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Chinese-speaking popular cultures have never been so queer in this digital, globalist age. The title of this pioneering volume, Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan already gives an idea of the colorful, multifaceted realms the fans inhabit today. Contributors to this collection situate the proliferation of (often online) queer representations, productions, fantasies, and desires as a reaction against the norms in discourses surrounding nation-states, linguistics, geopolitics, genders, and sexualities. Moving beyond the easy polarities between general resistance and capitulation, Queer Fan Cultures explores the fans’ dive...
The 2010s have seen an explosion in popularity of Chinese television featuring same-sex intimacies, LGBTQ-identified celebrities, and explicitly homoerotic storylines even as state regulations on “vulgar” and “immoral” content grow more prominent. This emerging “queer TV China” culture has generated diverse, cyber, and transcultural queer fan communities. Yet these seemingly progressive televisual productions and practices are caught between multilayered sociocultural and political-economic forces and interests. Taking “queer” as a verb, an adjective, and a noun, this volume counters the Western-centric conception of homosexuality as the only way to understand nonnormative id...
Chinese-speaking popular cultures have never been so queer in this digital, globalist age. 'Boys' Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols' describes the colourful, multifaceted realms that fans inhabit today. The contributors situate the proliferation of (often online) queer representations, productions, fantasies and desires as a reaction against the norms in discourses surrounding nation-states, linguistics, geopolitics, genders and sexualities.
Queer Literature in the Sinosphere is the most up-to-date English-language study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) themed literature and culture in the Chinese-speaking world. From classical homoerotic texts to contemporary boys' love fan fiction, this book showcases the richness and diversity of queer Chinese literature across the full spectrum of genres, styles, topics and cultural politics. The book features authors and literary works from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and the global Chinese diaspora. Featuring chapters by leading scholars from around the world, this book rewrites literature, history and culture from a queer lens in China and globally.
Lala (lesbian) and gay communities in mainland China have emerged rapidly in the 21st century. Alongside new freedoms and modernizing reforms, and with mainstream media and society increasingly tolerant, lalas still experience immense family and social pressures to a degree that this book argues is deeply gendered. The first anthropological study to examine everyday lala lives, intimacies, and communities in China, the chapters explore changing articulations of sexual subjectivity, gendered T-P (tomboy-wife) roles, family and kinship, same-sex weddings, lala-gay contract marriages, and community activism. Engebretsen analyzes lala strategies of complicit transgressions to balance surface res...
Contemporary Queer Chinese Art is the first English-language academic book that explores the intersections of queer culture and contemporary Chinese art from the mid-1980s to the present. This book brings together 15 internationally renowned artists, activists, curators and scholars to explore heterogeneous expressions of Chineseness and queerness in contemporary art from China and Chinese diasporas in Asia, Europe and North America. Examining contemporary visual art, performance and activism, this book offers a rich archive of queer Chinese artistic expressions. It provides valuable insights into the status quo and intersectional struggles of Chinese artists who identify themselves as queer and who have associated their work with queer positionalities and perspectives. By sharing personal experiences, art expressions and critical insights about what it means to be queer and Chinese in a transnational context, the book reveals multiple forms and potentialities of queer politics in the domains of art and activism.
The new celebration of women's aggression in contemporary culture, from Kill Bill and Prime Suspect to the artists group Toxic Titties. In the past, more often than not, aggressive women have been rebuked, told to keep a lid on, turn the other cheek, get over it. Repression more than aggression was seen as woman's domain. But recently there's been a noticeable cultural shift. With growing frequency, women's aggression is now celebrated in contemporary culture—in movies and TV, online ventures, and art. In Push Comes to Shove, Maud Lavin examines these new images of aggressive women and how they affect women's lives. Aggression, says Lavin, need not entail causing harm to another; we can th...
Published to accompany touring exhibition held at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 7/4 - 7/6 1992.
Maud Lavin approaches design from the broader field of visual culture criticism, asking challenging questions about about who really has a voice in the culture and what unseen influences affect the look of things designers produce. Our culture is dominated by the visual. Yet most writing on design reflects a narrow preoccupation with products, biographies, and design influences. Maud Lavin approaches design from the broader field of visual culture criticism, asking challenging questions about about who really has a voice in the culture and what unseen influences affect the look of things designers produce. Lavin shows how design fits into larger questions of power, democracy, and communicati...
The serial narrative is one of the most robust and popular forms of storytelling in contemporary China. With a domestic audience of one billion-plus and growing transnational influence and accessibility, this form of storytelling is becoming the centerpiece of a fast-growing digital entertainment industry and a new symbol and carrier of China’s soft power. Televising Chineseness: Gender, Nation, and Subjectivity explores how television and online dramas imagine the Chinese nation and form postsocialist Chinese gendered subjects. The book addresses a conspicuous paradox in Chinese popular culture today: the coexistence of increasingly diverse gender presentations and conservative gender policing by the government, viewers, and society. Using first-hand data collected through interviews and focus group discussions with audiences comprising viewers of different ages, genders, and educational backgrounds, Televising Chineseness sheds light on how television culture relates to the power mechanisms and truth regimes that shape the understanding of gender and the construction of gendered subjects in postsocialist China.