2019.26: Jamie Zhao, Queer TV China as an Area of Critical Scholarly Inquiry in the 2010s

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 twenty-first 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.[2] 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.”[3] 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).”[4] 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, 2005-2009).[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.[7]

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.[9] 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.[10]

This impact of the digital age on gender and sexual minority cultures has also been manifested in Chinese television production, audiences, and fan activities. In particular, the years since 2010 have seen an unexpected burgeoning of a Chinese-specific televisual culture, which represents a discursive result of refined, multidimensional negotiations with non-normatively gendered, sexualized, and/or eroticized performances, sentiments, and embodiments. On the one hand, masculine female and effeminate male celebrities (often referred to in Chinese as androgynous or “neutrosexual” [zhongxing] stars) have proliferated and been promoted in many variety programs.[11] Chinese television dramas and talk shows featuring same-sex intimacies, LGBTQ-identified participants, and even explicitly gay-themed narratives and social issues, such as Go Princess Go (LeTV, 2015), Guardian (Youku, 2018), and You Can You Bibi (iQiyi, 2014-present), have been produced and aired in Chinese cyberspace.[12] On the other hand, these seemingly progressive television productions have been pushed back and forth by multilayered capitalist, sociocultural, and political forces and interests. One of the most sensational gay TV dramas in Chinese cyberspace, Addiction (iQiyi, 2016), which was banned by  media censors for no clear reason,  is a case in point.[13] Young, effeminate male celebrities have also been criticized for their potential to damage China’s national image and power, which  always has been closely associated with Chinese manhood and male masculinity.[14]

Paradoxically, alongside an escalation in media censorship of vulgar and immoral content and the party-state’s misogynistic and hetero-patriarchal policies in recent years, television series adapted from popular novels that portray same-sex romance have become more common.[15] Shows such as The Untamed (Tencent, 2019) have not only triumphed within China but have also aired on Netflix and gained large-scale fan bases in other parts of the world.[16] Nevertheless, these adaptations, while retaining their original narrations of same-sex romantic tensions, have often subtly revised or “straightened” explicitly homosexual storylines into an ambiguous portrayal of intimate brotherhood or sisterhood. This reconfiguration of homosexuality and homosociality on Chinese television has proved appealing to a broad range of audiences with diverse gender, sexual, and cultural interests without offending predominately heterosexual audiences in mainstream society and entertainment industry.[17]

The emerging “queer TV China” culture I have described above certainly warrants dedicated scholarly examinations that combine research methodologies and analytical perspectives from the fields of media studies, audience research, gender, sexuality, and queer studies, and area studies. It is an increasingly perplexing media phenomenon, which requires scholars to broaden their focus on Chinese LGBTQ visibility in both mainstream and underground media industries and productions to include a queer deconstruction and understanding of non-identitarian-based gendered and sexualized representations, personas, relationalities, and subjectivities. In other words, studies of queer TV China can offer alternative possibilities for scholarship on contemporary Chinese media studies through a radical “queering” (or queer reading) of Chinese television itself.

Despite the dearth of research on Chinese queer TV audiences, the publication of the English-language anthology Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan by Hong Kong University Press in 2017 suggests future directions for queering Chinese media and audience research. In particular, the editors have proposed that the term “queer” be employed as:

… a productive analytical lens that “defines itself diacritically not against heterosexuality but against the normative,” including any perspectival norms and ideals in both contemporary public cultural and scholarly discourses surrounding nation-states, linguistics, geopolitics, ethnicities, genders, and sexualities.[18]

This use of “queer” can be advanced to call for research that highlights the self-contradictory queer-enabling potential of mainstream televisual discourses in China. A queering of TV China sheds light on the ubiquitous existence and negotiative power of queer, which works productively within and against (and, sometimes, also colludes with) mainstream, heterosexual media cultures, and spaces. By recognizing the intertwined queer and normative dimensions of television as a mainstream sociocultural platform in China’s hetero-patriarchal and authoritarian society, research on queer TV China helps to unveil both the potential and the problems associated with televisual-industrial-cultural specificities. Possible research questions include the following:

·         Since queer television culture has emerged in a society where Euro-American-defined “mainstreaming”[19] of gay and lesbian characters has never occurred, in what ways can it interrogate and/or mediate the Chinese party-state’s economic, political, and ideological projects in mainstream media and public spaces?

·         What are the relationships between queer television images, China’s media regulatory policies concerning homosexual content, and the existence and performance of gender and sexual non-normativities (although not necessarily self-identified as LGBTQ) in off-screen Chinese society?

·         How do official political-ideological manipulations, mainstream commercial forces, and grassroots voices intersect, compete, and collaborate in the too-often non-normatively gendered and sexualized Chinese-specific television spaces?

Moreover, as part of the continuous de-Western-centric endeavor in global queering studies, the field of queer TV China is also obliged to fight against the universalization of Euro-American-defined sexuality as the only way to represent queerness in Asian media. Queer television culture in post-2010 China cannot be simplified as the capitalist exploitation and stereotyping of gay identities, lives, and politics. Rather, explorations of this culture should strive to challenge the dichotomy of positive and negative representations of gender and sexual minorities on Chinese television and in related audience and fan cultures. At the same time, scholars must be attentive to traditional values, local gender/sex systems, and mainstream Chinese-speaking culture’s appropriation, mobilization, and commercialization of regional, transnational, and global gender and sexual knowledge, which, combined together, make possible the bloom of this post-2010 queer tele-visual spectacle.  

In addition, the connotation and denotation of China (or Chineseness) requires further intervention from queer TV China studies. As some queer Sinophone scholars have already discussed, mainstream commercial media productions often appropriate a hetero-patriarchal-structured Chinese orthodoxy to create non-heterosexual fantasies that are paradoxically rejected within such a normative context.[20] These media works can be read as queer in the sense that they create and constantly mediate an alternative “Chinese” imagination “approximating, yet remaining apart from,” China-centered gender, sexual, and cultural normativities.[21] Queer TV China studies follow a similar analytical logic in analyzing Chinese television culture. As a field, it demands researchers to queerly interrogate essentialized imaginaries of the “Chineseness” portrayed on Chinese television inside out by examining the dissonances and mismatches generated in and mediated through intersected paradigms of gender, sexuality, race, class, and nationality across Chinese and Sinophone communities. For instance, scholars should pay attention to how gender-non-normative ethnic minority Chinese-speaking celebrities are compulsorily incorporated into the ethno-nationalistic imagination of “a cosmopolitan, culturally inclusive, racially diverse China” on television.[22] They should also examine the ways that celebrities deliberately perform ethnically essentialized gender and sexual ideals in order to survive from a discriminative Han-Chinese-dominated television industry that often heterosexually eroticizes ethnic minorities. It is through these and other ways that queer TV China as a new, promising scholarly inquiry will produce useful frameworks and methodologies that can be applied in Asian media and queer studies.

Dr. Jamie J. Zhao is a global queer media scholar and currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at the Sino-UK collaborative institution, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. She received a PhD degree in Gender Studies from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2016 and completed another PhD in Film and TV Studies from the University of Warwick in 2019. Her work explores East Asian media and public discourses on gender and sexuality in a globalist age.

NOTES:

[1] Ying Zhu and Chris Berry, eds., TV China. Bloomington: Indianan University Press, 2009.

[2] For TV’s function as a political tool in Maoist China (pre-1976), see Yu Huang and Xu Yu, “Broadcasting and Politics: Chinese Television in the Mao Era, 1958-1976.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 17:4 (1997), 563-574; and Ying Zhu, Michael Keane, and Ruoyun Bai, eds., TV Drama in China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008.

[3] Ruoyun Bai and Geng Song, “Introduction” to Chinese Television in the Twenty-First Century: Entertaining the Nation, edited by Ruoyun Bai and Geng Song. New York: Routledge, 2015, 5, 7.

[4] Ibid, 7.

[5] Kelly Wu, “Between Informal and Formal Cultural Economy: Chinese Subtitle Groups and Flexible Accumulation in the Age of Online Viewing,” in Routledge Handbook of East Asian Popular Culture, edited by Koichi Iwabuchi, Eva Tsai, and Chris Berry. New York: Routledge, 2017, 46.

[6] Michael Keane, “Disconnecting, Connecting, and Reconnecting: How Chinese Television Found Its Way Out of the Box.” International Journal of Communication 10 (2016), 5426-5443.

[7] Yizhou Xu, “The Postmodern Aesthetic of Chinese Online Comment Cultures.” Communication and the Public 4:1 (2016), 436-451.

[8] Jamie J. Zhao, “New Media in Asia,” in Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) History, edited by Howard Chiang. Farmington Hills, MI: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2019, 1142. Also see, Maud Lavin, Ling Yang, and Jing Jamie Zhao, eds. Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2017.

[9] Xinyan Yu, “The World’s Most Popular Gay Dating App Is Made in China.” Inkstone News, June 13, 2019. https://www.inkstonenews.com/business/blued-gay-dating-app-china-new-propeller-worlds-pink-economy/article/2150593

[10] “What Is the Significance of China’s #MeToo Movement?” A ChinaFile Conversation, March 20, 2018. http://www.chinafile.com/conversation/what-significance-of-chinas-metoo-movement

[11] See, for example, Jamie J. Zhao, “Acrush: A Case Study in Chinese Gender-Neutrality.” IAPS Dialogue, July 16, 2017. https://queerasia.com/2017/07/16/acrush-a-case-study-in-chinese-gender-neutrality/; Jamie J. Zhao, “Queer, Yet Never Lesbian: A Ten-Year Look Back at the Reality TV Singing Competition Show Super Voice Girl.” Celebrity Studies 9:4 (2018), 470-486; and Jamie J. Zhao, “The Emerging ‘National Husbands’: Queer Female Fantasy in Popular Culture,” in Love Stories in China, edited by Wanning Sun and Ling Yang. London: Routledge, 2019, 205-225.

[12] See, for example, “Welcome to China’s First-Ever Gay Big Brother: The Online TV Show Busting the Censorship of ‘Immoral’ Content.” TimeOut Beijing, April 26, 2017. http://www.timeoutbeijing.com/features/LGBT/158120/Welcome-to-Chinas-first-ever-gay-Big-Brother.html; and Manya Koetse, “The Success of China’s Hit Talk Show Qi Pa Shuo (U Can U Bibi).” What’s On Weibo, April 26, 2017. https://www.whatsonweibo.com/success-chinas-hit-talk-show-qi-pa-shuo-u-can-u-bibi/

[13] “China’s Censors Take Another Gay-Themed Web Drama Offline.” The Wall Street Journal, February 24, 2016. https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2016/02/24/chinas-censors-take-another-gay-themed-web-drama-offline/

[14] Jack Hilbride and Bang Xiao, “China’s ‘Sissy Pants Phenomenon’: Beijing Fears Negative Impact of ‘Sickly Culture’ on Teenagers.” ABC News, September 15, 2018. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-15/male-beauty-in-china-does-not-fit-with-push-for-global-influence/10221984

[15] See, for example, Sarah Ditum, “In a Country Where #MeToo Is Censored, China’s Feminists Have To Be Creative Online.” NewStatesman, October 17, 2018. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2018/10/country-where-metoo-censored-china-s-feminists-have-be-creative-online; Jamie J. Zhao, “Censoring ‘Rainbow’ in China.” Asia Dialogue, June 1, 2018. https://theasiadialogue.com/2018/06/01/censoring-rainbow-in-china/; and Amy Gunia, “A Chinese Broadcaster Censored the Phrase ‘Gay Man’ from Rami Malek’s Oscar Speech.” Time, February 27, 2019. https://time.com/5539590/china-censor-rami-malek-oscar-speech/.

[16] Shumei Leng and Keyue Xu, “Hit Adaptation of Chinese ‘Boys’ Love’ Novel Debuts on Netflix.” Global Times, October 29, 2019. http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1168331.shtml

[17] Zhao, “Acrush,”; Zhao, “Queer, Yet Never Lesbian”; and Zhao, “The Emerging ‘National Husbands’.”

[18] Zhao, Yang, and Lavin, “Introduction,” xii.

[19] Kevin Barnhurst, Media/Queered: Visibility and Its Discontents. New York: Peter Lang, 2007; Larry Gross, Up From Invisibility: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Media in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.

[20] See, for example, Howard Chiang and Ari Larissa Heinrich, eds. Queer Sinophone Cultures. London: Routledge, 2014.

[21] Lily Wong, “Sinophone Erotohistories: The Shaw Brothers’ Queering of a Transforming ‘Chinese Dream’ in Ainu Fantasies.” In Queer Sinophone Cultures, edited by Howard Chiang and Ari Larissa Heinrich. London Routledge, 2014, 101.

[22] See, for example, Jing Zhao, “The Chinese Queer Glocalisation of TV Formats in the New Millennium.” Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2019.