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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 identities and same-sex desire in the Chinese and Sinophone worlds. It proposes an analytical framework of “queer/ing TV China” to explore the power of various TV genres and narratives, censorial practices, and fandoms in queer desire-voicing and subject formation within a largely heteropatriarchal society. Through examining nine cases contesting the ideals of gender, sexuality, Chineseness, and TV production and consumption, the book also reveals the generative, negotiative ways in which queerness works productively within and against mainstream, seemingly heterosexual-oriented, televisual industries and fan spaces.
“This cornucopia of fresh and original essays opens our eyes to the burgeoning queer television culture thriving beneath official media crackdowns in China. As diverse as the phenomenon it analyses, Queer TV China is the spark that will ignite a prairie fire of future scholarship.”
—Chris Berry, Professor of Film Studies, King’s College London
List of Figures vii
Acknowledgments viii
Notes on Romanization and Chinese Characters x
Introduction: Making “TV China” Perfectly Queer 1
Jamie J. Zhao
I. Queer/ing Genders and Sexualities through Reality Competition Shows
1. Growing Up with “Tomboy Power”: Starring Liu Yuxin on Post-2010 Chinese Reality TV 29
Jamie J. Zhao
2. When “Jiquan” Fandom Meets “Big Sisters”: The Ambivalence between Female Queer (In)Visibility and Popular Feminist Rhetoric
in Sisters Who Make Waves 52
Jia Guo and Shaojun Kong
3. A Dildonic Assemblage: The Paradoxes of Queer Masculinities and Desire on the Chinese Sports Variety Show Let’s Exercise, Boys 67
Wangtaolue Guo and Jennifer Quist
II. Queer/ing TV Dramas through Media Regulations
4. Addicted to Melancholia: Negotiating Queerness and Homoeroticism in a Banned Chinese BL Drama 87
Aobo Dong
5. Taming The Untamed: Politics and Gender in BL-Adapted Web Dramas 105
Jun Lei
6. Disjunctive Temporalities: Queer Sinophone Visuality across Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan 124
Alvin K. Wong
III. Queer/ing Celebrities across Geocultural Boundaries
7. Queer Vocals and Stardom on Chinese TV: Case Studies of Wu TsingFong and Zhou Shen 145
Linshan Jiang
8. Gay Men in/and Kangsi Coming 161
Oscar Tianyang Zhou
9. Queer Motherly Fantasy: The Sinophone Mom Fandom of Saint
Suppapong Udomkaewkanjana 177
Pang Ka Wei
References 201
About the Contributors 230
Index 233