartum month is still very popular and important for women in Taiwan. Yet, almost all my informants insisted that, in this competition to get back into shape, the main challenge of bouncing back often comes less from personal determination than from dealing with delicate social relationships. Many participants insisted that, due to complicated kinship and social relationships, women could not freely do their bodily beautification. This means that getting one’s body back into shape is inseparable from and includes the adroit management of social and interpersonal relationships. Accordingly, one typical situation is that some elder family members oppose the necessity for such bodily beautification; another is that women’s relatives prepare a lot of high-calorie meals for them, hoping that the mothers will eat all of the food. Thus, these glamorous mothers need to tactfully manage complex family and social relationships to ensure their bodily projects. Therefore, many participants emphasized that bouncing back is a crucial factor in their choice of how to handle the postpartum month. Some informants decided to order prepared yuezi meals, explaining that these meal companies target mothers who want to lose weight quickly and provide nutritious meals without many calories, while a few of them chose private postpartum-care establishments offering specialized meals and many beauty services, which helps them refuse unwanted or troublesome relatives.

Finally, it is worth pointing out that a spouse’s choice to participate or not during childbirth is also crucial in the project of bouncing back in Taiwan’s context. More than half of the women I interviewed reported that they do not want their husbands to be present during childbirth in order to retain their beauty capital so that those husbands preserve beautiful images of their wives. In other words, it is believed that such participation could disgust men and therefore cause them to lose interest in their wives in the future. Chun-Fang articulated what many indicated:

I do not wish my honey to see me during delivery, because there is a lot of sweat and blood and because I wince, I scream and I cry. Delivery is really not a scene where I am pretty. I do not want to create sexual trouble with my husband after childbirth. If he were there during delivery, I’d be afraid that even if I lose all pregnancy fat, I’d lose my physical charm for him due to these unpleasant and unattractive images.

Her comment indicated that getting one’s body back involves not only the body’s shape, but also psychological desirability. For many participants, bouncing back involves more than weight loss and regaining their pre-pregnancy figure; in fact, it should be viewed as a holistic concept because women seek to keep the same, still-vibrant erotic charm and be as widely appealing as they were before childbirth.

To be precise, I am not arguing here that beauty has become the most powerful factor affecting women’s procreative choices and that women are merely dupes of beauty pressure. Neither am I pretending that this phenomenon exists only in Taiwan and cannot be found in a Western context. I am suggesting, however, that the beauty factor has now become a persuasive and controlling claim that, in many cases, competes with a child’s well-being or a mother’s health. Furthermore, I emphasize that, while we can observe some similar, isolated cases of this quest for beauty in Western societies, the particularities of the East Asian context are the intensity and popularity of the appearance norms that are imposed on women.

Understanding the diverse influences of beauty culture on childbirth requires scholars to contextualize the intersections of women’s life circumstances and local ideologies regarding mothering and feminine appearance. Accordingly, I emphasize that participants in this study are complex subjects impacted by multiple competing discourses and social norms. At the same time, they have agency and are able to act within social discourses to negotiate or resist them. It remains the case that women’s ability to act is located within specific social and historical structures of power and gender norms over which they have little control. As Widdows (2018) cogently argues, ‘Importantly, as individuals we do not choose our beauty ideals. Arguably we choose the extent to which we conform to them, but the extent to which we can do this is limited by the dominance of the ideal’ (p. 35). Such considerations require that we challenge an overly simplified and disembedded conception of the relationship between women and beauty culture. Reality is more complex than describing women only as free agents or as dupes of the cult of beauty.

To illustrate this, I turn to the case of Lu Zhen. Although she has no social pressure from her workplace because she is now a stay-at-home mother, Lu Zhen is one of the participants who considers appearance to be a determinant part of one’s femininity and identity, partly due to the fact that she was a flight attendant (Taiwanese men consider women in this domain to be particularly beautiful and Taiwanese airline companies have strict appearance criteria concerning the looks of their flight attendants). For example, in a very contemptuous tone, she told me that ‘There are a lot of women who give up on their appearance after childbirth. I don’t like them, and I think it is not a good thing!’. Indeed, after the birth of two daughters, she continues to attentively take care of her looks and invests a lot of time and money in her appearance. Even so, she said that all of her friends strongly advise her to keep her husband out of the delivery room; they say that a man who sees an actual childbirth will lose his sexual appetite for his wife and it would be the end of their sex life. But Lu Zhen insists on the presence of her spouse during childbirth because she wants him to know that childbirth is not easy for a woman. After the births, she chose breastfeeding and was very unhappy about the changes in her breasts. However, she thinks that it is the right choice since she sacrificed her beauty for the sake of their child’s health. Although she chose breastfeeding for her child’s health, interpreting this as sacrificing her beauty is witness to the influence of the growing culture of beauty.

Consequently, countering the rigid dichotomy of agency/structure, a subtle conceptual framework and detailed ethnographic description are required to accommodate these multivalent and sometimes contradictory articulations that exist between individuals, local appearance culture and global neoliberal ideology.

Discussion

Some important points about this continuum of regaining one’s body merit careful attention. First, the case of Taiwan confirms that neoliberal marketization of the beauty cult becomes a ‘transnational culture’ (Gill, 2017: 614). Moreover, the challenge to which many scholars in the field are responding is that the existing works on pregnancy and beauty, which focus on a Western context, are contradictory (Nash, 2014), particularly in regard to how expectant mothers cope with weight gain. While some scholars (Bailey, 2001; Fox and Neiterman, 2015; Upton and Han, 2003) frame pregnancy as a release from beauty pressure and contend that pregnancy and motherhood are associated with asexuality and the functional conception of women’s bodies, important and increasing scholarship stresses the redefinition of the pregnant body and motherhood due to recently intensified beauty pressure. I contend that the case of Taiwan and its related continuum of aesthetic labor endorses what Elias et al. (2017: 26–30) call the ‘intensification’ and ‘extensification’ of beauty pressure in contemporary societies and that expectant mothers, in many Western and non-Western countries, are no longer released from the relentless pursuit of physical attractiveness.

Second, this continuum of regaining one’s body also raises the following question: Is such a phenomenon more about the long history and tradition of men controlling women’s bodies than neoliberal capitalization of physical appearance? I contend that there is a complex relationship between neoliberal individualism and local patriarchal norms, and this continuum of regaining one’s body is shaped by both the specificities of local contexts and global neoliberalization. Without denying that some informants’ behavior could be interpreted to some degree as conformity to the local patriarchy, I first want to emphasize that there is no well-defined distinction between male domination and female agency; Malatzky’s study (2017) of the Australian yummy mummy reveals that ‘they [participants] are critical of media representations of the ideal body while at the same time desirous of the ideal which they know is impossible and injurious’ (p. 31). In this study, women also mention their ambivalent attitude toward the dominant beauty ideal. For example, Lara, who was angry about those unfair demands on her own body, did not challenge the skinny pregnancy norm:

We have to be skinny even while pregnant [. . .] Sometimes I’m getting sick of that! [. . .] Why do I have to be skinny! I want to eat! [. . .] But for us, it is very important to get into shape very quickly after pregnancy.

To me, however, analyzing this situation merely in terms of male domination or conformity to patriarchal norms is problematic because many informants clearly indicate that their bodily grooming was initially done for their partner or spouse, but that they now do it for their own sake. In other words, while women’s physical attractiveness was largely encouraged to please their husband and to meet societal expectations, bodily work is done to a great extent by enhancing women’s opportunities to gain manifold advantages in the social field and private life. A few informants asserted that they have had some cosmetic surgery despite their spouses’ opposition. Shi-Liu also told me: ‘Neither my husband nor other people are putting pressure on me. It is me who cares about my figure very much and this is how I have always been. For me, my face and body shape are very important’. Echoing her, Yixian said that ‘the quest to look good is for me – it makes me more cheerful. The most important thing is that I’m happy because of my looks’. Therefore, informants are self-conscious and self-reflexive about their aesthetic choices. In Taiwan’s neoliberal context, where appearance is considered one of the most important personal assets for women, this means that beauty is a monopolistic capital which could be converted into many advantages. From women’s point of view, bodily beautification is largely considered a form of capital that can be invested in, and physical attractiveness can be used as a practical strategy to reshape the various fields around them. Therefore, in Chen’s (2013) words, neoliberalism ‘equates the patriarchal norm with rationality’ (p. 446), inviting and favoring a capitalization of beauty. In other words, neoliberalism intensifies the local gender inequalities such as beauty pressure by transforming it into an entrepreneurial activity with all the intensity that comes with it. My analysis shows that the aesthetic entrepreneurship of many participants should be interpreted as an adroit appropriation of local patriarchal norms and women often see these gendered expectations as an occasion of ‘agency within’ (Yueh, 2017).

Nonetheless, I underline at the same time that there is a strong social class connotation in such appropriation of patriarchal norms, since women in this study are in an advantageous position and have more social, economic and cultural capital than the average when they negotiate with others or negotiate social norms. As many scholars have argued, yummy mummy is a middle-class figure and becomes a part of classed code femininities (e.g. Allen and Osgood, 2009; McRobbie, 2013). Littler (2013: 231) also astutely noted that ‘The yummy mummy is profoundly classed. She has the ability to afford a plethora of beauty treatments and ‘good’ clothes as well as the time to plan to buy them’. Consistent with such research, in the present study, Fei-Liu described women who seem to have abandoned the pursuit of thinness in very condemnatory terms:

I did not change any beauty practices after having two children. I think it is important to continue making oneself charming. I do not like these women who let their appearance run down. I frequent only well-dressed mothers who have regained their shape.

Therefore, I would suggest that, in Taiwan’s case, the performance of maternity is ‘status discrimination within the middle class and with classed others’ (Jackson and Benson, 2014: 1198) and a quick and successful return to one’s pre-pregnant body is a way through which women seek to secure their social status and distinguish themselves from ‘abject’ others. Thus, regaining quickly one’s body is a mean to assert status and middle-class style of living.

Meanwhile, in Taiwan, the relentless quest for beauty becomes a cross-class phenomenon. As Allen and Osgood (2009) argue, ‘The Yummy Mummy falsely universalises middle-class neo-liberalism’ (p. 6). In this study, some informants even presented this goal as an absolute social norm, emphasizing that all Taiwanese women expect to regain their figure if they have a child. The exhibition of a regained pre-pregnant silhouette becomes a mark of success and modern lifestyle. Indeed, I was told repeatedly that regaining their pre-pregnant shape is an indispensable factor for women to be seen as ‘good’, ‘normal’ or ‘acknowledged’ mothers. Therefore, the ‘duty’ of returning to a pre-baby body is a hallmark of good housekeeping, successful womanhood and intensive mothering; modern women should and can ‘do it all’. In other words, as Littler (2013: 227) noted, yummy mummy is the ‘ultimate modern woman’ who does not identify with the traditional, dowdy image of motherhood. Pursuing this figure of a modern glamorous mother thus helps women to get rid of becoming what is pejoratively referred to as impoverished and slovenly motherhood. The figure of yummy mummy embodies and therefore represents an idealized modern and self-determined woman/mother within neoliberal, middle-class, patriarchal and heterosexual norms.

Finally, I want to point out that, due to this extension of the beauty cult and spread of such maternal aesthetic ideal, many participants emphasize increasing beauty-related conflicts in their social and family relationships. Women who ‘abnormally’ gain weight or mothers who failed to regain their pre-pregnant body suffer blame from all sides and weight gain becomes a subject of dispute with their spouse and other family members. Many participants also underline that, despite their huge effort, their husbands are dissatisfied with their changed bodies and their negative comments provoke women’s anxiety and sadness.

In fact, since slenderness is the most important criterion of the local beauty ideal, this aggravated ‘pregorexia’ (Tyler, 2011: 29) is only a small part of the generalized fat-shaming climate. Many informants told me, and I also observed, that ‘fat talks’ based upon mockery and disgust against corpulence are extremely frequent and trivialized in women and men’s comments about women’s appearance. As On-Ru reported, ‘We will laugh at a fat, good-looking girl, but never at a thin, ugly one’. Accordingly, under the cult of beauty, women who do not respond to such ideals are now suffering an unprecedented wave of fat shaming and various other forms of size-based body discrimination. Yet, as a consequence of this persistent discrimination against ‘overweight’ women, an increasing number of corpulent women have mobilized, trying to combat such injustice. The most important proponent for this new social movement is the group Lady Bom Bom Power (肉彈甜心) ² founded in 2015 by two activists who have been interviewed by many local and international newspapers and magazines; they have also recorded and posted short videos to raise awareness of this type of abuse and the damage caused by size-based body discrimination. Similarly, the film Heavy Craving (大餓) (2019), portraying the story of a rotund woman who suffers from everyday sizeism, bears witness to the increasing sensitization to fat-shaming-related discrimination. Therefore, while highlighting the intensity, fervency and popularity of such appearance norms as they are applied to women in Taiwan, I underline as well that there is resistance to such beauty culture or a counter current advocating body diversity and aesthetic pluralism. In sum, women’s body becomes again a site of struggle and contestation and an epicenter of competing discourses in contemporary Taiwanese society.

Conclusion

The aim of this study was to describe and analyze the continuity of the project of regaining one’s body before, during and after pregnancy in Taiwan’s neoliberal context. Through the lens of aesthetic entrepreneurship and emphasis on the futurality of human capital, I found that, since beauty is seen as a crucial part of femininity, women try hard to avoid an altered appearance resulting from maternity and aspire to the well-prepared goal of regaining one’s body, often starting before pregnancy. Moreover, I stressed that we should adopt a holistic and expanded understanding of such a maternal ideal since it involves not only the figure and weight control but also maintaining an active physical and psychological attractiveness as well as succeeding in complicated interpersonal relationships.

Finally, from the perspective of a continuing aesthetic entrepreneurship, it is crucial to mention that childbirth is not the end of the neoliberal project of staying attractive. In Taiwan, the quest for attractiveness seems to be an open-ended imperative and beauty pressure also shapes a mother’s childrearing practices. I heard many complaints caused by the conflict between the quest for beauty and children’s needs. For instance, consider the following: ‘Call me ‘Armstrong’! Because I continuously hold my kid, my arms have become big and muscled! They are really ugly!’ and ‘Since I have to take care of my kid and need energy for that, I can’t be on a diet. Dieting while taking care of my kid makes me dizzy! But, oh my God, I’m losing my figure!’ Thus, future research will take advantage of observing how mothers deal with combining infant care and retaining their physical attractiveness, and their anxiety about aging in a culture of beauty.