Acquiring a divine composure: Singlehood, excessiveness, and the changing gendered order

Singlehood scholars have long noted that single women are of-ten portrayed as leading lonely, empty lives as well as being too selfish, too educated, and too successful. This paper contributes to the growing field of singlehood studies by proposing a theoretical framework that explores these images through the duality of lack and excess as well as the concept of moral panic. By exploring the notions of excessiveness and lack, moral panic, and moral respectability, I explore the new ways in which stigmas of female singlehood are bestowed with discursive force and power. The first part of my chapter examines this conceptualization in the North American and European contexts; the second part scrutinizes these themes further in an Asian context and more specifically, in relation to China’s “leftover” ideology.
China’s “leftover” discourse illustrates how this category has become a concept through which singlehood, families, and collective national life are imagined. One’s status (single or married, with or without children) and age become important axes of signification distinguishing between surplus and non-surplus populations, the condemned and the praised re-spectively. Accordingly, single women are perceived as personally respon-sible and accountable for their surplus status and the lack of a man in their lives. Thus, my proposal is that the contemporary global discourse about female singlehood should be explored as a significant discursive site, a place where images of women’s autonomies and life choices are circulated and evaluated. In this light, I argue that contemporary studies of female singlehood should be situated in the broader framework of gen-dered forms of oppression and new modes of subjection.