East Asian Journal of Popular Culture - Online First

This article contributes to two relatively under-researched areas in the existing literature of Taiwanese popular culture and film studies – Taiwanese-language films (taiyupian) and port city cinema. We compare five case studies in Taiwanese-language port city cinema: Anping zhuixiang qu (Nostalgic Song of Anping) (Chen Yang 1969), Huilai anping gang (Back to Anping Harbor) (Wu Feijian 1972), Fenggui lai de ren (The Boys from Fengkuei) (Hou Hsiao-Hsien 1983), Haijiao qi hao (Cape No.7) (Wei Te-Sheng 2008) and角頭 Jiao tou (Gatau) (Li Yunjie 2015). Across each case, we analyse how the cinematic representation of port cities may have reflected social and cultural developments, changing (and unchanged) Taiwanese intersectional and cultural identities from the 1960s to the twenty-first century.

In recent years, hostility towards Asian boys love (BL) media and fans in western English-speaking fandoms has been growing. This has manifested in anti-BL and anti-fujoshi anti-fans, many of whom express the general notion that queer western media is morally good and queer Asian media is morally bad. This division has encouraged a dehumanizing environment and some of these anti-fans consider their prejudiced behaviour morally justified and necessary. Their proposed aim is to maintain the moral sanctity of LGBTQ+ representation in their western English-speaking fan spaces. This article explores what drives this division and how BL and fujoshi specifically came to be so vilified in parts of LGBTQ+ western English-speaking fandom. The origins of this growing desire for LGBTQ+ moral sanctity in western English-speaking fandom are critiqued and how anti-trans gender critical beliefs in online communities came to affect western English-speaking fans’ perceptions of BL and fujoshi is revealed.

What does humour do to us and our relationship with the society? This article examines political humour in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and asks how hegemony is mediated through political humour in China. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) of two Spring Festival Gala sketches, 春晚小品 (‘chunwan xiaopin’), is applied not only for its ontological fit with the literature of hegemony but also because of its potential to unravel the hidden power relations. I argue for the social and psychological significance of xiaopin to the general public because they reveal the fragility of the intellectual hierarchy that places the rural population at the bottom, play with the heavy historical episode of the Great Leap Forward, and create the illusion of empowerment. Furthermore, it reveals that humour can be subversive on the textual level and simultaneously hegemonic on the discursive level.

The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics birthed a cultural phenomenon in China: Eileen Gu, an 18-year-old half-white, half-Chinese ‘skiing genius’ who left the United States to join team China. In this article, I explore the ways in which Gu’s online presence informs understandings about class, women, race, ‘Chineseness’ and the complex entanglement of the neo-liberal self and collective nation. First, I provide an introduction to sports nationalism and neo-liberal feminism to situate Gu in the post-socialist neo-liberal Chinese context. Then, I turn to Gu’s social media posts, self-made videos and online commercials during the Winter Olympics. I argue that Gu is presented within (1) a neo-liberal feminist moment characterized by individual empowerment and (2) a nationalist and cosmopolitan moment framed by the national pride towards her and her self-framing of a flexible citizenship and ‘apolitical Chineseness’. I conclude that the ‘Eileen Phenomenon’ is an illustrative instance of the shifting demarcations in a global political economic field, in which a desirable Chinese identity and a marketable femininity are both crucial for the Chinese state under globalization. Gu’s case shows that the interplay and contradiction of the neo-liberal self and the nationalist collective continue to play out in contemporary Chinese culture and society.