commodifying romance and searching for love: rural migrant bar hostesses' moral vision in post-mao dalian / tiantian zheng

Commodifying Romance and Searching for Love: Rural Migrant Bar Hostesses' Moral Vision in Post-Mao Dalian
Author(s): Tiantian Zheng Reviewed work(s):
Source: Modern China, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Oct., 2008), pp. 442-476
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27746899 .

Abstract
This article discusses Dalian's bar hostesses' paradoxical model of romance: one that is both commodified and based on love. On the one hand, hostesses reject the popular media's emphasis on romantic love and sexual purity as a
thin disguise for the ugly reality of men's sexual exploitation of women, and they actively perform and commodify romance for their instrumental pur poses. On the other hand, hostesses resort to supernatural forces to determine their romantic fate and to seek out ideal love. Keywords: romance; love; commodification; sex workers; urban China.

When I asked Lan why she chose to be a bar hostess, she responded, I used to be very pure and romantic. Back in my rural hometown, it never crossed my mind to consider the economic and social circumstances of a male partner. I used to worship pure emotion (chunzhen de ganqing) without any materialistic adulteration. Talk to any hostess here. Which one of us was not full of pure emotions (ganqing fengfu) before working as a hostess? All of us learned from painful experience that our purity was not appreciated by urban men or society. We were totally disillusioned after being used and then abandoned. You know, it's no use being a pure and chaste rural woman. Nobody cares about that. Lan's narrative is representative. During my fieldwork in the karaoke bars in Dalian, narratives to this effect were repeated over and over by the hostesses. It epitomizes an important moral shift from worshipping "pure love".

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