Televising Chineseness: Gender, Nation, and Subjectivity (China Understandings Today) (Hardcover)

Description

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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.

About the Author

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Geng Song is Associate Professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong.

Praise For…

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"Song convincingly maps how Chinese state media conditions its audience to guard its national identity. Recommended."
—CHOICE
— CHOICE

"Televising Chineseness is an impressive academic text with adroitly put arguments. It not only offers meticulous analyses of the history and contemporary situations of China’s television and other media industries, Chinese audience and fan cultures, and rising issues concerning the Chinese cyber environment and offline social realities but also provides readers with rich details and useful information on Chinese popular culture and media communication in general."
—Critical Asian Studies
— Critical Asian Studies