Sunday Onsite Presentation Session 3

Cultural Studies

Session Chair: Ying-Ying Chen

14:05-14:30

70676 | Transnational Thai Boys’ Love Drama Fandom Considered from the Gaze of Oriental-orientalism in Japan

Sae Shimauchi, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Japan

This study focuses on the interaction, creation, and practical activities of the Thai Boys’ Love drama cyber-fandom. Through interviews, it examines how fans accept and consume the culture, and how their gaze and perception of Boys’ Love and Thailand changes in the process, and how fans influence each other. In the Thai Boys’ Love dramas cyber-fandom in Japan, people with diverse gender identities and sexualities, mainly women, intermingle, learn, and become aware of their changing gaze towards Thai and Japanese culture, queerness, and various related issues. Within a transnational framework, Thailand’s culture is contrasted with others, particularly the west, and an oriental gaze has emerged in this context. Boys’ Love content does not comprise the monolithic global queerness of Western culture, and fandoms have an attitude of learning. A movement beyond national Thailand–Japan framework has also emerged that explores its multifaceted nature within a single-issue context. Thus, the Thai Boys’ Love drama fandom, comprised of diverse subcultures, overcomes the oriental perspective and reflects on the national framework by consuming Boys’ Love’s queer content.

14:30-14:55

67754 | Hybridizing Nationalism and Entertainment in an Unanticipated Fashion: A Longitudinal Study of Hong Kong’s Film Production in China Since 2003

Victor Shin, Lingnan University, Hong Kong

How do pop-culture producers survive in a field driven by both the state’s political interests and the market forces? To address this question, this study examines how the film production companies from Hong Kong coped with the institutional pressures in China after the People’s Republic of China (PRC) government implemented the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement in 2003. The Chinese film market offers a rich context to pursue this inquiry because it is a field wherein enduring institutional complexity encompassing both a political and a market logic is evident. The Hong Kong film companies’ experience also presents an intriguing case: they were once a prominent player in the field, best known for their market-oriented traits that sometimes challenged the officially permissible line in China’s censorship regulations. During the early 2010s, however, many of them shifted their focus to producing propaganda-like movies. This study draws on a quantitative dataset and an event-history database on Mainland-Hong Kong film co-productions between 2003 and 2016, and in-depth interviews with industry practitioners in Hong Kong and mainland China. The unanticipated consequences of the Hong Kong film companies’ strategic actions and their implications for the development of the cultural industry in mainland China will also be discussed.

14:55-15:20

70755

| Exploring Cultural Imagination for Indian Most Popular Movies

Chen Ying-Ying, National United University, Taiwan

In India, south India film industries outperform Bollywood in recent years. For Indian audiences, they experience historically different choices for film appreciation and entertaining styles. This study uses textual analysis to interpret public and social meanings for two kinds of most popular Indian movies: Top 10 movies in India movie markets, and Top 10 most popular India movies in global markets. The latter is influenced by non-Indians and other non-controllable factors. In total, 11 Indian movies are analyzed. From perspectives of cultural studies, texts are analyzed through concepts such as collective subjectivities, imagined communities, feeling structure of social groups and being local, social consciousness of issues. This study finds that Indian most popular movies are often loyal to Indian audiences and offer them ways to explore a possibly better self, not only individually but maybe more collectively.