Feminized Revival: Han Chinese Dress, Gender and Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary China

Women hold disproportionate authority in China’s contemporary Hanfu revival, where Han-ness operates through implicit cultural codes rather than explicit ethnic claims. Recent scholarship highlights how Han-ness circulates as a moral, etiquette-centred grammar of “proper culture.” Drawing on 18 months of ethnography across six sites in China, this article shows how gender mediates that grammar and shapes the performances of Han-ness. Women, as arbiters of taste and propriety, enact an assertive banal nationalism through aesthetic and organizational labour. Men, marginal within the field, perform defensive overt nationalism through didactic historical narratives and moralized claims to legitimacy. To explain this pattern of identity formation and boundary making, I advance the notion of gendered everyday nationhood. The article contributes to scholarship on nationalism by showing how embodied practices sustain national belonging, and how mundane evaluation and boundary policing reproduce nationhood in everyday life.