Research Framework: In Taiwan, parents are increasingly concerned about their childen’s future and deliberately invest in their future competitiveness. In a highly competitive environment where female beauty can bring many material and immaterial benefits, mothers are encouraged to transmit some aesthetic values and behaviors to their daughters.

Objective: This paper aims to analyze the little-studied phenomenon of the transmission of beauty care by mothers to their daughters in the Taiwanese neoliberal context.

Methodology: To do so, we mobilized a qualitative methodology based upon 70 semi-structured interviews and participant observation in Taiwan between 2014 and 2017. 

Results: Our research showed that, in order to maximize their chances of success in their personal, marital, professional and social life, beauty is seen by women as a decisive asset. Mothers are then held accountable to teach their daughters to take care of their physical appearance. Three dominant themes emerged from the participants’ comments regarding this aesthetic training: moderating or reducing the appetite, having white skin, having a cute behavior and appearance.

Conclusions: The skills necessary for aesthetic work are learned from deliberate investment. Mothers have the responsability for this aesthetic training. This gendered and generational dimension of the training of future « aesthetic entrepreneurs » is decisive, but often invisibilized in discussions of neoliberal individualism.   

Contributions: Our research allows us to understand the new gendered modalities of parenting in a context where the children are considered as human capital in the making. 

• beauty
• motherhood
• eating attitude
• neoliberalism
• Taiwan
• human capital
• aesthetic entrepreneur

https://journals.openedition.org/efg/15019#article-15019