Liu Xiaoqing as a celebrity site: gendered ageing and the remaking of female sexual subjectivity in postfeminist China

This article examines the star text of Chinese actress and entrepreneur Liu Xiaoqing (whose reported birth year varies across sources, most commonly cited from 1950 to 1955) as a diagnostic site for understanding gendered ageing and the cultural production of female sexual subjectivity in postfeminist China. Spanning four decades of public visibility across socialist cinematic heritage, market reform, entertainment industrialisation, and platformisation, Liu’s career has made her a persistent focal point of contestation over the boundaries of age-appropriate femininity. Adopting a cultural-analytic methodology rooted in celebrity studies, this article treats Liu’s star text as a mediated public persona assembled from autobiographies, interviews, screen roles, promotional imagery, platform content, and popular gossip rather than as a reducible biographical subject. The central argument is that Liu constitutes a diagnostic case revealing how postfeminist empowerment operates in China through confidence talk, self-branding, and individualised agency, while remaining constrained by moral scrutiny, heteronormative expectations, market capture, and platform governance. Her performance of ‘agelessness’ constitutes a paradoxical form of celebrity agency: it stages resistance to the desexualisation and erasure of ageing female stars while simultaneously complying with a normative aesthetic regime that treats youth as the primary condition of market visibility.