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Televising Chineseness: Gender, Nation, and Subjectivity
Geng Song
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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.
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. (Post-)Television in China
Chapter 3. Anti-Japanese Dramas and Patriotic Patriarchy
Chapter 4. “Straight-Man Cancer” and “Bossy CEO”
Chapter 5. Foreign Men and Women on the Chinese TV Screen
Chapter 6. “Little Fresh Meat” and the Politics of Sissyphobia
Chapter 7. Womanhood and the Many Faces of Chineseness
Figure 13. The Xiao family. Back row from left: Yunchu, Yuntian, and Yunshu with their partners. Front row: Mr. and Mrs. Xiao with Yunchu’s son in the middle. A Modern Family (2001).