‘The most beautiful teacher’: patriotism, gender and affective governance in Chinese higher education

Abstract Becoming academics has been hard-won by Chinese women, with over half the nation’s academic workforce now female. But the conditions for academic women’s flourishing remain fraught, even as they are publicly celebrated. This paper explores how discourses of patriotism and gender operate at one Chinese university through public pedagogies that function as techniques for the governance of gendered conduct. Specifically, we perform an affective-discursive analysis of the Most Beautiful Teacher Award when news of local winners is disseminated via campus media. While acclaiming academic women, the award is wrought through discourses that reproduce gender norms while affective registers are mobilised that hold women to conflicting measures of performativity. We suggest that the award is an expression of affective governance whose harms are concealed beneath a gender-egalitarian guise. The paper is offered as feminist knowledge production in support of academic women.