Saturday Onsite Presentation Session 1

Interdisciplinary Gender & Sexuality

Session Chair: Yuan Zhu

09:55-10:20

69520 |

Challenging the Normative Paradigm of Gender and Sexuality: A Critical Literature Review of ‘T’ Experience and Embodiment in China

Xiaoqi Sun, Lancaster University, United Kingdom

Mainland China’s queer culture has seen interesting developments since the early 2000s. Between 2000 and 2010, a group of Chinese pop-stars embodying ‘T’ – an abbreviation and collective metaphor for ‘tomboy’ that generally refers to female masculinity and potential lesbianism in Chinese queer culture – emerged in Chinese pop culture. This introduced a new kind of queer sensibility composed of androgynous aesthetics and ambiguous desire to the Chinese national imagination. However, the queer masculinity that T expressed has been problematized. T was either pathologically trivialised as ‘gender inverted’by pathological discourse in academia or criticized as a sloppy imitation of heteronormative masculinity by the appropriation of parts of western discursive queer knowledge and feminist theories seen in the Chinese lesbian community. These conflicts reminded a necessity to scrutinize the ambivalent interplay between unconventional gender expressions and homosexuality that have not yet been evaluated by previous queer studies in China. This paper aims to critically examine the existing scholarship of lesbian studies in China and propose an alternative theoretical lens to theorise and contextualise the experience and embodiment of T. In contrary to the studies that characterise T as merely a label for gendered personalities, which assumes a stale lesbian/female identity, the main argumentation of this paper is T should be considered as a cultural resistance to challenge the institutionalised gender and sexuality paradigm and to undermine compulsory heterosexuality.

10:20-10:45

70413 | Sculpting the Desire: Chinese Women Re-imagining Gender Subjectivities by Participating Nisu Fandom

Yuan Zhu, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong

The paper explores the newly-emerged danmei fandom phenomenon Nisu (泥塑) in Mainland China’s cybersphere. Nisu in the internet fandom community designates the action of fantasizing idols/characters as in their non-biologically assigned gender, for instance, imagining a male character performing as a female. Upon such fantasy, fans produce creative content, including fan art, fan fiction, and re-edited video clips to fulfill communities’ homo-erotic desires. Together, fans generate an active and interactive online community. Among all the mediums of fan expression, the literary text is the most dominant form of communication. Such texts could serve as a lens to understand Nisu culture as a site of subjectivity negotiation under censorship and heteronormative hegemony. In this paper, I offer a close reading of these texts derived from popular fan-fiction, online fan forums, survey results, and semi-structured interviews of Nisu fans. Although Nisu fans’ behavior is usually solely derived from their affection and sexual projection instead of a clear intention of contestation, the study reveals that they managed to offer a queer reading to non-binary intimacy and sexuality. The paper, therefore, argues that Nisu culture reinforces a tactical power to confront the state oppression of queerness and homosexuality. In this case, it manifests a counter-public potential. Through Nisu culture, we could observe a non-normative narrative of female desires, while the Nisu culture itself operates as a safe, participatory space for individuals to reimagine the fluidity of gender and sexuality.

10:45-11:10

69798 | Sexual Politics in YouTube: Shifting Values in Femininities and Women’s Empowerment

Porranee Singpliam, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand

There had been an increase in public adornment towards celebrity mothers in Thai society nowadays. The Thai netizens have shown overt appreciation towards celebrity families, particularly mother figures on the new media platform. YouTube as a new media platform has garnered massive attention from the netizens in such a way that it could be said to be a domain that reflects a distinct value of the Thai society. This research examines the way in which Thai women YouTubers perform their gender “roles” differently in comparison to other media platforms (i.e., the traditional ones). The fact that these carefully selected women YouTubers receive attention from their fans speak volume about the shifts in gender modalities and sexual politics endemic in Thai society. These women YouTubers all share in common the notion of “modern women,” which is palpable and yearned for by the Thai netizens today. This research is conducted through computer assisted textual analysis and content analysis method. The conceptual tools follow Butler’s (1988; 2001) seminal notion of performativity, citationality, and resignification (Inda 2000), coupled with Connell’s (2002; 2009) fundamental ideas on structured gender order of the society and its emphasis on the tendencies for change and historical character. This research wishes to argue that contemporary women’s self-representations are increasingly tied to material possessions. Women images are widely accepted due to the changing nature sexual politics of the Thai society that enables women to succeed for individualistic gains yet remain viable in the traditional expectations.