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East Asian Journal of Popular Culture - Online First

Online First articles will be assigned issues in due course.

4 results

    • The cultural logic of the attention economy: Channel 991 on YY

      https://doi.org/10.1386/eapc_00161_1
      Available online: 20 December 2025

      Using YY, one of China’s earliest live-streaming platforms, as a case study, this article investigates the cultural logic of the attention economy in the context of streaming media. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and participant observation, I examine the everyday practices and dynamics that shape live-streaming on YY. I argue that live-streaming reconfigures our understanding of the attention economy through three conceptual dyads: attention and distraction, commodity and intimacy, agency and passivity. By analysing the hierarchical structures of attention and its commodification within the live-streaming sphere, this study offers new insight into the rapid expansion of live-streaming industry in China and its significance for global digital cultures.

    • Fractured massacre: Gwangju, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Han Kang

      https://doi.org/10.1386/eapc_00162_1
      Available online: 29 November 2025

      The nature of suppression and resistance is that modes of movement fracture time and power. In examining Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Han Kang’s reckoning with the Gwangju Uprising and Massacre, this article works to grapple with how resistance efforts and the state’s military response to political action ripple through time. Witnessing both Cha’s and Kang’s depictions of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising and Massacre both history and the text itself represent resistance to fixed and defined (re)tellings. In many ways, literature helps to better recognize how state-sanctioned violence disorients and forever fractures our relationship to history and memory. State violence thus works to create chaos and erase any trace of it ever happening. With Cha’s and Kang’s , the legacy of Gwangju continues to unravel and its afterlife remains unresolved.

    • and the construction of a Taiwanese queer identity

      https://doi.org/10.1386/eapc_00149_1
      Available online: 28 February 2025

      This article examines , a docu-series focusing on LGBTQ topics in Taiwan. Among the very first original content commissioned by GagaOOLala, Asia’s first LGBTQ streaming platform, is imbued with messages of social import while tracing the history and recording the current fight for LGBTQ rights. By adopting a participatory approach, sparked conversation on hotly debated topics among different social groups with the goal of enhancing mutual understanding and shedding light on common misconceptions. This article explores how these conversations reflect the changing social outlook and public attitudes during Taiwan’s journey towards marriage equality. It includes a discussion of the socialization and politicization of sexual identity by situating it within the history of Taiwan’s national identity politics, a pervasive theme of the island’s queer literature and cinema. The analysis encompasses queer cinema, documentaries in particular, illustrating how non-fiction film envisions the parallels between campaigns to assert queer pride and Taiwanese distinctiveness. This study illuminates the relationship between queer cinema and the wider sociopolitical landscape in the run-up to Taiwan’s legalization of same-sex marriage.

    • The Confucian knight-errant: A traditional Chinese masculine ideal in the wuxia film

      https://doi.org/10.1386/eapc_00136_1
      Available online: 21 October 2024

      While wuxia film criticism has extensively examined the macho-masculine archetype in the kung fu subgenre, there is a noticeable oversight regarding another vital type of masculinity: the scholar-type or Confucian knight-errant. Despite its divergence from the rugged gunfighter in Hollywood action genres such as the western, Confucian masculinity as a timeless ideal across Chinese genres also finds appreciation within the wuxia genre – a genre known for its dynamic action and a world akin to westerns’ supposedly merciless Social Darwinist frontier. Through a comparative lens on the iconic figure of the American cowboy, this article first identifies some crucial features of gender discourse in Chinese traditional culture through an interpretation of the two paradigms of complementary opposites – the yin/yang dichotomy and the wen/wu (‘cultural/military attainments’) dyad. Then, it explains how this traditional Chinese cultural ideal aligns with the wuxia genre’s thematic requirements, with a detailed analysis of two celluloid epitomes of the Confucian knight-errant in wuxia epics: Xiao Shaozi in King Hu’s () (1967) and Chen Jialuo in Ann Hui’s () (1987).

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