A taste of class: Manuals for becoming woman

This essay addresses the making of woman as postsocialist class-object, developing core notions of class-making and spiritual homelessness through an exploration of the forms of the feminine in the taste structures in contemporary urban China. Our key observation is that beautification, sexual styling, and spiritual/cultural cultivation are consistently linked in narratives of ¿becoming-woman¿ in a newly successful genre of aspirational literature, which we call ¿manuals of elite civility.¿