Suzhi,Guanxi,and the Abject Body: Nonhuman Agents of Paradox that Perform Identity Work Together With Chinese Women Political Leaders

Paradox in Sociomateriality

What matters to the current analysis is Barad’s (2003, 2007) rewriting of meaning and matter and agency. First, critical to this realism is the idea that materiality is discursive while meaning must materialize (Barad, 2007; Cooren, 2020). Rather than being out there, matter in agential realism enacts “local semantic and ontological determinacy,” thereby coming to matter/materialize (Barad, 2003, p. 820). This determinacy co-performed by all kinds of mattering bodies within certain relations of which they are constitutive (what Barad calls “intra-action”) is characterized by identifiable/sensible/intelligible (i.e., meaningful) boundaries and relations among “differential categories” (e.g., observing subject and observed object; dominant male bodies and marginalized female bodies). “Boundary-making practices” are open-ended “discursive practices” of materialization (Barad, 2003, p. 821), dynamics that produce “the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface” (Orlikowski & Scott, 2014, p. 699). Furthermore, power dynamics among bodies also form as boundaries are made while local material conditions of im/possibilities emerge (Barad, 2003, 2007). That is, some aspects/components/properties becoming to be constitutive of a phenomenon gain a presence while some others are excluded from and rendered unintelligible within a relation. That some bodies are rendered (un)fit for certain types of work is a good example of such power dynamics.

Second, extending performativity that concerns the embodied identities and reality construction through the becoming of human subjectivity, Barad (2003, 2007) has pushed for “hybrid, interrupted, and dispersed” agency (Ashcraft, 2021, p. 583). That is, agency precedes human subjects now that everything/everyone becomes/acts together (Barad, 2003). Agency is now the “doing/being” of human and nonhuman beings/bodies participating in the boundary-making, about “the possibilities and accountabilities entailed” in the local enactment of determinacy (p. 829). In communicative terms, anything/anyone that/who communicates the presence of some entity (e.g., an organizational condition) is an agent constitutive of its becoming (Cooren, 2020). Therefore, agency is attributable to people, things, words, established practices, and relationships relevant to a phenomenon (Harris, 2015). Recognizing dispersed agency enables an effective account of what/who are actors (re)producing materialized meaning systems, including those by which human bodies are divided.

Reconsidering gender paradoxes through sociomateriality, the question is no longer about whether given dualisms cause/trigger contradictory experiences of women in masculine settings or whether symbolic activities of people produce systems. Rather, gender dualisms materialize together with other becoming entities, including systems and specific practices of marking differences and the bodies of humans and objects as open systems (Ashcraft, 2021), to constitute a provincial relation/phenomenon of paradox (Barad, 2007). They/there are agents of paradox. Regarding (mis)alignment between work and the symbolic and physical bodies, the contradictory, dilemmatic senses of women practitioners under conditions made masculine is very much real, made present by various bodies. (Mis)alignment, however, is not a perpetual condition precisely because it is an enactment of multiple agents in the making of un/fit boundaries. Identifying these agents may be a good way to both intervene in and explain paradoxes (Harris, 2015; Putnam & Ashcraft, 2017).

Existing identity work literature has demonstrated how (women) practitioners creatively negotiate their identities facing systems of (gendered) identity regulation, often when interacting with other (human) actors at/outside of work (for reviews, see Buzzanell, 2020; Putnam & Ashcraft, 2017). Through a sociomaterial lens, I also focus on nonhuman agents of paradox that have become a thing with which Chinese women leaders must work in some ways to make sense of their embodiment of work identity. Two additional propositions about sociomateriality already woven into this section sensitize my analysis. First, according to Cooren (2020), the materiality of “what exists” is a matter of degree, “depending on the number of other beings that materialize its existence” for others (p. 3). In Cooren’s example, the condition of a work unit can increasingly materialize its presence through not only human agents who talk about and feel the condition, but also other forms of embodiment, such as measurements, pictures, and the act of visiting. These nonhuman and human agents are all components (of the condition) whose meaningful presence lies in them embodying the very condition (Barad, 2007). Here, I seek the bodily presence of what performs together with Chinese women leaders through ongoing discursive struggles. Next, through “sociomaterial becoming” a body necessarily touches/moves/evokes intensities in other bodies as they become together (Ashcraft, 2021, p. 585). Therefore, to sense these bodies, I trace affect, pre-personal/individual intensities just preceding linguistically captured feelings/emotions. That is, I turn to expressed feelings and paralinguistic/embodied signs of participants to gain a sense of what things elicit what kind of intensities in them in their becoming as women political leaders.

RQ: What identity work do Chinese women political leaders perform and what works with them as the identity of political leaders materializes?

Participants

This study involves a difficult-to-reach population. China’s political climate is intricate, and although increasingly more women work in China’s political institutions, women among the leadership boards are rare. For perspective, at the provincial level (second from the top), PRC has 1242 leadership positions—including 124 chiefs—in the four major branches of its political system; amongst the total number, 10.8% are women (Fu et al., 2018). Women in chief positions are scarce across all levels and branches and are, as one participant stated, “too conspicuous.” Thus, all identifiers (e.g., specific titles) have been removed or camouflaged. In total, six (n = 6) Han women over the age of 40 participated in the study. They have served in Party-/non-Party-affiliated leadership positions for over two decades. All participants advanced to chief positions in political units/branches at different levels (e.g., provincial, municipal, county-level), having started from humble families of origin (e.g., rural households). Their gender, class, and political status intersect to create unusual experiences. Tracy (2010) suggested, “if data are new, unique, or rare, a valuable contribution could be achieved with very little data” (p. 841). While representation may not be the goal of this inquiry, I aim to make present the nuanced interplay of the identities of a group of women, therefore “account[ing] for the lived nuances and embodied specificities of situated subjectivities,” (Yep, 2016, p. 85) and contributing to a fuller understanding of the (political) experience of (non-white) women no longer as a monolithic category (Collins, 2000).

Procedures

The study used in-depth, narrative interviews. In narrative inquiries, interviews are occasions on which intersubjective meaning-making occurs through the (inter)active, expansive storytelling process (Riessman, 2008). The 13-question interview guide was designed to investigate participants’ gendered career processes and work-life issues. After receiving IRB approval, I recruited participants using a guanxi-oriented—or a relationship/connection-based—strategy appropriate for gathering sensitive data and crossing institutional boundaries in China’s relationship-oriented society (see Kriz et al., 2014). The tokenism and secondary positioning of women leaders (Edwards, 2007) inspired the selection of women who have achieved the chief status at locally top- and nationally mid-levels (for information about the Chinese political ranking system, see Wang & Hua, 2020). With the help of personal contact, I contacted the first participant, who then helped connect six more prospective participants through her guanxi. In two weeks, they all expressed interest in participating; one withdrew due to scheduling difficulties. I interviewed all participants via video calls within six weeks. Five participants permitted audio recordings of interviews, while one preferred notetaking (three pages). Interviews averaged 72 minutes (range: 39-88 min). I first transcribed the interviews verbatim in Mandarin and then translated the text into English (87 pages, single-spaced). Within the transcripts, italics are emphases while “CAPS” indicates higher volume (see Tracy, 2013).

A thematic narrative analysis (Riessman, 2008) with an iterative approach (Tracy, 2013) suited the data. A thematic narrative analysis seeks the guidance of existing concepts and frameworks and preserves the sequence of storytelling in presentation. An iterative approach is a reflexive process alternating between emic data coding and etic use of existing explanations from scholarship (Tracy, 2013). First, I read and reread the transcription line by line and coded freely. In this process, extensive narratives were divided into sections by codes. Then, I identified connections among the open categories to develop higher-level themes/categories. I noticed the prominence of talk about political “identity/shen fen,” the richness of participants’ answers to the question “on what occasions have you felt the saliency of your gender,” and the plentifulness of points where participants contradicted themselves. In response to these patterns, I revisited relevant literature on identity and identification and women professionals’ paradoxical experiences for perspectives and wrote down memos about how coded sections could be interpreted drawing from these perspectives. Informed by literature, I further combined categories into themes and identified their properties. I summarized key findings in Chinese and sent them to participants for member checks (Tracy, 2010). Participants quickly affirmed themes concerning suzhi and guanxi, although “abject” took more effort to explain. The next section presents these themes.

Suzhi Work(s)

Suzhi came to matter as an agent of paradox in the becoming of these women leaders. Suzhi is an indigenous Chinese descriptor for the nature of things and the inborn and cultivated qualities of people (for how its dimensions evolved historically, see Wang et al., 2014). Suzhi matters to the current findings because it concerns qualification and is a central concept for all contexts of “human resources-related issues,” including the grouping of “people” as China’s “first resource” (Wang et al., 2014, p. 99). Individuals and groups can be of “high” or “low” suzhi and even lack specific suzhi. Moreover, suzhi as an ambiguous notion is used as “a key explanatory variable for the under-representation of women in political life,” because of the assumptive women’s “low quality” compared to men (Howell, 2002, p. 49), which contradicts high suzhi associated with leadership positions (Wang et al., 2014). Suzhi—or references of its areas such as personality traits and physical status—occurred in all participants’ accounts in which they shared senses of their identity as women political leaders. Rather than being a passive concept used for ordering bodies, leadership suzhi materialized as a body that not only constituted the identity of political leaders but also transmitted intensities through participants’ embodiment and moved them to perform specific work.

A sense shared by participants was that suzhi/suyang (synonyms) was constitutive of occupation, as when Xing said, “My occupation is that I think I am a public figure . . . a civil servant, a leader/cadre, so to speak . . . like any other occupation . . . it has some requirements regarding basic skills, knowledge, and suyang.” Mo, reflecting on the dynamics between women and men as leaders, stated, “[F]irst, a woman . . . you must let yourself possess suyang required of leadership.” While participants acknowledged women’s agentic enactment through which suzhi/suyang can be obtained (i.e., let oneself have it), the irony was that the association between leadership suzhi and women took a lot of work in their narratives. For example, Ruxi generalized: “Chinese women’s suzhi isn’t high enough,” and thus they need constant improvement. Xing reflected, “[gender-related challenges] obviously exist, because . . . men still play the leading role in politics . . . So, there are fewer women . . . it’s not entirely social, and maybe attributable to women’s thought or anatomy.” Through this attribution, a misalignment/disassociation between political leadership and women’s mind and body—two areas/dimensions of suzhi (Wang et al., 2014)—formed. This work-body misalignment was also enacted by particular men whom participants encountered at/for work. For instance, Mo shared:

When I just became a leader, I wasn’t even 30 . . . I was managing some inspectors, who were usually pretty tough . . . they were some men who retired from the military. So, they wouldn’t listen to me, because, “You’re a woman, you’re young, and you don’t really know, how come you are managing me!”

In the hyper-masculine situation made of “tough” military men, Mo’s male subordinates negated the legitimacy of her leadership by problematizing her gender and youthfulness. Hence, leadership suzhi in this specific encounter was made present as something disassociated from a young woman.

Suzhi assumed an intensity-transmitting body in participants’ work-related encounters, when demonstrating superior suzhi became central to them viewing themselves as legitimate leaders. To me, a co-present body, the intensities when filtered linguistically were feelings such as anxiety, fear, and simultaneous pride. For example, right before Mo’s statement shown above about leadership suyang, she reflected:

[I]n the workplace, if you, a woman, were at about the same level as men, people would look down upon you—you’d have no place! If you were slightly better [than men], standing out a bit, [they] would be jealous of you, seeing you as a rival. [However,] if you surpassed him A LOT, meaning you were so much better, then he had no option but to admire you, and then you would be distinguishable.

Intensity—sorted into a range of emotions (disdain, envy, admiration)—arose from this statement when men encountered a woman symbolically to determine whether her performance met expected suyang. That Mo shared this statement as a frequent reminder for herself also heightened the intensity. More intensely, Jin’an shared:

[I] wasn’t inferior to men, for I always thought . . . a woman leader’s worst fear would be that others see you as a “vase” (hua ping), a decoration, and that you are in the chief position simply to meet the Party’s gender [affirmative] requirement . . . as a chief leader, I’d just quit considering whether I’m a man or woman, [and I] mustn’t do worse than men . . . I hope no one says that I’m in the chief position because of my gender advantage [or], “This woman as a director or deputy director is no match to men.” I seek perfection in terms of my career roles. I don’t want to hear veiled criticism. I hope not to fall short of any aspect compared to other people . . . I thought to myself that I must do better than men, achieving greater than men, and I made it.

Intensities were touchable through Jin’an’s multiple verbal and nonverbal cues. For instance, “vase,” her “worst fear,” in Mandarin could be a metaphor for someone pleasing to the eyes but of little usefulness, which indeed gave women’s inferior suzhi (as an assumption) a concrete shape. Changes in tone and repeated self-evaluative statements concerning her qualification (determined by suzhi) further intensified her narratives. Moreover, in both statements, the symbolic “men” automatically became agents embodying political/leadership aptitude, by whom women leaders were evaluated. Therefore, leadership suzhi came together with men as participants negotiating their own performativity, forming a paradox within which political leadership as a type of work was aligned with the bodies of men and in which women and feminine embodiment struggled to fit. Within such boundaries, even established affirmative action practices turned into agents materializing the work-woman body misalignment.

Paradoxically, suzhi was also an empowering agent. For example, intensities toward the end of the above two excerpts shifted from anxiety to a sense of pride (e.g., “I made it”). This pattern—acknowledging the difficulties of being a woman political leader with leadership determined by masculine suzhi while arriving at “I could do/made it”—was shared among participants. Indeed, this sense of agency despite estrangement was central to participants’ narratives. Moreover, ongoing workplace relationships where their qualification/legitimacy as leaders was challenged by other members were also opportunities for them to transform interpersonal relationships and local leadership and gender discourses. For instance, Mo convinced and earned the loyalty of those “tough men” by solving a crisis and felt proud of hearing their comment: “This female comrade is indeed so capable!” Minhui was appointed to be the chief leader of a unit notorious for personnel issues including an “untamable” deputy. Despite antagonization, she “tamed” him by demonstrating her “abilities” (that she could drink, write, and lead), and the deputy published an article entitled The Grace of Women Leaders dedicated to her. Participants even arrived at discourses disrupting the association between masculinity and male bodies when addressing suzhi (despite still perpetuating gender dualism). For example, gender identities became contextual and fluid when Chun discussed her physical suzhi:

I was able to do what male colleagues were capable of . . . once the male colleagues were enforcing [a regulatory] policy. They went up to a mountainous area that’s 800 meters above sea level to [confiscate] a tree from the offender’s property, and I participated as well . . . when I worked among a bunch of men, I was the warrior Chun. When I worked [in a different position] with a group of women, I felt like a fine Chun.

In this account, multiple bodies (e.g., male colleagues, mountains, the tree), made present by Chun, materialized her physical suzhi. In her concluding sentence, she enacted a multifaceted self whose identities and gendered images were spatially contingent on other co-present bodies.

Guanxi Work(s)

Guanxi also came to matter as an agent of paradox. Guanxi means relationships/connections, a notion salient to the everyday lives of Chinese people. Guanxi as a construct has been conceptually linked to networks, social capital, and social exchange, and captures the contextual complexities regarding professional networking and building social ties (e.g., an exchange of gifts is tacitly expected in many contexts) (see., Szeto et al., 2006). In Chinese cultures, the depth and width of guanxi often determine people’s mobility within and across systems (Smart & Hsu, 2007). Guanxi mattered to participants’ understanding of themselves as women leaders regarding at least two layers, as in guanxi/relationships with their immediate subordinates or co-workers, and professional guanxi/networks through which they are connected to other units and members of the political system.

For participants, a crucial layer to “being/as a leader” was that leaders must be savvy at managing the intricate relationships among members and units, including developing and maintaining good/close guanxi with their own leadership board/team and superior leaders at higher administrative levels. However, this guanxi practice when coming along with the female-male segregation (i.e., a binary) was often not practical, to say the least. For example, Jin’an shared:

[M]y deputies are all men, so you must particularly avoid being too close to any male deputy even if you appreciate him a lot. You must keep in mind that you are a woman. If you forgot about this and became close to him, treating him like a brother, others would gossip. So, you MUST BE particularly careful when managing the superior-subordinate guanxi, or else [you’d] be easily involved in scandals and rumors.

In another excerpt shown earlier, Jin’an stated, “I’d just quit considering whether I’m a man or woman,” to address suzhi. Paradoxically, within the sex segregation built on gender binary enacted through others’ talk, she must also “keep in mind” her gender identity when co-inhabiting a presence with an all-men team. Talk like scandals and rumors also suggested a sexualized presence of women leaders, a point to be developed in the last theme. A sense of anxiety (literally and tonally emphasized “you must. . .”) in her account further materialized the gendered guanxi by evidencing its capacity to touch or transmit affect.

In another case, uncomfortable feelings also occurred when Chun was dismissed by some men/man at networking events as somebody not worth their/his attention.

Some leaders treated [those who] are close to them [partially] . . . This [person] was not close to me at all. So, when you warmly greeted him, he might act indifferently. I just smiled and let it go. I could understand that. When you tried to shake his hand, he might turn away or didn’t even bother to reach out. There were people like this often, but I just smiled and let go . . . For one, it could be because [I was] a woman. He might have thought it’s unnecessary to have dealings with a female colleague . . . For another, maybe he was trying to avoid rumors, and avoid being too close to a female colleague, to prevent others’ suspicion or whatever.

Chun labeled these encounters as being “awkward.” She tried to make sense of the senses shared during and beyond their encounters by (a) repeating that she could understand and let go (a sense of agency, perhaps), (b) considering people’s accountability for their “opinions and feelings,” and (c) attributing such awkward encounters to the men-women binary enacted also by “others” not involved in the specific encounter. What the actors in this account presented was the breached formality and politeness otherwise characteristic of guanxi (Smart & Hsu, 2007). A “female colleague” in a male-dominated guanxi network, was her presence even included to be among the sensible bodies constitutive of guanxi rules?

Guanxi increasingly embodied determinacy by whose boundaries participants were marginalized. This exclusion could assume a higher degree of materiality involving formal documentation and positions (Cooren, 2020), like Mo’s lost promotion. She had a “guaranteed” promotion anticipated by colleagues. Unexpectedly, the position was “taken over” by a male subordinate whom Mo outperformed in every professional respect. Frustrated, Mo visited the provincial government in a different city to confront the superior who promoted the man.

[I asked,] “Why him, not me?” (LAUGHTER) “WHY HIM, NOT ME!” (tapping the desk) . . .Then I [listed] my experiences, conditions, degrees and diplomas, professional titles, the level of my work, my abilities, what I’ve done, and so on, ALL BETTER [than his]! Eventually, he said, “You’ve been a leader for many years yourself. Some opportunities and factors are fortuitous” . . . SAY NO MORE! That’s because I wasn’t close enough to him, whereas the other person was right by his side.

In this animated account, various actors came to participate in a struggle through which Mo tried to understand a literal threat to her leadership identity. Despite her attempt to evidence her qualification by listing a range of concrete objects, Guanxi mattered effortlessly more so than all other matters through the superior’s ambiguous response. She then explained how this lost promotion was a gendered matter.

About connecting with people, besides connecting for work, more of it is outside of the eight hours, [which] shows the emotional/relational connection better . . . I’m aware of how to do it theoretically, but not emotionally and practically willing to. Because, first, I have no time; next, I think fulfilling my duties is what I should do; third, I’m afraid of being seen by others as the kind of woman who gets the promotion via some improper/unethical relations.

Mo’s reasoning further complicated guanxi as an actor with which participants worked. First, participants understood guanxi both positively and negatively, in that (maintaining) guanxi, on the one hand, brought opportunities and demonstrated political skillfulness; on the other hand, it could harm the legitimacy of leadership identity. This, in part, made guanxi more complicated than similar concepts such as network in that it entails opportunities and (political) corruption (Smart & Hsu, 2007). Indeed, participants siphoned from such dialectics to empower themselves. Not only did Mo disassociate building guanxi from her official “duties,” she also drew on her lack of access to guanxi to evidence her legitimacy: “Many male and female leaders said, ‘Mo was one of the few who got promoted for her competencies,’ which I think were the best comments I got [and] were exactly what I needed!” Indeed, most participants emphasized their lack of connections with powerful individuals to foreground their “abilities/competencies” (neng li) as factors attributable to their success. In contrast, women leaders using guanxi (e.g., for promotion) became scandalous and improper in this narrative. Paradoxically, guanxi, which induced negative affect and on occasions hindered their career progression, empowered participants, as they ironically perpetuated a stigma attached to women in politics.

Abject Body Work(s)

Direct and indirect references of suzhi and guanxi were frequent in participants’ narratives. In the last theme, however, I turn to the concept, abjection, for capturing an “emblematic body” (Ashcraft, 2013) of a woman political leader whose symbolic presence touched/moved participants’ actual bodies by evoking strong feelings and changing how they perform their everyday selves at work. Abjection is experienced through affect when aspects of the self are found outside of norms and orders by which identities are made understandable, characterized by anxiety, disgust, repulsion, and fear or senses of uncleanliness and estrangement; however, people’s strong desire for distinguishing subject and object simultaneously renders the abject—the in-between—attractive/fascinating (Rizq, 2013). When women occupy positions of power within masculine orders, a “paradox of One and the Other” underlies their abjection (Mavin & Grandy, 2016, p. 1101). In this theme, abjection was not only about participants’ experience of troubled subject formation, but it materialized as a symbolic woman body.

As alluded to in previous themes, participants made present a symbolic woman leader who tended to be the subject of rumors and scandals. They referred to this body as “the kind of woman” or “some women.” Suzhi and guanxi both mattered. The kind of woman in politics was of the “low-suzhi” type, a “vase” of little use. This kind of woman was all about her feminine looks appealing to men rather than quality and ability, who likely obtained resources and advanced to certain positions either solely because of gender affirmative action or through unethical, scandalous approaches to guanxi. To participants, this woman embodied a perfect misalignment. The symbolic woman embodied participants’ abjection because they felt distressed about their selves’ possible association with her by shared gender identity, like when Jin’an said, “a woman leader’s worst fear would be that others see you as a vase, a decoration,” or when Mo said, “I’m afraid of being seen by others as the kind of woman who gets the promotion via some improper/unethical relations.” In the meantime, their fascination was shown when they could not help acknowledging her presence, presenting her as a body that they did not wish to inhabit.

A simultaneous attraction-distaste was apparent when Ruxi considered the relationship between physical attraction and women’s careers opportunities: “Society requires women to be pretty. The extent to which you receive attention is based on your appearance. Young women need to be pretty to get more opportunities.” However, she quickly disassociated herself from attractive women to highlight her ethical career progression as a woman leader. Jin’an considered people’s fascination with and scrutinization of successful women’s sexuality, which turned physical attraction into a disadvantage:

Among my friends . . . almost every woman leader who has achieved a similar position to mine had someone spreading rumors and scandals behind her back . . . It’s an issue shared by every professional woman, not just leaders or cadres . . . there are many successful women, but once they’re in trouble, even if it’s due to financial reasons or other problems, people would first attack them based on sexual relationships. [It’s] an easy target . . . for younger women, especially those who are not homely, this is quite a challenge. So, women leaders wouldn’t regularly wear feminine clothes, and would usually present [themselves] in a more gender-neutral fashion. So professional attires are gender-neutral.

Toward the end of this excerpt, objects embodying femininity also came to constitute the materiality of a woman body rendered the abject in politics, who/which could further defy the masculine-hiding-behind-gender-neutral norm by materializing her femininity to a higher degree. Xing’s abjection materialized through her one-time inhabitation of this body:

[I] usually wore formal suits, and I was/am very proper, I guess, but I also like(d) floral dresses, and I had one. In fact, the floral pattern was rather modest, not the showy type, but still covered the whole body with flowers . . . Once, I wore that [dress] when I [went to a rural district for civil engineering programs]. I was there getting information concerning the relocation of some telegraph poles and the budget. That’s [when] camera phones weren’t even as popular as these days. But maybe someone took a picture of me wearing a dress sitting in a farmyard, surrounded by men, alongside the shabby [countryside] buildings . . . Then two days later, on the [local] internet, people were discussing how this woman leader “went to the countryside” in a floral dress. Some others said what to wear was her own business if it didn’t affect the work. In fact, that didn’t affect the work AT ALL! So, people paid more attention to you wearing a floral dress, instead of you actually being there [for work]. Everyone paid more attention to your appearance. Indeed, I usually intentionally downplayed [feminine appearance].

In this account, femininity emerged to be the abject enacted by Xing and her floral dress and everybody else (e.g., men, the humble countryside setting, people online) that/who made the boundaries separating femininity and leaders’ work. Within a relation where masculinity and male bodies became the norm, Xing struggled to feel proper when her body was in touch with a feminine dress that she liked, rather than covered by formal suits that embodied masculinity—a state of abjection. On the internet, other people were also intrigued and disturbed by femininity materializing in a masculine work setting. Of interest was the “what to wear was her own business” comment, which gave a glimpse at how the mattering femininity might discursively change how others understood the identity of political leaders. Indeed, Xing acknowledged that nowadays, ten years after that encounter, people became more “open-minded” and she was thinking about growing “long, flowy hair.” The symbolic woman might be evolving after all.