Journalism and Media Communication

the 1980s, and the Evolution of Modern Consumer Culture For anyone that lived during the 1980s, there is no doubt these years left an impression on America, both economically and culturally. The popular culture and economic climate of the eighties have contributed significantly to the rise of the vast consumer culture today. This essay will examine the economic climate and popular culture of the 1980s in comparison to the philosophies of Karl Marx. To typify the popular culture of the period, this composition will cite several popular films of the decade including: Pretty in Pink, Trading Places and Wall Street.

This essay presents a case study of one of the largest and most popular slash fan sites for the Chinese reality TV show Super Girl, Fei Se Chao Nv (hereafter FSCN). I argue that an examination of fan discourses on FSCN indicates how this slash fan site acts as a middle ground between normative notions of deviant lesbianism and queer fantasies about media characters. Fans often project normative cultural positions onto their virtual slash practices and, as a result, constantly suspend their queer challenging of mainstream culture’s heteronormative ideologies.

This short essay offers a feminist reading of the ambivalent ways in which non-normative masculinities afford a paradoxical site for cultural exploitation and legitimization during the Chinese TV industry’s continual dialogues with global resource flows. By presenting three case studies of the contradictory reimagining of non-normative masculinities in three sensational, formatted Chinese reality TV shows—the 2006 Super Girl (SG), the 2012 The Voice of China (TVC), and the 2013 Your Face Sounds Familiar (YFSF)—I unfold a controversial layer of contemporary Chinese queer televisuality.

A Combined review of the following four books: Television and The Modernization Ideal in 1980S China: Dazzling the Eyes, Huike Wen (2014) Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 155 pp., ISBN: 9780739178867, h/bk, $75.00
Family Revolution: Marital Strife in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Visual Culture, Hui Faye Xiao (2014) Seattle, WA: The University of Washington Press, 247 pp., ISBN: 9780295993492, h/bk, $75.00
Staging Corruption: Chinese Television and Politics, Ruoyun Bai (2015) Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 276 pp., ISBN: 9789622091832, h/bk, $99.00
Chinese Television in The Twenty-First Century: Entertaining the Nation, Ruoyun Bai and Geng Song (Eds) (2015), New York: Routledge, 200 pp., ISBN: 9780415745123, h/bk, $145.00

Online gossip is an important site of negotiation and contestation
for today’s global popular culture in the post-audience age. This
article presents a discourse analysis of Chinese fans’ queer gossip
about the Danish female model, Freja Beha Erichsen, in one of the
most sizable and influential cyber Chinese fandoms, The Garden
of Eden Communication Site for Foreign Series (GE). Erichsen has
been famous worldwide for her queer persona and homosocial/
homoerotic relationships. The gossip discussed in the research was
mainly produced in GE between September 2007 and December
2012. My examination highlights the ambivalent strategy—namely,
queer normalization—employed by GE fans. I show that the fans
queerly contested yet also renormalized the commercialized images
of Erichsen. Furthermore, I illustrate how GE fans both debated and
contradictorily reimagined Erichsen’s personal lesbian relationships
based on Chinese-specific social-familial and marital ideals pertaining
to women’s genders and sexualities. Ultimately, I argue that this
tendency of GE fans to craft “desirable,” “normalized” queer fantasies
about Erichsen can be seen as an interesting set of queer strategies
that allow the fans to creatively reconfigure these local Chinese
normative cultural conventions and traditions as viable models for
queer women’s survival and expression.

A globally formatted, Idol-style, reality singing contest produced by a Chinese provincial TV station, Super Girl (SG; Hunan Satellite TV, 2004–2006) received staggeringly huge commercial success nationwide. It only allowed female participants and featured a large number of gender-defying finalists. This article explores femslash fan fiction published and circulated on feise chaonü (FSCN), one of the most popular Mainland Chinese femslash fandoms of 2006 SG participants. The lesbian romance depicted in FSCN fan fiction is inspired by and further articulates the intentionally "queered" content of SG. However, these lesbian stories are often narrated within culturally distant, fictional settings, such as Western, futuristic, or historical backdrops. My reading of FSCN femslash fan fiction explores how and why this prevailing, yet self-contradictory, femslash writing strategy helps the fans to queerly construct an "alternate world" that enacts, facilitates, or legitimizes Chinese lesbianism. I reveal the underlying ways in which this FSCN worlding practice ambiguously appropriates and ridicules contemporary Chinese female gender- and sexuality-related norms and ideals. Ultimately, I argue that the "worlded" contexts and plotlines of queer fantasy in FSCN femslash can be construed as active fannish responses to and negotiations with the realities and histories of Chinese lesbian-related public cultures.

On 28 April 2017, the first single, 'Action' (xingdongpai), of the newly formed Chinese pop group FFC-Acrush (Acrush in short) was released in Beijing. In the music video, five androgynous young people dance and sing like K-pop male idols. Yet, long before the song's release, the band had already sensationalised Chinese cyberspace for their cross-dressing personas in public appearances and promotion. As the first Chinese 'boyband' formed by five young, handsome, masculine Chinese girls between 18 and 24 years old, millions of Chinese female fans have gone fanatic for Acrush members' androgynous beauty, despite their cross-gender impersonation.

Chinese-speaking popular cultures have never been so queer as in this digital, globalist age. In mainland China where entertainment media products with explicit homosexual themes have long been banned from public screening, its contemporary media industry is nonetheless eager to ride the wave of queer connotations and sentiments. In December 2015, Go Princess Go! (Taizifei shengzhiji, LeTV, 2015), a thirty-six-episode, lighthearted comedy peppered with gender flips (xingbie fanzhuan) and elements of BL (Boys' Love, a fan subculture narrating male homoeroticism) and GL (Girls' Love, a fan subculture narrating female homoeroticism) became one of the most popular web-based TV dramas in mainland China. The show had been viewed 2.4 billion times before it was pulled offline by government regulators for revision because of its explicitly sexual and indecent content in January 2016. 1 In Hong Kong and Taiwan, queer cultures not only have permeated offline consumerist societies, social media uses, and cyberspaces, but also have appeared in political movements. 2 In the 2014 Hong Kong Umbrella Movement (Yusan yundong, a prodemocracy political protest initiated by Hong Kong students), online BL fans and student protestors creatively paired two male student leaders, Alex Chow and Lester Shum, as gay lovers and produced a variety of fan art devoted to this couple. 3 Similarly, earlier in 2014, during the Sunflower Student Movement of Taiwan (Taiyanghua xueyun, a Taiwanese civic protest), two male student leaders, Chen Wei-ting and Lin Fei-fan, were also "rumored to be lovers." 4 In response to this proliferation of queer representations, productions, fantasies, and desires, especially as manifested online, Boys ' Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (QFC hereafter) explores extended, diversified, digitized, and transculturally informed fan communities and practices that have been devoted to and that have cultivated various forms of queerness. The focus of this volume travels among fans of transnational androgynous celebrities, such as Hong Kong idol HOCC (Denise Wan-See Ho, see chapter 7), mainland Chinese superstar Li Yuchun (Chris Lee, see chapter 8), Taiwanese actress Joe Chen Chiao-En (chapter 6),

My interview (with coeditor Ling Yang) by Prof. Henry Jenkins on my collaborated anthology Boys' Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. The interview was posted as three parts on his academic blog, available here: http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2018/1/14/boys-love-cosplay-and-chinese-fandom-an-interview

Super Voice Girl (SVG) was an Idol-style Chinese reality show that allowed only female contestants. The show became famous worldwide for featuring gender-nonconforming contestants. This article examines the rise and fall of the most popular online Chinese queer fandom of the 2006 SVG in the forum feise chaonv (FSCN). I focus on the fans' ambivalent play with Chinese-specific female homo-erotic imaginaries that initially popularized and protected but eventually led to the decay of FSCN as a queer fantasy space. First, I look at the subtle ways in which the 2006 SVG tactically normalized the female homoerotic imaginaries surrounding its tomboyish national finalists. Then, I examine FSCN fans' struggles with both this female homoeroticism and the stigmatization of real-world lesbianism. I demonstrate that the fictional imagination of female homoeroticism sustained FSCN as a popular queer fantasy space after the show ended. Additionally, I detail the fans' self-contradictory reactions to several real-life lesbian incidents involving the finalists that gradually came to light in the post-show years. I argue that the fans' confinement of female homoeroticism to a youthful, memorable fantasy scenario that was substantially shaped by both Chinese mainstream and lesbian,

In the past decade, mainland China has witnessed a proliferation of nonnormatively gendered images on reality TV shows. This research presents a case study of queer female stardom in the most profitable and influential Chinese reality singing competition show Super Voice Girl (SVG). Through a careful reading of the cultural-televisual techniques and hybridised formats SVG has employed in the construction of its queer celebrities over the last ten years, I argue that the show has exemplified a mainland Chinese-specific queer sensationalism, in which queer female images on reality TV do not necessarily signify lesbianism. Instead, through complex negotiations with diverse commercial, political, and sociocultural factors and forces, SVG presents a highly commercialised, de-lesbianised queer pop culture, which is compatible with contemporary Chinese ideological, economic, and political reforms on the one hand but discursively voices queer agency on the other.

In the mid-1990s the popular adoption of digital technologies by the general public gradually became evident in non-English-speaking regions, especially non–South Asian countries. The internet was first introduced to mainland China in 1994, to Singapore in 1994, and to Malaysia in 1995 (Berry, Martin, and Yue 2003). By 2002 Japanese was the third-most-used language on the internet after Chinese and English (McLelland 2003). In 2010 approximately one half of Vietnam’s urban population had used the internet (Justumus et al. 2013). Furthermore, by 2016, the number of internet users in the Philippines had reached 44 million, which represented more than 40 percent of the country’s population. Meanwhile, India witnessed its internet and cellular mobile phone booms early in the twenty-first century (Shahani 2008). The popular use of digital tools in making short videos and circulating these media materials (either online or in the VCD or DVD formats) for sociopolitical and/or entertainment purposes has also been widespread in Asian media markets since 2000.

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My proposal for "queer TV China" to be considered a serious, major academic field that will bring queer media studies, television studies, and China studies into critical conversations should not come as a surprise to most scholars and students of Chinese and Asian media studies. A decade has passed since TV China, one of the first and most comprehensive academic books to treat the study of Chinese-language television as a fecund scholarly endeavor and to examine its production, circulation, and consumption, was published.[1] Now, at the end of the second decade of the twentyfirst century, television in China is no longer a simple propaganda tool nor an innocent form of entertainment viewed by scholars as inferior to literature and film. In their 2015 anthology Chinese Television in the Twenty-First Century: Entertaining the Nation, Ruoyun Bai and Geng Song proposed to explore "Chinese television entertainment in the context of globalization, commercialization, and digital technologies" and to understand the medium as "a site for ideology contestation, and hegemony." In their introduction to this productive collection, the editors also called for more innovative research on Chinese television viewers, who have become increasingly active and enabled in our digitized age but have received little attention by scholars. The diverse transnational communities and digital practices that have flourished in post-2000 Chinese cyberspace have facilitated both trans-geocultural and cross-linguistic flows of television information and "an intensified privatization of television viewing (via cell phones and the internet)." For instance, one of the first large-scale transnational fandoms to gain American media exposure and worldwide scholarly attention was an online Chinese fan-subtitling group dedicated to the translation and recirculation (though by largely illegal means) of the American TV drama Prison Break (Fox, 2005(Fox, -2009)).[5] Meanwhile, even within the mainstream Chinese media industry, a growing number of online video-streaming websites and smartphone applications have transformed traditional modes of television content distribution and reception through their collaboration with China's regional and national TV stations. This has resulted in the creation of online broadcasters who invest financially in the production of television programs and enable audiences to participate creatively in online television distribution and broadcasting.[6] For example, the burgeoning "bullet curtain" (danmu) culture in contemporary China allows audiences to add comments to media content streamed online, thereby challenging univocal meanings and ideologies in the mainstream domestic media. The digital era also has advanced "knowledge production, identity formation, and political and cultural movements" among Chinese LGBTQ and feminist groups, albeit in complicated ways.[8] For example, the Beijing-based gay dating app Blued was launched in 2012 and now has the largest user community in the world. Along with the #MeToo movement, which emerged in the U.S. in 2017, local Chinese feminist activists have tactically employed digital tools to mobilize transregional and transnational anti-hetero-patriarchal movements.