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15mm 5mm 146mm 12mm 20.7mm 12mm 146mm 5mm 15mm

15mm
5mm
QUEER TV CHINA
Televisual and Fannish Imaginaries of Gender, Sexuality,
and Chineseness
“This cornucopia of fresh and original essays opens our eyes to the burgeoning queer television
culture thriving beneath official media crackdowns in China. As diverse as the phenomenon it
analyses, Queer TV China is the spark that will ignite a prairie fire of future scholarship.”
—Chris Berry, Professor of Film Studies, King’s College London

“This timely volume explores the various possibilities and nuances of queerness in Chinese TV
and fannish culture. Challenging the dichotomy of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ representations of
gender and sexual minorities, Queer TV China argues for a multilayered and queer-informed
understanding of the production, consumption, censorship, and recreation of Chinese
television today.”
—Geng Song, Associate Professor and Director of Translation Program,
University of Hong Kong

The 2010s have seen an explosion in popularity of Chinese television featuring same-sex

235mm
intimacies, LGBTQ-identified celebrities, and explicitly homoerotic storylines even as state
regulations on “vulgar” and “immoral” content grow more prominent. This emerging “queer
TV China” culture has generated diverse, cyber, and transcultural queer fan communities.
Yet these seemingly progressive televisual productions and practices are caught between
multilayered sociocultural and political-economic forces and interests.

Taking “queer” as a verb, an adjective, and a noun, this volume counters the Western-centric
conception of homosexuality as the only way to understand nonnormative identities and same-
sex desire in the Chinese and Sinophone worlds. It proposes an analytical framework of “queer/
ing TV China” to explore the power of various TV genres and narratives, censorial practices,
and fandoms in queer desire-voicing and subject formation within a largely heteropatriarchal
society. Through examining nine cases contesting the ideals of gender, sexuality, Chineseness,
and TV production and consumption, the book also reveals the generative, negotiative ways in
which queerness works productively within and against mainstream, seemingly heterosexual-
oriented, televisual industries and fan spaces.
Edited by Jamie J. Zhao

Jamie J. Zhao is an assistant professor in media and cultural studies in the School of Creative
Media at City University of Hong Kong.

Gender Studies / Media / China

h�ps://hkupress.hku.hk Printed and bound in Hong Kong, China

5mm
15mm
Queer TV China
Queer Asia
The Queer Asia series opens a space for monographs and anthologies in all disciplines focusing
on nonnormative sexuality and gender cultures, identities, and practices across all regions of Asia.
Queer studies, queer theory, and transgender studies originated in, and remain dominated by, North
American and European academic circles. Yet the separation between sexual orientation and gender
identity, while relevant in the West, does not neatly apply to all Asian contexts, which are themselves
complex and diverse. A growing number of scholars inside and beyond Asia are producing exciting
and challenging work that studies Asian histories and cultures of trans and queer phenomena. The
Queer Asia series—the first of its kind in publishing—provides a valuable opportunity to develop and
sustain these initiatives.
Editorial Collective
Chris Berry (King’s College London, UK), John Nguyet Erni (Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong
Kong), Peter Jackson (Australian National University, Australia), Helen Hok-Sze Leung (Simon Fraser
University, Canada), and Shawna Tang (University of Sydney, Australia).
Selected titles in the series:
Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan
Edited by Maud Lavin, Ling Yang, and Jing Jamie Zhao
Contact Moments: The Politics of Intercultural Desire in Japanese Male-Queer Cultures
Katsuhiko Suganuma
Falling into the Lesbi World: Desire and Difference in Indonesia
Evelyn Blackwood
First Queer Voices from Thailand: Uncle Go’s Advice Columns for Gays, Lesbians and Kathoeys
Peter A. Jackson
Gender on the Edge: Transgender, Gay, and Other Pacific Islanders
Edited by Niko Besnier and Kalissa Alexeyeff
Maid to Queer: Asian Labor Migration and Female Same-Sex Desires
Francisca Yuenki Lai
Obsession: Male Same-Sex Relations in China, 1900–1950
Wenqing Kang
Oral Histories of Older Gay Men in Hong Kong: Unspoken but Unforgotten
Travis S. K. Kong
Queer Chinese Cultures and Mobilities: Kinship, Migration, and Middle Classes
John Wei
Queering Chinese Kinship: Queer Public Culture in Globalizing China
Lin Song
Queer Politics and Sexual Modernity in Taiwan
Hans Tao-Ming Huang
Queer Singapore: Illiberal Citizenship and Mediated Cultures
Edited by Audrey Yue and Jun Zubillaga-Pow
Shanghai Lalas: Female Tongzhi Communities and Politics in Urban China
Lucetta Yip Lo Kam
Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong
Helen Hok-Sze Leung
Queer TV China

Televisual and Fannish Imaginaries of

Gender, Sexuality, and Chineseness

Edited by Jamie J. Zhao

Hong Kong University Press
The University of Hong Kong
Pok Fu Lam Road
Hong Kong
https://hkupress.hku.hk

© 2023 Hong Kong University Press

ISBN 978-988-8805-61-7 (Hardback)

All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,
or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from
the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed and bound by J&S Printing Co., Ltd. in Hong Kong, China
Contents

List of Figures vii

Acknowledgments viii
Notes on Romanization and Chinese Characters x
Introduction: Making “TV China” Perfectly Queer 1
Jamie J. Zhao

I. Queer/ing Genders and Sexualities through Reality Competition Shows

1. Growing Up with “Tomboy Power”: Starring Liu Yuxin on Post-2010
Chinese Reality TV 29
Jamie J. Zhao
2. When “Jiquan” Fandom Meets “Big Sisters”: The Ambivalence
between Female Queer (In)Visibility and Popular Feminist Rhetoric
in Sisters Who Make Waves 52
Jia Guo and Shaojun Kong
3. A Dildonic Assemblage: The Paradoxes of Queer Masculinities and
Desire on the Chinese Sports Variety Show Let’s Exercise, Boys 67
Wangtaolue Guo and Jennifer Quist

II. Queer/ing TV Dramas through Media Regulations

4. Addicted to Melancholia: Negotiating Queerness and Homoeroticism
in a Banned Chinese BL Drama 87
Aobo Dong
5. Taming The Untamed: Politics and Gender in BL-Adapted Web Dramas 105
Jun Lei
6. Disjunctive Temporalities: Queer Sinophone Visuality across
Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan 124
Alvin K. Wong
vi Contents

III. Queer/ing Celebrities across Geocultural Boundaries

7. Queer Vocals and Stardom on Chinese TV: Case Studies of Wu Tsing-
Fong and Zhou Shen 145
Linshan Jiang
8. Gay Men in/and Kangsi Coming 161
Oscar Tianyang Zhou
9. Queer Motherly Fantasy: The Sinophone Mom Fandom of Saint
Suppapong Udomkaewkanjana 177
Pang Ka Wei
References 201
About the Contributors 230
Index 233
Figures

Figure 2.1: In a Jiquan Gossip Group discussion thread about SWMW,

the show was described as “Sappho’s lesbian island” 62
Figure 3.1: A screenshot of one of Qiu Yiwei’s Weibo videos, showing
that he is taking off his shirt 79
Figure 3.2: A screenshot of one of Zhang Xindong’s Weibo photos 81
Figure 3.3: A screenshot of the show’s logo 83
Figure 5.1: Rotten and pan-rotten culture 110
Figure 6.1: Lan Wangji (left) and Wei Wuxian (right) fighting under the
moon 129
Figure 6.2: Tin (left) kissing Muk (right) in a queer presentist mode 136
Acknowledgments

Producing an edited volume in an emerging academic field during a global

pandemic has been a much harder task than I could have ever imagined. I con-
ceptualized the idea of Queer TV China in December 2019. In 2022, I finalized its
manuscript after experiencing the most depressing time of my life, with endless
worldwide COVID-related lockdowns and quarantines. I wish to thank all the
individual authors who have given me their unwavering trust and contributed
their highly astute writings to this volume. During this tortuous yet always
inspiring journey with unexpected ups and downs in my academic, professional,
and personal lives, I have been indebted to a number of scholars and academic
friends who have encouraged and sustained me along the way.
I feel deeply grateful for the priceless time, patience, advice, and dialogue
provided by Chris Berry and Hongwei Bao, especially their emotional, intel-
lectual, and moral support during the early stages of preparing this book.
Meanwhile, I would like to express my gratitude to Shi-yan Chao, Adam Chen-
Dedman, Victor Fan, Jie Guo, Li Guo, Heidi Huang, Kelvin Ke, Maud Lavin,
Liang Luo, Gina Marchetti, Fran Martin, Hui Miao, Rachel Moseley, Eve Ng,
Ziquan Ni, Karl Schoonover, Geng Song, Qingning Wang, Shuaishuai Wang,
Yiman Wang, Alvin K. Wong, Jim Wren, Hui Faye Xiao, Yanrui Xu, Ling Yang,
Ting-Fai Yu, Charlie Yi Zhang, Kaixuan Zhang, Xiaoling Zhang, and many
others who are not included in this short, incomplete list for their generous time
and companionship through a difficult period. I also thank the two anonymous
reviewers, as well as the editorial board of Hong Kong University Press’s Queer
Asia series, for their insightful, constructive feedback.
Some parts of the introductory chapter were published in the following two
online entries:
Zhao, Jamie J. “Queer TV China as an Area of Critical Scholarly Inquiry in
the 2010s.” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary 26, December 25, 2019. https://
criticalasianstudies.org/commentary/2019/12/25/201926-jamie-zhao-queer-tv-
china-as-an-area-of-critical-scholarly-inquiry-in-the-2010s.
Acknowledgments ix

Zhao, Jamie J., and Hongwei Bao. “‘Queer/ing China’: Theorizing Chinese
Genders and Sexualities through a Transnational Lens.” criticalasianstudies.org
Commentary Board, April 5, 2022. https://doi.org/10.52698/KLCE9376.
Substantial revisions and updates have been made to the previously pub-
lished portions. I extend my gratitude to Critical Asian Studies’s editors, Robert
J. Shepherd and Tristan R. Grunow, for their professionalism and academic
support. They encouraged me to publish on the topics of “Queer TV China” and
“queer/ing China” with their journal, and later allowed me to revise and reprint
the online entries in this current anthology project.
Last but not least, I am thankful for the generous grants from the Center for
Gender and Media Studies in the Department of Journalism and Communication
in the School of Media and Law at NingboTech University for my academic and
publishing activities, without which the publication of this project and sharing
its ideas globally would have been impossible.
Notes on Romanization and Chinese
Characters

This book uses hanyu pinyin to denote certain Chinese-language terms (such as
qinglang, ku’er, and tongxing ai). Chapters 6 and 9 are written by authors located
in Hong Kong and focus on Sinophone issues. Both chapters, based on the
authors’ own preferences, use traditional Chinese characters. All of the other
chapters use simplified Chinese characters. Place names and personal names in
mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other non-English-speaking regions
are romanized by following local conventions.
Introduction
Making “TV China” Perfectly Queer

Jamie J. Zhao

As noted in TV China, one of the first and most comprehensive academic books
dedicated to Chinese-language TV studies, television has become “a global phe-
nomenon” in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and has been “fully estab-
lished as the dominant medium among all Chinese populations” since the new
millennium (Zhu and Berry 2009, 3). At the same time, at the beginning of the
third decade of the twenty-first century, the mainstream society of mainland
China remains largely authoritarian, patriarchal, and heteronormative. Against
this backdrop, in a beguiling yet highly ambivalent way, the Chinese-language
televisual world, with its related celebrity-fan economy, has become increas-
ingly accessible and relevant to gender, sexual, and sociocultural minorities.
Alongside an escalation in official media censorship of what is considered
“vulgar,” “immoral,” “irrational,” and “negative” content (Bai and Song 2015;
Jia and Zhou 2015; Shaw and Zhang 2018; L. Yang 2022) and the party-state’s
misogynistic and homophobic policies (Bao 2021; Xiao 2014, 2020), an unexpect-
edly burgeoning queer media and cultural landscape—what I call “queer TV
China” in this edited volume—has been discursively produced and filled with
nonnormatively gendered, sexualized, or eroticized narratives, personas, affects,
and sentiments (Song 2022a; Yang and Bao 2012; J. Zhao 2016, 2018b).
Particularly during the past decade (2010–2020), the TV screens of the PRC
have presented more and more norm-transgressive images and subjectivi-
ties, made available to audiences through online and digital media platforms.
These queer televisual scenes include, but are not limited to, masculine female
and effeminate male celebrities, who have proliferated and been promoted
on various provincial station-produced reality TV shows; homosociality and
homoeroticism (especially between cis males) in many TV dramas; transgender
personalities, same-sex intimacies, participants who identify as lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) featured on Chinese-language talk
shows; and even explicitly gay-themed stories and topics in online TV programs
(see, for example, Kam 2014; Ng and Li 2020; Song 2022a; A. Wong 2020; Zhao,
2 Introduction: Making “TV China” Perfectly Queer

Yang, and Lavin 2017; J. Zhao 2016, 2018b, 2020a). This boom in post-2010 queer
TV China has been appealing to a broad range of local and international audi-
ences and fans with diverse gender, sexual, and cultural interests, linguistic pref-
erences, and geopolitical identities.
The simultaneous mainstreaming, capitalization, and globalization of queer
TV China, along with the wide use of the internet and digital media in the
twenty-first century, has been further complemented by numerous cross-geo-
linguistically connected cyber queer fan communities and an increasing number
of mainland China-based queer fan sites and practices dedicated to Euro-
American, East Asian, and Southeast Asian TV programs and stars (Hu 2016;
Zhao 2017b). Yet these seemingly progressive TV productions and fan cultures
have been constantly contested by, and even subjected to, multilayered capital-
ist, sociocultural, and political-ideological forces and interests on local, transna-
tional, and global levels. A recent sensational case is the large-scale global queer
fandom, as well as the local government’s endorsement, of The Untamed (陈情
令; Tencent, 2019), the story of which is set in a fantasy immortal world (also
known as the xianxia/仙侠 genre). The Untamed is a mainland China-produced
TV drama in the genre of boys’ love (BL; a kind of East Asian popular genre fea-
turing male same-sex romance, which originated in Japan and is also known in
China as danmei/耽美). As Jun Lei opines in Chapter 5 of this edited volume, the
drama’s unanticipated success “in domestic and overseas markets exemplifies it
as a model that aligns with the official ideology to establish cultural confidence,
spread positive values, and erect Chinese heroic characters” to both local and
international audiences. Using a different approach, Alvin K. Wong, the author
of Chapter 6, reads its global popularity as a result of the “unhistorical queer-
ness” of many mainland Chinese BL dramas, which eventually renders “gay
male homoeroticism . . . easily consumable as commodity.”
This prosperous queer TV culture within, originating from, or associated with
a (hetero-) normative-structured nation-state (the PRC, which this edited volume
is directed toward) raises some pertinent questions that call for urgent academic
consideration. For instance, what are the relationships between this queer TV
scene, mainland media regulatory policies and national projects, and the reality
of Chinese-speaking gender and sexual minorities in the off-screen world? What
dynamics play out between these queer televisual representations and their
related star personas and fan practices inside and outside the PRC? What roles
have local and transnational Chinese feminist movements and queer identity
politics played in the emergence and development of this queer TV culture in
the past decade? How do explorations of queer TV in the Chinese-speaking
context depart from the already flourishing Euro-American queer TV studies
(see, for example, Davis and Needham 2009; Hart 2016; Straayer and Waugh
2005; Villarejo 2014)? Finally, how do queer Chinese TV cultures and studies
open up new empirical and analytical possibilities for post-2020 inter-Asian,
Jamie J. Zhao 3

transnational, and global TV studies, as well as for global queer studies, in a

world that may be undergoing a difficult restructuring of the old global order
during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, if not a simultaneous process of de-
globalization, transnationalization, and “deterritorialization” (Iwabuchi 2002,
2004; Iwabuchi, Tsai, and Berry 2017; Martin et al. 2020; Zhao 2021c)?
Queer TV China: Televisual and Fannish Imaginaries of Gender, Sexuality, and
Chineseness (QTC hereafter) recognizes the intricacy of these questions and their
implications for TV studies, queer media studies, global gender and sexuality
studies, and China and Sinophone studies. To advance the scholarly treatment
of the above-described queer pop cultural phenomenon in a highly normative,
strictly surveilled social setting as an interdisciplinary field of critical inquiry,
this anthology proposes an analytical framework of “queer/ing TV China.”
Employing the term “queer” as a verb, an adjective, and/or a noun in various
case studies, QTC’s contributors work together to highlight the nonnormative
potential, nature, and denotations and connotations of TV and its celebrity and
fan cultures in the PRC and the Chinese-speaking world at large.
As I will elaborate on in other sections of this introduction, LGBTQ images,
narratives, and celebrities in the televisual landscape of the PRC—mainly
produced, circulated, and consumed in a heterosexual-dominated society and
a heteronormative-structured nation-state—have been assumed by many media
scholars and critics around the world to be made invisible, marginal, or stereo-
typical. This subsequently led to a relative scarcity of research about queer TV
culture within the context of mainland China until the recent rise of local BL TV
and related fan cultures (see, for example, Lavin, Yang, and Zhao 2017; Ng and
Li 2020; A. Wong 2020; Yang and Xu 2017; Zhao 2020a; Zhao and Wong 2020).
Even when mainland Chinese queer TV and fan cultures are discussed in most
of the existing queer TV and fan scholarship, scholars often consider media
regulatory and censorial practices a major repressive force that closes rather than
proliferates the possibilities of nonnormative embodiment and imaginary on
and through TV screens. To challenge the widespread “repressive hypothesis”
(Foucault 1978) rooted in existing queer Chinese TV studies, QTC takes as its
primary focus emerging queer televisual and fannish discourses that have been
contested and reworked within the PRC.
Meanwhile, the approach of “queer/ing TV China” acknowledges the inter-
connection and mutual implications of the two overly essentialized and forcibly
disassociated notions, Chineseness and queerness, in the televisual and fannish
imaginaries examined throughout this book. Previous scholarship has power-
fully showcased the importance of decolonializing and denationalizing both
terms, the imaginations of which cannot be based on a monolithic categorization
of identities and subjectivities (Ang 2001; Chun 1996; Leung 2008; Liu and Rofel
2010; Martin 2014). For example, some global queer studies scholars have noted
that “neither ‘Chineseness’ nor ‘queerness’ can or should be understood within
4 Introduction: Making “TV China” Perfectly Queer

national boundaries” (Leung 2008, 129) because both formulations “are ‘always
already’ transnational” in nature (Martin 2014, 35; see also Liu and Rofel 2010).
As Fran Martin brilliantly states,
Chineseness is conceptualized as multiple, contradictory and fragmented:
not the expression of a timeless national essence but instead the produce of
disjunctive regimes of cultural regulation across the multiple transnational
contexts where claims to various forms of Chineseness are made. (Martin
2014, 35)

Although concurring with the call to juxtapose and examine “the margins of
gender and sexuality with the margins of China and Chineseness” that have been
made by many queer Sinophone scholars (Heinrich 2014; see also Chiang and
Heinrich 2014; Chiang and Wong 2020a), Martin also emphasizes the necessity
of including queer cultures and subjects “located inside the territorial borders of
the PRC” in queer Sinophone and queer Asian studies as well as part of global
queer flows in general (2014, 43). As she further elaborates,
Mainland China is more and more interlinked into the transnational
networks of Sinophone cultural flows, both of broader popular culture and
specifically of queer texts, practices and identities. Hence, in a practical sense,
it becomes harder than ever to conceive of mainland Chinese queer cultural
life as sealed off from that of Sinophone queer communities outside China.
Analysis of material exchanges between queer peripheral Sinophone sites
and queer mainland Chinese sites can surely be made while continuing to
avoid the uncritical China-centrism of which the Sinophone studies project is
so suspicious. (Martin 2014, 43)

QTC takes Martin’s cue and further pushes the limits of existing queer China
and queer Sinophone studies by inspecting queer Chinese TV and fan cultures on
local, transcultural, and global scales. Some of the contributors explore Chinese-
language TV phenomena which have been (re)configured across the borders
of various Chinese-speaking societies and communities (as seen in Chapters 6,
7, and 8), while others explore issues concerning the transnational fandom of
mainland Chinese BL-adapted TV (Chapters 4 and 5); the Chinese queer fandom
of Thai BL TV stars (Chapter 9); gender- and sexually nonnormative foreign
stars in mainland reality programs and Chinese cyberspace (Chapters 1 and 2);
and the domestication of cosmopolitanism in queer representations of and self-
performances by male reality sport TV stars (Chapter 3). By so doing, QTC
reveals some prominent, yet severely underexamined, means through which
queer TV in and beyond the geocultural borders of the PRC not only participates
in and links to but also directs and reshapes global queer-centered flows, knowl-
edge production, and subject formation and remaking.
In the remainder of this introduction, I first situate the studies of queer TV
China within existing scholarship and conceptualize the notion of “queer/ing” in
Jamie J. Zhao 5

this field of inquiry. I then discuss the sociopolitical contexts and transformations
that have contributed to the rise of nonnormative representations on Chinese TV
in the twenty-first century. My discussion also challenges the assumption that
queer TV culture did not come into existence in the PRC until the late 2000s by
unpacking the queer nature and contours of Chinese TV. This queer deconstruc-
tion highlights the theoretical and methodological contributions of this edited
volume. By drawing multiple connections among the chapters included in this
project, I emphasize the importance of unsettling the dichotomous, categori-
cal logics often employed to understand meanings associated with various TV
genres and formats and televisual imaginings of gender, sexuality, class, ethnic-
ity/race, nationality, and age. I conclude this introduction by suggesting promis-
ing directions and areas for future research through the critical lens of “queer/
ing TV China.”

Situating “Queer/ing TV China” in the Twenty-First Century

Queer TV studies, especially in the Anglophone context, is no longer a nascent

scholarly field. Research on the “queering” or queer readings of Euro-American
public TV images and narratives can be traced back to the 1980s (Bacon-Smith
1992; Jenkins 1992; Penley 1997; Russ 1985). The years since the 1990s have
seen the “mainstreaming” of LGBTQ characters in Euro-American commercial
media, especially through the makeover TV and advertising industries (Sender
2004; see also Campbell 2005; Chasin 2000; Gross 2001). Following from this,
a body of scholarship on Western queer TV studies has been flourishing since
the early 2000s (Davis and Needham 2009; Day and Christian 2017; Hart 2016;
Joyrich 2014; Kohnen 2016; Lewis 2007; Lovelock 2019; Malici 2014; McCarthy
2001; McIntyre 2016; Miller 2014, 2019; Ng 2008, 2013; Peele 2007; Straayer and
Waugh 2005; Villarejo 2014). Scholarly interest in racial, class-based, and cross-
geocultural representations and interpretations of Anglophone queer TV has
also grown (Bradley 2012; Christian 2016; Day and Christian 2017; Horvat 2020;
Martin 2021; Ng 2021; Peters 2011).
This body of research often draws on classic scholarly definitions of “queer” in
Anglophone queer theory and queer cinema studies, such as that offered by Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick in her 1993 monograph Tendencies. According to Sedgwick,
queer is “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and reso-
nances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of gender,
of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically”
(1993, 8). In another influential and widely cited work published in 1993, Making
Things Perfectly Queer, queer media scholar Alexander Doty also extended the
uses of “queer” and “queer theory” in his study of nontraditional “positions,
pleasures, and readings of” the media audience (xviii). Adopting a poststructur-
alist perspective, Ki Namaste (1994) summarized Doty’s theoretical remaking of
6 Introduction: Making “TV China” Perfectly Queer

queerness as the powerful proposition that queer can be a practice, a spectatorial

position, a temporary desiring moment, a media device, or a nonheterosexual
connotation without explicit self-identification or representational denotation,
all of which are “different strategies for interpreting mass culture” produced and
consumed in “supposedly ‘straight’ settings” (225). Nevertheless, with more and
more LGBTQ images, narratives, and celebrities represented and commodified
on Western TV, queer TV scholar Lynne Joyrich also reminds us that
some televisual forms may be becoming, in a sense, more queered doesn’t
necessarily mean that more queers appear in them—that queering as a verb
(the process of playing, transforming, and making strange) lines up with
queer as a noun (identifying people who are “recognizably” LGBT). (Joyrich
2014, 135)

Moreover, the past two decades have seen the publication of a number of
scholarly books dedicated to Asian and Chinese TV cultures, mostly by media
and cultural studies scholars based in Hong Kong, North America, the United
Kingdom, and Australia (Bai 2015b; Bai and Song 2015; Cai 2016; French and
Richards 2000; Gorfinkel 2018; Iwabuchi 2004; Keane 2015; Keane, Fung, and
Moran 2007; Lewis, Martin, and Sun 2016; Moran and Keane 2004; Song 2022b;
Tay and Turner 2015; Wen 2014; Zhong 2010; Zhu 2008, 2012; Zhu and Berry
2009; Zhu, Keane, and Bai 2008). Some studies have addressed gendered aspects
of Chinese TV, such as its representations of women’s familial, romantic, and
marital lives and various forms of racialized and class-based masculinities
portrayed in Chinese TV series (for example, Gong and Yang 2018; Hird and
Song 2018; Louie 2016; Song 2022b; Xiao 2014). However, research on the ethnic,
industrial, sociopolitical, and geolinguistic intricacies of the increasing number
of queer TV phenomena emerging from predominantly authoritarian, heteropa-
triarchal Chinese-speaking societies and communities, especially with regard
to queer theory and LGBTQ cultures in the Chinese and Sinophone contexts,
remains rare.
In contrast, in recent years, scholarly surveys of Asian queer TV and its fan
cultures, especially those of Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and Singapore, have
proliferated and succeeded in directing attention to the diversities of gender,
sexuality, identity, and subjectivity mediated through televisual representations
and imaginaries (Baudinette 2019; Chao 2021; Jung 2011; Lavin 2015; Liew and
Ismail 2018; Liew, Manokara, and T’a’at 2016; Martin 2010a; Miller 2000; Yuen
2011; Zhang and Dedman 2021). While some of these explorations have focused
on the queer-enacting characteristics of televisual narratives, styles, genres,
formats, and industries in diverse Asian contexts, the discussions have predomi-
nantly focused on either inter-Asian media and information flows or local media
productions about gender and sexual minorities in cosmopolitan, queer-friendly
contexts.
Jamie J. Zhao 7

In the post-2010 years, an exciting surge of scholarly publications in the fields

of queer Chinese and queer Sinophone media and cultural studies has occurred
(Bao 2018, 2020, 2021; Chiang and Heinrich 2014; Chiang and Wong 2020b;
Engebretsen and Schroeder 2015; Liu 2015; Zhao 2020a; Zhao and Wong 2020).
These works indicate the growing academic interest in the mutually implicative
relationship between queerness and Chineseness in queer media cultures in the
Chinese and Sinophone worlds. Among the most prolific endeavors of this schol-
arship is the underscoring of the cross-geocultural traveling and local appropria-
tion of the Anglophone term queer “as a powerful, generative tool in the political,
cultural and scholarly dimensions of diverse Chinese-speaking contexts” (Zhao
and Wong 2020, 477).
In particular, the queer Asian scholar Petrus Liu famously stated,
The possibility of practicing queer theory in Chinese contexts demonstrates
that critical attention to local knowledges and concerns does not immediately
constitute a categorical rejection of “the queer;” rather it shows that what
is “queer” is constantly expanded, supplemented, and revised by what is
“Chinese.” (Liu 2015, 297)

Furthermore, following Chinese-language film scholar Song Hwee Lim’s (2006)

recording of local renderings of “queer” as ku’er (酷儿; literally meaning “cool
kid” or “a generation of being cool”) or guaitai (怪胎; literally meaning “strange
fetus”) in mid-1990s Taiwan, Hongwei Bao (2018) has also emphasized the
elitism- and cosmopolitanism-charged adoption of “queer” and “queer theory”
in mainland Chinese scholarly publications, media spaces, and political activism
since the early 2000s. Bao (2018) underlines the significant political and activist
potential of the word ku’er in mainland China in evading the government’s cen-
sorship of homosexuality and in working as a practical strategy for subjects who
live on the social margins to negotiate with the mainstream, normative social
policing of behaviors, desire, and identities.
This has been paralleled by queer Sinophone research that has relied
heavily on and developed Shu-mei Shih’s problematization of China-centrism
rooted in area and Chinese diasporic studies, which encourages “the study of
Sinitic-language cultures on the margins of geopolitical nation-states and their
hegemonic productions” (2011, 710). Queer Sinophone scholars have strived to
“deconstruct what the category of China itself might mean in a nonnormative
sense—that is, to queer China from the outside in” (Chiang 2014b, 365). More
recent queer Chinese-language media studies have also addressed this theoreti-
cal advancement of, and the implicative linkage between, the queer essence of
Chineseness and the indispensable inclusion of queerness as a key, constitu-
tive element in mainstream Chinese (especially mainland Chinese) culture and
society. Some research has specifically examined “the world-making potential
8 Introduction: Making “TV China” Perfectly Queer

and struggles of the media praxis of subjects who have been constantly cast out
of mainstream media and public spaces” (Zhao and Wong 2020, 478).
In addition, since 2009, the amount of English-language scholarship on cross-
cultural, transnational queer fandoms in the Chinese and Sinophone worlds
or devoted to Chinese-speaking celebrities has noticeably increased (Bai 2022;
Chiang 2016; Chin and Morimoto 2013; Feng 2013; Gong 2017; Li 2009; Li 2017;
Liu 2009; Morimoto 2013; Yang and Xu 2013, 2016a, 2016b, 2017; Zhang 2017;
Zhao 2017a, 2017b). Many early studies in this body of research focused on BL
culture in Taiwan and Hong Kong—two relatively liberal, sexually open, and
feminist- and queer-supportive Chinese-speaking societies. Since the early 2010s,
a parallel body of literature has emerged that sheds light on the production and
interpretation of homoerotic imaginaries and gender-ambiguous performing
spaces on mainland Chinese TV, as well as their negotiation with and contesting
of local gender and sexual systems and histories (He 2013; Hu and Wang 2020;
Lavin, Yang, and Zhao 2017; Ng and Li 2020; Wang 2015; A. Wong 2020; Yang
and Bao 2012; J. Zhao 2016, 2018c, 2020b; Zheng 2019; Z. Zhou 2020).
QTC responds to this growing interest in queer Chinese TV, celebrities, and
fandoms in English-language academia. In line with previous global queering
theory, queer Asia, queer Sinophone, and queer China studies (see, for example,
Bao 2020, 2021; Berry, Martin, and Yue 2003; Chao 2020; Chiang 2012; Chiang and
Heinrich 2014; Chiang and Wong 2020b; Liu 2015; Liu and Rofel 2010; Martin
et al. 2008), QTC cautions against equating contemporary queer Chinese TV
culture with a straightforward capitalist exploitation and stereotyping of LGBTQ
identities, lives, and politics. The contributors to this volume present a variety of
persuasive case studies to demonstrate that the nuances, contextual specificities,
global influences, and theoretical significance of queer TV China diverge from,
yet might also parallel or interconnect with, the prevalent queer marketing strat-
egies conceptualized in the Euro-American and East Asian entertainment indus-
tries as “gaystreaming,” “post-queer,” “queerbaiting,” or “fanservice” (Boyd
2016; Brennan 2018b; Green 2002; Gross 2001; Maris 2016; Ng 2013; Sender 2004,
2007; Wood 2013). This anthology also contests the universalization of a Western
conception of homosexuality (as well as a Western conception of queerness) as
the only way to represent and understand nonnormative identities, relation-
ships, and forms of desire in the Chinese-speaking world. Instead, by propos-
ing the framework of “queer/ing TV China,” we consider queer as a contingent
and flexible assemblage of nouns, verbs, or adjectives that can be used to unveil
“whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant” (Halperin
2003, 62) and to interrogate unconventional ways of being, doing, desiring, and
imagining in and through televisual spaces.
In her pioneering work Backward Glances, Martin (2010a, 16) identified two
ways of representing (and conceptualizing) nonnormative gender and sexual
subjects in contemporary Chinese-language media. One is the “minoritizing”
Jamie J. Zhao 9

approach, which involves self-conscious, identitarian-based LGBTQ subjects

who have emerged out of and are recognizable in location-specific contexts of
feminist and queer politics. The other is the “universalizing” approach, which
captures nonidentitarian, “ephemeral yet powerfully—often troublingly—
memorable” moments of nonnormative embodiment, performances, and intima-
cies. While concurring with Martin’s (2010a, 16) observation that the majority
of mainstream Chinese-language media representations of homoeroticism,
especially those set within a largely heteronormative society, are visualized
through the “universalizing rather than minoritizing” approach, the framework
of “queer/ing TV China” encompasses both forms of televisual representations
and fannish imaginations. More importantly, QTC includes critical analyses from
both perspectives. Some chapters examine progressive, self-identified LGBTQ
TV images, stardom, and fandom (as seen in Chapters 2 and 8), while others
move beyond the binary categories of masculinity versus femininity, hetero-
sexuality versus homosexuality, past versus presence, positivity versus negativ-
ity, and reality versus fictionality to demystify “the contradictory, ambiguous,
playful, anti-essentialist, transgressive” characteristics of televisual and fannish
spaces “made by, for, about and/or associated with sociocultural groups, identi-
ties and stances positioned as peripheral in mainstream Chinese-speaking socie-
ties,” which do not necessarily self-identify or may not be publicly recognized as
LGBTQ (Zhao and Wong 2020, 478).
Through this innovative lens of “queer/ing TV China,” QTC highlights the
multivalent queer potential of both China/Chineseness and TV/televisuality
(which is, in fact, made possible through their mutual shaping and constitu-
tion) in not only representing and signifying but also concocting and refashion-
ing nonnormative subjects. To achieve this goal, QTC recognizes the inherently
intertwined queer and normative dimensions of TV as an effective sociocultural
platform within and beyond mainstream Chinese-speaking spaces. For instance,
Chapters 1 and 3 uncover the performativity of a particular TV genre—reality
TV—in representing real-life gender-nonnormative groups while actively nego-
tiating the nation-state’s gendered policies and ideological projects. Addressing
TV drama, Chapter 6 focuses on the queer-enabling power of televisual narra-
tivity and temporality in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Chapter 7
explores the vocal queerness realized through Chinese-language talk and singing
programs, while Chapter 8 explores the gendered performance and negotiation of
gayness on queer-friendly Mandarin talk shows hosted by publicly out Chinese-
speaking gay celebrities. QTC also captures research on the cross-cultural cir-
culation, translation, and remaking of ethnic-Chinese-related queer TV cultures
in multiple trans-geolinguistic contexts. Chapter 9, in particular, uncovers how
ethnic Chineseness, rather than simply being imagined as an arbitrary geopoliti-
cal identity, serves as a key element in mobilizing transnational queer readings
and encouraging disruption of the conventional Sinophone form of mother-son
10 Introduction: Making “TV China” Perfectly Queer

kinship. Furthermore, QTC unveils the paradoxical, yet queer-essenced, aspects

of Chinese televisual-industrial-cultural discourses in the contemporary era.
Chapters 4 and 5, for example, demonstrate the diverse discourses through
which the media censorship of homosexuality in the PRC has generated innova-
tive strategies for homoerotic content production, adaptation, and viewing in
an increasingly digitized and globalizing Chinese TV landscape complicated
by cross-cultural communication, transnational access to online sites, and local
concessions to political-national ideologies. These “queer-inviting” nature and
contours of TV China are discussed in depth in the next section.

Queer/ing the Contours of TV China

In a departure from research that aims to recognize and capture self-identified

Chinese LGBTQ groups’ underground cultural productions and sociopolitical
movements, QTC is especially attentive to a queer televisual spectacle crystal-
ized in contemporary mainstream Chinese culture’s censoring, appropriation,
shaping, mobilization, and commercialization of local, transnational, and global
gender and sexual knowledge. Queer TV China, in this sense, is neither neces-
sarily subversive of, nor submissive to, hegemonic sociocultural and political-
economic systems characterized by heteronormativity, patriarchy, nationalism,
globalism, and capitalism in the twenty-first century. Rather, it has been shaped
by premodern Chinese gendered paradigms and local performing arts (for
example, the wen/wu 文武 male masculinity praxis and the cross-gender roles
in regional operatic, theatrical aesthetics mentioned in a number of chapters
in this volume; see also He 2013, 2014; Hird and Song 2018; Louie 2015, 2016;
Song 2022a, 2022b; Tan 2000, 2007) and the local same-sex erotic modalities, such
as the famous cases of “passions of the cut sleeve” (断袖之癖; denoting male
homoeroticism) and “mirror rubbing” (磨镜; denoting female homoeroticism),
which were widespread in premodern classical literature and historical records
(Chiang 2012; Hinsch 1990; Kang 2009; Rocha 2010; Sang 2003; Shi 2014). In the
premodern and early modern era of China, these local forms and media repre-
sentations of same-sex desire and intimacies were not necessarily unequivocally
forbidden or ostracized, but tacitly endured as part of hetero-marital harmony
and/or elitist heterosexual fantasies (Sang 2003).
Certainly, the modern history of Chinese gender and sexuality has not been
a static perpetuation of a traditional past, nor has it taken the form of a sub-
versive, anti-hegemonic lineal process. Instead, since the beginning of China’s
self-modernizing process and the birth of Chinese feminist movements in the
first decade of the twentieth century, gender and sexual neologisms, shaped by
modern Western and Japanese sexological, medical, and scientific knowledge
imported through Chinese male intellectuals’ translations, have been con-
stantly invented and manipulated in Chinese public discourses to propel local
Jamie J. Zhao 11

ideological-political movements (Barlow 2004; Liu, Karl, and Ko 2013; Rocha

2010). For instance, following Chinese intellectuals’ deployment of the modern
concept of “love” during the May Fourth New Culture period (1915–1937) as “a
symbol of freedom, autonomy, and equality” (Lee 2007, 5), the Chinese term for
homosexuality, tongxing ai (同性爱; literally “same-sex love”), emerged as part of
local modern sexology in the 1920s (Rocha 2010). Moreover, both republican and
socialist China tactically used these imported ideas of modern (homo)sexuality
to imagine a modern China and distinguish it from what was perceived as either
backward and primitive from a discriminative, Western-centric, Orientalist
viewpoint or as obsequious to the Western capitalist modernity or local feudal
residues (Sang 2003; see also Q. Zhang 2014, 2015). Admittedly, the political-ide-
ological manipulations of Chinese gender and sexuality during the Maoist years,
especially the socialist feminism and women’s “androgynous” public images as
discussed in Chapter 1, enhanced Chinese women’s social status to some extent
and diversified their nonnormatively gendered (as well as potentially nonhetero-
sexual) positionalities (see Jiao 2021; Lei 2015; Zhu and Xiao 2021). This historical
trajectory of queer genders and sexualities in premodern and modern times has
inevitably silhouetted today’s queer TV China.
Post-2000 queer TV China has certainly been rendered more visible by a
series of cultural-political events, digital technological transformations, and
neoliberal economic reforms that occurred after the PRC’s participation in the
global economy starting from the late 1970s. The PRC entered a post-Mao age
after the Cultural Revolution era (1966–1976), which was characterized by a
radical break from previous Maoist politics and a “resurging discourse of liberal
individualism [in] the intersections of society, family, and state” (Xiao 2014, 16).
Meanwhile, the economic experiments and restructuring in the post-Mao time,
such as the “reform and opening up” (改革开放) and “marketization” (市场化)
of various sectors of Chinese society, led to significant growth in the number of
local TV stations and TV sets owned by individuals (Huang 1994). Together with
the development of transmission technologies during the 1980s, these reforms
eventually resulted in the rapid commercialization, internationalization, and
decentralization of the Chinese TV industry in the early 1990s (Sun and Gorfinkel
2015; Webber, Wang, and Zhu 2002; Yu 2011). TV as a key mass communicative
platform in the PRC has thus been transformed from the party-state’s tool for
political mobilization to a “financially self-reliant” industry that relies “strongly
on market forces and commercial interests to operate,” while still constantly
bargaining and complying with the government’s ideological supervision and
its national and political projects (Sun and Gorfinkel 2015, 21–25). At the same
time, competitions for ratings and broadcasting reach between the national TV
station China Central TV (CCTV), the provincial stations, and other “privately
owned and operated media systems” also intensified (Keane 2004, 93; Yu 2009,
7; Zhao 2008, 96). In addition, the popularity of “television entertainment”
12 Introduction: Making “TV China” Perfectly Queer

(电视娱乐), especially in the forms of TV serials, reality TV, and variety shows,
has increased among both TV producers and audiences since the late 1980s (Bai
and Song 2015, 2).
Starting in the late 1990s, a series of cultural-political events and neoliberal
transformations occurred, which expedited the PRC’s integration into global
capitalism (Keane and Liu 2009, 246). For instance, national and global media and
political events, such as the British handover of sovereignty over Hong Kong to
China in 1997, China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001,
and significant increases in information exchange and human mobilization (most
often in the forms of entertainment media and migratory flows) within China
and internationally, captured the world’s attention (Keane 2004, 90–95). Coupled
with the emergence of multimedia broadcasting and participatory platforms
(mobile TV and video-streaming and livestreaming sites, for example) for TV
distribution and consumption in mainland China in the early 2000s, these signs
of progress and change combined to facilitate transcultural traffic, drastically
diversifying the Chinese TV industry and related cultures (Bai and Song 2015).
In the meantime, the decriminalization of homosexuality in the PRC’s Criminal
Law in 1997 and the subsequent “partial removal of homosexuality as a mental
disorder from” the third edition of Chinese Classification of Mental Disorders in
2001, as well as the rapid rise of urban China-based, transnational-connected
feminist, LGBTQ, and HIV/AIDS-concerned non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) and activists in the 2000s, have all contributed to “an increasing LGBTQ
rights consciousness, [an expansion] of queer-friendly spaces and a burgeoning
‘pink economy’” in mainland China (Bao 2021, 2–3, 32–33).
As further evidenced in Chapters 1, 2, and 3 in this volume, gender- and
sexually nonnormative people in the PRC who can embody forms of Chinese-
specific cosmopolitanism, neoliberalism, and neo-Confucianism are often
treated as constructive elements rather than “the most politically sensitive and
subversive social groups” (Bao 2021, 34) in the party-state’s economic and politi-
cal projects of creating and sustaining fantasies of “great China” and “strong
nation” at the center of the global stage (Hird and Song 2018; Rofel 2007; Song
2022a; J. Zhao 2016, 2018a, 2020b). This ideological subjectivization and capitalist
manipulation of LGBTQ groups in media and public spaces, though fundamen-
tally problematic and perpetuating sociocultural hierarchies, has also perpetu-
ated the government’s somewhat ambiguous, performative, and even generative
attitude toward queer media images (in both minoritizing and universalizing
senses).
Notably, the government has practiced a hidden “Three No’s” rule concern-
ing LGBTQ issues in contemporary Chinese society: namely, “no approval, no
disapproval, and no promotion” (Chen and Wang 2019). As recorded by Bao,
Jamie J. Zhao 13

Since the 1990s, LGBTQ issues have started to emerge in China’s mainstream
media and public discourses, although they have often been framed in
limited ways and often associated with pathology, criminality, and abnormal-
ity. . . . In December 2000, Li Yinhe, Cui Zi’en, and Shi Tou participated in the
talk show Approaching Homosexuality (Zoujin Tongxinglian) on Hunan Satellite
Television, openly discussing queer issues in China’s mainstream media for
the first time. In December 2004, China Central Television broadcast a news
feature Tongxinglian: Huibi Buru Zhengshi (Homosexuality: Better Face It Than
Avoid It), discussing homosexuality in relation to HIV/AIDS prevention. (Bao
2021, 36)

Indeed, these early TV representations of LGBTQ subjects, especially the minor-

itized ones, often reproduced the “sad young men” (Berry 2000) imaginary of
homosexuality in which gay men were persistently othered and repressed, if not
portrayed as being ghettoized, hopeless, “deviant, abnormal, and anonymous”
(Bao 2018, 113; Martin 2010a; Yu 2009). Although in the 2010s transgender and
openly gay Chinese-speaking celebrities, such as the Mainland-born, male-
to-female transgender TV personality Jin Xing (金星) and the Taiwanese gay-
identifying talk show host Kevin Tsai (蔡康永), can be seen in seemingly
“positive” representations on Chinese TV, their images have been largely refash-
ioned in discourses of Chinese-specific elitism, cultural pride, cosmopolitan-
ism, and neoliberalism. As our authors Linshan Jiang (in Chapter 7) and Oscar
Tianyang Zhou (in Chapter 8) point out, even in the late 2010s, male effeminacy,
which has been closely associated with the gender identities and aesthetics of
gay men, is often negatively framed on Chinese TV or stereotypically interpreted
through Chinese-speaking stars’ on-TV performances. These stereotypes may
have incurred the widespread “sissyphobia”—“the fear or hatred of effeminate
men” who might undermine the heterosexualized and masculinist ideologies of
the PRC nationalism and global power—in the post-2010 mainstream Chinese
society (Song 2022a, 68–70).
In sharp contrast, as revealed in the discussions in Chapters 1 and 3 concern-
ing images of real people and celebrities with norm-defying genders or same-sex
intimacies in reality competition shows, universalized queer images and star
personas have been not only increasingly visible but also blatantly commercial-
ized, celebrated, and “normalized” by the media market, the government, and
audience and fan groups (J. Zhao 2016, 2018b). More often than not, these defiant
genders, connotated nonheterosexualities, and unconventional desires (which
belong to the universalized queer representations, identities, and subjectivities
on entertainment TV) have been fictionalized, detached from real-life LGBTQ
identities and relationships (which are denotated, identity politics-based,
minoritized nonheterosexuality), or fetishized and “straightened” as precious
human qualities or characters (J. Zhao 2016, 2018b). On the one hand, since 2020,
this omnipresent “queering” of TV narratives, media characters, and celebrity
14 Introduction: Making “TV China” Perfectly Queer

personas, widely practiced by both the media producers and the fan commu-
nities (as explicated in Chapters 2 and 5), incurred a sudden official top-down
curtailment of BL media cultures and the formerly exponentially burgeoning
celebrity-fan economy.1 On the other hand, this ubiquitous queerness on TV and
in Chinese cyberspace frequently led to unexpected online anti-pornography,
anti-misogyny, and anti-homophobia/transphobia protests in digital spaces,
initiated by different kinds of Chinese-speaking fan and activist groups (which
is explored in depth in Chapters 1, 2, and 5; see also Bai 2022). These intricacies
and conflicts within this post-2010 Chinese queer pop scene involving queer TV
and fan cultures demonstrate the complex, inconsistent, vague ways media and
online censorship systems in the PRC have worked (which can also be contem-
plated as “queer” in some sense).
Research has found that the Chinese TV and cyber censorship systems have
been characterized by performativity and “generative”-ness within a “panoptic”
social structure (Ng 2015; see also Bai 2022; Tsui 2003; Zhao 2020a). The party-
state considers “a healthy moral order for Chinese society” as the fundamental
key to its national progress and social-political stability and reinstates “itself as
the moral center of Chinese society with ideological innovations” (Bai 2015a,
69–73). Meanwhile, the post-Mao government sees TV “as the guardian of a
coherent, dominant morality system” and has strived to restrain TV entertain-
ment from “promoting inappropriate morals and dubious values, catering to
vulgar tastes, and staging the ugly, the dark, and abnormal” (Bai 2015a, 71–73).
In addition, the often contradictory attitudes of the official censors at the various
levels of TV production and broadcasting, as well as the self-censorship of media
practitioners who “tend to produce materials . . . [that are] commercially suc-
cessful,” morally permissive, and less politically offensive to “the conversative
morals of mainstream Chinese consumers” (Gorfinkel 2018, 75; see also Amar

1. The most recent practice of official crackdowns on the celebrity-fan economy happened in
cyberspace in June 2021, targeting illegal, irrational, immoral, and even chaotic activities
and communication in fan circles (饭圈; meaning “fannish social networks”) and celebrity-
related rumors and disputes on social media (see dramapotatoe 2021; L. Yang 2022). Known
as the “Qinglang Rectification on the ‘Fan-Circle’ Chaos” (清朗·‘饭圈’乱象整治) initiated by
the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission, this crackdown is part of the state-endorsed
movement to create and sustain a “clean and bright” cyberspace (清朗网络空间), which was
encouraged by President Xi Jinping in a speech in October 2017 at the nineteenth National
Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (Wang and Liu 2020, 699; G. Yang 2022, 36; L.
Yang 2022). Aiming to tame unruly fan activities and discipline the celebrities active in
local entertainment industries, the government’s qinglang (清朗) campaign indeed helped
to cease some long-lasting issues and abuses in online Chinese fandoms and celebrity
cultures, such as some idols’ “manipulation of their fame for personal gain” and sexual har-
assment and certain fan groups’ illegal economic activities and personal attacks (Tao and
Liu 2021). Nevertheless, with a nature of censoring dissident opinions and public speech,
this movement has largely impinged on freedom of speech and civil activities, especially
those from feminist and LGBTQ groups, in cyberspace (Wang and Liu 2020; G. Yang 2022).
Jamie J. Zhao 15

2018), often lead to the censoring of information that is incompatible with the
political-ideological projects of the party-state and to unreasonable (self-)crack-
downs on “politically innocuous” content in public spaces (Balding 2017; see
also Zhao 2018a). Yet, in response to this official “morality” regulation, the
Chinese TV industry often “embraces resilience” and pragmatically tailors ways
of content production and distribution (Guo 2017, 488).
In terms of regulating homosexual media content, official policies have
deemed homosexual topics in mass media and cyberspace “abnormal” and “per-
verted” since 2008. Some official guidelines directly associated homosexuality
with “pornography, sex, and vulgarisms” and claimed it should be excluded from
Chinese mass media (Jia and Zhou 2015). In 2016, the official media supervision
and regulation executive agency, the State Administration of Press, Publication,
Radio, Film, and Television (国家广播电影电视总局; SAPPRFT),2 issued a set of
new stipulations expressing unequivocal disapproval of media materials that
“express or display abnormal sexual relations or sexual behavior, such as incest,
homosexuality, perversion, sexual assault, sexual abuse, and sexual violence” or
“promote unhealthy views of marriage and relationships, including extramarital
affairs, one-night stands, and sexual freedom” (Shaw and Zhang 2018, 273). As
thoroughly investigated in Chapter 4, one of the mainland Chinese TV produc-
tions severely affected by this policy is the 2016 popular online drama Addicted
(上瘾; iQIYI). The show, also known as Heroin, involves a high school male
same-sex romance. It was pulled off the air before the online distribution of its
final three episodes in mainland China for its portrayals of male homosexuality
and was accused of promoting “vulgar, immoral, and unhealthy content” and
“the dark side of society” (Ellis-Petersen 2016). Yet, unexpectedly, this censor-
ing of the show before the airing of its finale, as pointed out by Aobo Dong in
Chapter 4, drove its fans to resume their consumption of the drama on English-
language video-streaming websites based outside of the Mainland. In this sense,
the censorship unexpectedly generated a resistive practice of queer Chinese TV
fans based in the PRC that bypassed both the government’s censorship of homo-
sexuality and its digital geo-blocking of political-ideologically sensitive media
information.
The online censoring of Addicted and the fan resistance provoked by the gov-
ernment’s regulation both showcase the censorial logic that was reinforced in
an official media regulatory memo circulated internally in June 2018. The memo
states that in order to create an ideologically positive, politically correct media
environment, the “self-censorship” of media producers is encouraged and
“homosexuality is respected, but gay-themed content or gay characters are not
allowed” in mass media (Feng 2018). Moreover, official media outlets, such as the

2. SAPPRFT existed between 2013 and 2018. Since March 2018, it has been restructured as the
National Radio and Television Administration (国家广播电视总局; NRTA).
16 Introduction: Making “TV China” Perfectly Queer

newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, People’s Daily, sometimes self-con-

tradictorily criticized the disrespect and depathologization suffered by gender
and sexual minorities in cyberspace and on TV that caused public anxiety and
transnational protest against the PRC’s heteronormative ideology, while also in
the same statement advising Chinese LGBTQ people to be self-disciplined and
behave like socially responsible, “normal” Chinese citizens (Zhao 2018a; see also
Bao 2021, 35).3 This official attitude is often more concerned with maintaining the
nation’s social-political stability in a neoliberal discourse and its global image
as a culturally diverse, liberal, open-minded, modern, strong nation than with
gender and sexual equality within mainland China.
What has further complicated this queer TV culture in the PRC is the queer
nature and history of Chinese televisual and fannish discourses. As Jamie J. Zhao
expounds in Chapter 1, “Reality talent shows [especially those adapting foreign
formats and produced in the 2000s] have been credited with the emergence and
popularity” of young Chinese idols with gender-nonnormative personas and
performances. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to assume that queer TV is
a recent local phenomenon or limited to reality TV. As Joyrich noted, “queer is
defined precisely as the subversion of the ordinary, as the strange, the irregu-
lar, which would seem to necessitate some sort of disruption to ‘our regularly
scheduled [TV] programming’” (2014, 134). Accordingly, contemporary TV is
increasingly
intriguing in its concepts and politics, complex in its story structure and
visuals, multiple in its address and mediations. Thus, . . . television itself is
being remade, some might say, as more queer: more eccentric and playful,
more connective and transformative, with more stand-out strangeness than
just stand-up straightness. (Joyrich 2014, 135)

This is particularly true for mainland Chinese TV and its stardom and fandom,
which have been shaped by and actively transforming both local and global
queer cultures, though often in subtle and negotiative ways.
Some notable cases of queerness on mainland Chinese TV prior to the “ubiq-
uitous queerness” (Zhao 2018b, 2020a) on contemporary reality TV can be
identified. Take, for example, the annually televised Chinese Lunar New Year
special Spring Festival Gala (春晚; CCTV, 1983–present), which has continually
featured cross-gender and cross-dressing performances or nonconforming
gender personas (often legitimized through the theatricality of Peking opera/京
剧 or other local Chinese folk art forms such as er’ren zhuan/二人转); the delicate
homoerotism between Prince Hong (太子弘) and his catamite Hehuan (合欢) in

3. Take, for example, the official media responses to the online communicative platform
Weibo’s ban on homosexual content in April 2018 and to Mango TV’s self-censoring
of LGBTQ images during its broadcasting of the European reality singing competition
Eurovision (EBU, EU) in May 2018.
Jamie J. Zhao 17

Palace of Desire (大明宫词, CCTV-8, 2000), the mega-hit historical TV drama of the
Tang Dynasty; the male-to-female cross-dressing servant girl Da Meizi (大梅子)
in Xuese Canyang (血色残阳; BTV, 2005), the suspense drama portraying a story
of pre-1949’s modern China; and the surprisingly large number of “handsome”
single young women on the heterosexual match-making show If You Are the One
(非诚勿扰; Jiangsu TV, 2010–present) who were rumored to be lesbians and have
long-term same-sex partners in their offscreen lives.
Along with the rise of online audience and fan groups dedicated to non-Main-
land TV in the early 2000s, both the East Asian pop culture of androgynous beau-
tiful males (also known as 花美男/flower-like men) and images of androgynous
girls and young women (also known as 中性女孩儿/少男系少女/neutrosexual
or tomboyish girls) in variety shows and TV dramas produced in Taiwan, Hong
Kong, Thailand, and the United States have largely facilitated the development
and intricacy of local mainland Chinese LGBTQ cultures and subject positions
(Zhao, Yang, and Lavin 2017; see also Lu and Hu 2021). After the Mainland
entered the era of digital TV production, distribution, and consumption in the
years since 2010,4 both Chinese-language and foreign TV programs featuring
homoerotic and homosocial scenes, connotations, and storylines have prolifer-
ated in Chinese cyberspace. In addition to the TV shows discussed in QTC’s
essays, other noteworthy cases in recent years include the comedy Go Princess
Go (太子妃升职记; LeTV, 2015), which was released online and presents a time-
traveling, gender-reversal story; the 2016 Super Voice Girl (超级女声; Mango TV),
a reality singing competition that featured numerous high-profile masculine girl
stars; and the Thai BL TV series I Told Sunset About You (Line TV, 2020) and I
Promised You the Moon (Line TV, 2021), the online subtitled release of which drew
a large Chinese-speaking queer fan base in the Chinese and Sinophone worlds.
Despite this flourishing queer TV culture within and beyond the geolinguis-
tic, political-ideological confines of mainland China, what has yet to emerge in
existing queer Chinese TV and fan studies is a comprehensive text that recog-
nizes the usefulness of universalizing and minoritizing approaches and high-
lights the interdigitated root and route of the discursive formations of queerness,
Chineseness, and TV in the field. Through the framework of “queer/ing TV
China,” QTC addresses this urgent need to explore the subtleties, anxieties,
and confrontations within and surrounding the collisions of global TV flows,
international politics, cross-racial issues, ethnic-cultural connections, historical
divergence within various Sinophone communities, transcultural traveling and
mutations of feminist and queer politics, and the local adaptation and reinven-
tion of televisuality. The contributors collaborate to provide powerful proof of
the omnipresence of queer subjects and cultures in forming and transforming

4. The first online mainland Chinese TV drama was released in 2007. Yet, online TV shows
were rare in the pre-2010 years.
18 Introduction: Making “TV China” Perfectly Queer

Chinese commercial and entertainment media industries, televisual aesthetics

and digital communication, sociocultural developments, and political-ideolog-
ical regulations.

Chapter Breakdowns

This volume is divided into three sections, each of which includes three original
studies dedicated to the most attention-grabbing “queer/ing” issues in the field.
The first section is titled “Queer/ing Genders and Sexualities through Reality
Competition Shows.” As mentioned above, reality TV is one of the queerest TV
genres, often characterized by easily adaptive formats and performativity in rep-
resenting “reality,” gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity (Zhao 2018b; see also
Gater and MacDonald 2015; Hill 2005; Skeggs and Wood 2012). Set in heteronor-
mative societies, these features of reality competitions can offer and intensify
ambiguous, yet ubiquitous, homosocial settings and same-sex erotic tensions
(Zhao 2018b). Meanwhile, research has attributed the state-backed popularity
of reality TV in the twenty-first-century PRC to the genre’s ideological-propa-
gandistic function in promoting “positive” and “happy” voices to the audience
(Yang 2014) and articulating the government’s ethno-nationalistic projects,
such as “China Dream” and “root-seeking,” in sonic or visual representations
(Jiang and Gonzalez 2021; Song 2022b; Xiao 2020; Zhao 2020b). These also partly
explain why reality TV is intrinsically both queer and hegemonic, as well as both
ideologically orthodoxic and commercially successfully, in the PRC.
Chapter 1, “Growing up with ‘Tomboy Power’: Starring Liu Yuxin on Post-
2010 Chinese Reality TV,” captures this self-contradictoriness of reality TV and
elaborates on the nuances of how gender-norm-defying girls and young women
have been framed by and are actively navigating through reality TV’s dual
function. Jamie J. Zhao explores this queerly gendered televisual phenomenon
by examining a particular form of female masculinity, “tomboyism,” which is
embodied by one of the most successful girl pop stars in the post-2010 era: Liu
Yuxin, who rose to stardom in the most recent girl band-manufacturing reality
program, Youth With You 2 (青春有你2; iQIYI, 2020). Zhao presents a critical tele-
visual analysis of Liu’s tomboyism as presented on mainland Chinese reality TV
between 2012 and 2020. Her analysis unpacks the intricate relationship between
televised Chinese tomboyism and the local Chinese term signifying a young,
butch lesbian, “T.” She demonstrates how, along with the drastic changes in local
queer and feminist cultures over the past decade, the constantly self-fashioning
format and televisuality of reality TV subjectivize tomboyish stars who cite local,
transnational, and global pop cultural discourses on youth, androgynous beauty,
girl power, and neoliberalism to validate their gender and potentially sexual
non-normativities while, either voluntarily or unwillingly, being fabricated into
Jamie J. Zhao 19

the official imaginary of China as a globalized, modernized nation-state that

appreciates female gender diversity, feminist expressions, and self-cultivation.
Chapter 2, “When ‘Jiquan’ Fandom Meets ‘Big Sisters’: The Ambivalence
between Female Queer (In)Visibility and Popular Feminist Rhetoric in Sisters Who
Make Waves,” looks at queer female images and same-sex intimacies in, as well
as the queer fandom of, another extremely successful girl group-manufacturing
reality show in the Mainland in 2020, Sisters Who Make Waves (乘风破浪的姐姐;
Mango TV). Diverging from the first chapter’s focus on norm-defying girls and
young women, Jia Guo and Shaojun Kong examine how a show featuring female
celebrity participants over the age of thirty successfully devises a “big sister”
persona by incorporating popular feminism. These images of mature, independ-
ent, and brave “big sisters” coincide with the preference of jiquan (姬圈; liter-
ally meaning “lesbian circle”) fandom, a queer female fan culture that has been
emerging in post-2010 Chinese cyberspace. The authors explore the ambivalent
relations between queer female visibility and popular feminist rhetoric on TV
through jiquan fans’ queer readings of the show. They find that, on the one hand,
the popular feminist rhetoric of the show creates a viable space for jiquan fans to
project their queer desires onto female celebrities and foster their understanding
of female homoeroticism. On the other hand, jiquan fandom marginalizes mascu-
line queer women and promotes elitism and lookism in lesbian culture.
While the preceding two chapters are dedicated to queer female images
on reality TV, Chapter 3, “A Dildonic Assemblage: The Paradoxes of Queer
Masculinities and Desire on the Chinese Sports Variety Show Let’s Exercise,
Boys,” turns to norm-negotiating male gender and sexual representations on the
2020 sports reality show Let’s Exercise, Boys (运动吧少年; Hunan TV). Wangtaolue
Guo and Jennifer Quist present textual and paratextual analyses and explore the
dynamics between contestants on the show, male bodies in the mediascape, and
the making of spornosexuals under Chinese censorship and in a postsocialist
society. Guo and Quist also add to this analytical approach the concept of the
“dildonic assemblage,” applying it to the show’s spornosexuality as it is read
through the female gaze and through latent queer erotics. By doing so, they
uncover the show’s representations of male masculinity, desire, and queerness
through a polysystematic lens. The authors argue that, despite the ambivalent
attitudes toward homoeroticism, commodification, and the ironic queering of
male bodies in Chinese media, Let’s Exercise, Boys subverts and complicates the
discourses that would suppress this new spornosexual iteration of Chinese male
masculinity.
The second section, “Queer/ing TV Dramas through Media Regulations,”
focuses on the transnational, cross-linguistic circulation and consumption of
queer TV dramas in and beyond the Chinese-speaking world that have always
been under the government’s cultural surveillance, economic exploitation, and
political manipulation. This section contains three chapters that, from different
20 Introduction: Making “TV China” Perfectly Queer

perspectives, emphasize the queer-enabling power of the seemingly repressive

official media policies and the negotiative potential of contemporary queer
Chinese televisual production, distribution, and consumption.
Chapter 4, “Addicted to Melancholia: Negotiating Queerness and
Homoeroticism in a Banned Chinese BL Drama,” spotlights the transgressive
potential of queer Chinese TV under erasure. Aobo Dong examines the affect and
plot in Addicted, an immensely popular BL web series that was abruptly banned
by state censors in 2017. Focusing on the dynamics between two same-sex lovers,
he explores the critical themes of performativity, melancholia, and identification
underlying the plot and reception of the series. Drawing on Judith Butler’s (1995,
1997) theory of gender melancholia and José Esteban Muñoz’s (2009) vision for
a queer utopia, Dong illustrates the role of grief in enabling their same-sex love
and argues that overcoming their shared grief and precariousness threatens
the heterosexual symbolic in the Chinese and Confucian social orders. Dong’s
analysis also shows that Addicted is an attempt to construct a utopian parallel
reality in which same-sex love trumps same-sex rivalry, class difference, and
compulsory filial piety. Because the narrative of Addicted never attaches a gay
identity to the characters, the series frees same-sex love from the constraints of
LGBTQ identity politics and disguises it as other forms of same-sex intimacy—
making it both ubiquitous and dangerous to the hegemonic gendered matrix in
contemporary Chinese society.
Chapter 5, “Taming The Untamed: Politics and Gender in BL-Adapted Web
Dramas,” by Jun Lei, looks at one of the most widely discussed and debated
Chinese BL dramas of the digital TV era. The author proposes “BL-adapted”
(耽改) as a genre related to, but differentiated from, BL, because media industry
infiltration and state regulations have depleted the BL-adapted sexual and
homoerotic content and converted it into “bromance.” As Lei shows, the two
queer media genres differ in narrative modes, fan objects, fan participation
patterns, cultural function, and ideological positioning to dominant political
and commercial forces. Lei reassesses optimistic scholarly claims about fans’
digital dexterity, initiative, and capacity to be a subversive force of heteronor-
mativity and state ideology. Her analysis also reveals contention and compliance
between audience, industry, and state censors in “taming” BL-adapted dramas.
She unravels controversies revolving around the lead actors of The Untamed to
situate the BL-adapted genre as part of the Chinese entertainment industry’s
“pan-rotten” strategy of clickbaiting for profitmaking. Her examination extrapo-
lates how the ideological expressions of BL-adapted dramas are shaped by state
regulatory strategies. As Lei finds, while gesturing toward new possibilities of
queer representations and fantasies and public agencies for female fans and
viewers, the current form of BL-adapted dramas actually bespeaks a heteronor-
mative conservatism and can distract attention from politically sensitive and
often severely censored LGBTQ media in China.
Jamie J. Zhao 21

The hypermasculinist and heteronormative geopolitics of the PRC in the Xi

Jinping era are often framed as less progressive in the domains of gay marriage,
anti-discrimination laws, and LGBTQ public cultures in comparison to post-
Martial Law Taiwan, as well as less friendly than the queer-supportive envi-
ronment of postcolonial Hong Kong. In response, Alvin K. Wong, in Chapter 6,
“Disjunctive Temporalities: Queer Sinophone Visuality across Mainland China,
Hong Kong, and Taiwan,” examines the textual and contextual disjunctions
of BL cultural productions in the three major Chinese-speaking societies. The
author finds that while The Untamed, produced in the PRC, captures a form of
“unhistorical queerness” whose queer appeal lies precisely in its portrayals of
bromance and queer desire in a non-historical world of jianghu (rivers and lakes
of the heroic world), recent queer dramas and films in postcolonial Hong Kong
are by contrast more concerned with social issues such as aging, HIV prevention,
and familial conflicts. The HIV-related online film For Love, We Can (愛，不難;
dir. Chi-Lung Lam, 2014) and the recent hit TV drama Ossan’s Love (大叔的愛;
ViuTV, HK, 2021) visualize queer Hong Kong through what Wong describes as
“queer presentism.” Finally, the legalization of gay marriage in Taiwan in 2019
has significantly impacted the queer imaginary of BL in films and media. In
lighthearted films and TV dramas such as Formula 17 (2004) and Because of You
(因為愛你; LINE TV, TW, 2020), a world in which gay men no longer need to come
out and can simply be as ordinary as any other Taiwanese citizen is highlighted.
Wong conceptualizes this as a certain “postliberal temporality” that emerges in
post-2019 Taiwan. By delineating the three modalities of “unhistorical queer-
ness” in mainland BL dramas, “queer presentism” in postcolonial Hong Kong
BL media, and “postliberal temporality” in contemporary Taiwanese BL produc-
tions, he theorizes the overall disjunctive temporalities across queer Sinophone
visuality and mediascapes.
The last section, “Queer/ing Celebrities across Geocultural Boundaries,”
shifts the focus to issues concerning post-2010 queer Chinese-language TV
star and fan cultures with a transcultural dimension. As noted earlier, queer
Chinese TV stardom and fandom in the first decade of the twenty-first century
were largely shaped by inter-Asian and global queer media, such as Japanese
BL media and Western LGBTQ pop cultures (Lavin, Yang, and Zhao 2017; Li
2015; Zhao 2017a). Post-2010 global TV market and transnational TV flows have
allowed further queer dynamics and possibilities, which have been mobilized
by Chinese-speaking queer stars and fans. Therefore, the last three chapters of
QTC examine these queer/ing phenomena in the Chinese glocalization of and
participation in transnational and global TV, celebrity, and fan cultures. They
provide cross-cultural, comparative perspectives for studying the intricacies of
queer TV stardom and fandom in different Chinese-speaking societies as well as
across geopolitical borders and linguistic boundaries.
22 Introduction: Making “TV China” Perfectly Queer

Linshan Jiang’s essay, “Queer Vocals and Stardom on Chinese TV: Case
Studies of Wu Tsing-Fong and Zhou Shen,” offers a critical reading of gendered
representations of and self-performances by Wu Tsing-Fong (吴青峰) from
Taiwan and Zhou Shen (周深) from mainland China—two Chinese-speaking
pop singers—on TV. Both Wu and Zhou possess “androgynous” voices as male
singers. Although their appearances and personalities correspond to popular
inter-Asian imageries of “soft masculinity,” Jiang argues that their vocal queer-
ness further destabilizes the mainstream’s assumed univocal masculinity and
adds to the diversity of male gender subject positions. Her examination focuses
on the two singers’ negotiations with the state and the market based on their
queer masculinities within the dissimilar social-political environments and
gendered histories of mainland China and Taiwan. She argues that Wu and Zhou
continue to seek room for existence between sissyphobia, homophobia, transpho-
bia, and voyeurism on Chinese-language TV. As they gain popularity and find a
broad audience in the Chinese-language mainstream media and public spaces,
Wu and Zhou not only maintain queer voices and personae but also form affec-
tive bonds with audiences to elicit queer sociocultural transformation.
While Jiang’s study unpacks how vocal queerness works in Chinese-language
media industries, Oscar Tianyang Zhou’s research in Chapter 8, “Gay Men in/
and Kangsi Coming,” analyzes the ways in which gay men are (mis)represented
on Chinese-language entertainment TV. Zhou interrogates two dominant gay
types represented in two top-rated Mandarin talk shows—Kangsi Coming (康熙
来了; CTi Variety, Taiwan, 2004–2016) and U Can U Bibi (奇葩说; iQIYI, China,
2014–present)—namely, the “sissy” and the “macho,” which both signify a gay
male subject and object of desire. He suggests that media representations play
a crucial role in establishing cultural understanding of what it means to be gay
in Taiwan and mainland China today. Zhou points out that the televised gay
representations in question promise to enhance the visibility of gay men in the
Chinese-speaking world. Yet, when gay visibility and cultural practices become
good business prospects in a digital age, they also create and sustain disappoint-
ing stereotypes and hierarchies in TV representations.
The last chapter of QTC, “Queer Motherly Fantasy: The Sinophone Mom
Fandom of Saint Suppapong Udomkaewkanjana” by Pang Ka Wei, presents
a sophisticated investigation of an emerging yet understudied topic—“mom
fans” (妈妈粉)—in transnational Chinese queer fandom of Thai BL TV. As Pang
opines, when the Thai BL TV series boom meets the burgeoning mom fandom,
the two synergize transnational queer motherly fantasies of fans that go beyond
parasociality and heteronormativity. Focusing on the Sinophone mom fandom
of Saint Suppapong Udomkaewkanjana (Saintsup hereafter), a Sino-Thai BL
actor, Pang looks into how the family metaphor is at work among mom fans. She
observes that in viewing BL TV series along with Saintsup’s words and deeds,
fans acquire a motherly position framed in the heteropatriarchal envisioning of
Jamie J. Zhao 23

the family. As Pang finds, Saintsup’s ke’ai (being cute and lovable) fosters fans’
infantilization of the idol, the star’s diverse masculinities defy the toxic patriar-
chal masculinity, and his Chinese descent nurtures kindred feelings among the
mainland Chinese fans. Pang argues that Saintsup’s Sinophone mom fandom
illustrates how “Chineseness” is homogenized and essentialized, as well as how
the fan-as-mother/idol-as-child positioning complicates and transforms the
inelastic kinship in the Sinophone setting. As desiring subjects, these mom fans
form an affective alliance that opens up possibilities for multifarious queer fan-
tasies to be played out.
Taken together, through a “queer/ing TV China” lens, the essays in QTC
explore the various TV narratives, temporalities, genres, formats, censorial prac-
tices and policies, celebrity images, and fan practices over the past decade. The
authors highlight the ubiquitous existence and negotiative power of queerness
in identity formation and desire voicing within a largely authoritarian, heter-
opatriarchal society. They also shed light on the intricate ways in which official
political-ideological manipulations inside and outside of the PRC, mainstream
commercial forces, digital technological affordances, and defiant desires inter-
sect, compete, and collaborate through transnational, cross-media TV adaptation,
production, and consumption. Overall, QTC presents a rich, fecund inspection of
how these intersections manifest in and complicate the queer manufacturing and
queering potential of TV images and stars and contribute to the interests of and
conflicts among their fan communities.

The Future of Queer TV China

Delving into the deeply interwoven queer and normative dimensions of Chinese-
language televisual screens, stardom, and fandom, QTC details how queer TV
China, as a vital part of global TV and queer studies, carefully positions itself
in relation to other more politically sensitive, less commercially profitable, and
thus often censored LGBTQ cultural productions in Chinese media and digital
spaces. Analytically, QTC radically redefines “queer” as a televisual-cultural-
industrial-fannish position that is diacritically opposed to the normative ideals
and expectations in the public and popular discourses surrounding gender,
sexual, geocultural, and sociopolitical identities in the highly authoritarian, het-
eropatriarchal, and predominantly Chinese-speaking world. Through the idea
of “queer/ing,” the contributors have worked together to highlight the inter-
digitated meanings and implications of queer/ku’er in Chinese and Sinophone
studies as a self-identification point for gender and sexual minorities, a media
practice to push forward social-political changes, a response to different queer
politics and censorship systems in diverse Chinese-speaking communities, a
media industry’s production and marketing strategy for profit making and
gimmick creating, and/or an alternative representation or interpretation of
24 Introduction: Making “TV China” Perfectly Queer

nonnormative genders and sexualities that are not necessarily self-identified as

nonheterosexual.
The studies included in the volume exemplify the usefulness of the lens of
“queer/ing TV China” in spotlighting queerness as an indispensable, constitu-
tive element to the media-cultural discourses surrounding TV—the seemingly
“most ordinary, everyday, and commonplace of our media forms” (Joyrich 2014,
134)—and Chineseness, especially the too-often assumed most heteronormative
mainstream Chinese spaces and identities in the PRC. Rather than reiterating
that the political edge of queer Chinese TV and fan cultures is simply erased
or de-radicalized by the converging forces of economic neoliberalization and
state surveillance, QTC takes a step further to offer a complex understanding
of today’s mainstream, commercial Chinese-language media and cultural land-
scapes. It conceives contemporary cultures, industries, creativities, and policies
concerning queer TV China as being constituted and continually remade by
multiple forces and factors (including historical and contemporary values, as
well as local, transcultural, and global information flows, cultural hybridiza-
tion, and social-political contestations), while persistently negotiating with both
queer and normative elements to sustain the official imaginaries of both a neolib-
eral-heteropatriarchal China and a geopolitically essentialized and self-centered
Chineseness, domestically, transnationally, and globally.
Through critical reflections on various emerging queer TV and fannish phe-
nomena and deconstructive analyses of specific sensational cases, QTC also
challenges the dichotomy of “positive” and “negative” representations of gender
and sexual minorities and cautions against the simplistic, generalizing view of
Chinese media regulatory and censorial practices as straightforward “repressive”
regimes. In doing so, the volume’s essays suggest new and exciting approaches
and perspectives to the multilayered constructedness and performativity of
identity and desire, such as those of tomboyism, adult womanhood, male homo-
sociality and homoeroticism, mother-son relationships, and Chineseness and
Sinophonicity, in the televisual-cultural productions of gender, sexual, ethnic,
and geolinguistic identities and subjectivities. The contributors not only dem-
onstrate that TV is queer in essence and has enormous queering potential, but
also expose the queer problems and nuances that have mushroomed through
contemporary Chinese-language media and creative productions. More impor-
tantly, the empirical discussions offered in the book showcase the cultural
agency of insubordinate genders, sexualities, bodies, relationalities, and sub-
jectivities mediated through the transnational, cross-racial, digital dimensions
of contemporary Chinese-language screens and fan practices. By emphasizing
the queer characteristics and promises of certain trans-local and transnational
TV phenomena, QTC expands the existing Western-centered and Japanese- and
South Korean-focused scholarship on queer media, celebrity, and fan studies to
Jamie J. Zhao 25

include up-to-date investigations of queer TV production, distribution, circula-

tion, and consumption in and beyond the PRC.
QTC aims to inspire sophisticated scholarly endeavors to inspect queer TV
China and related subjects. As noted earlier in this Introduction, a growing
number of academic works devoted to examinations of queer Chinese fan
cultures (especially centering around BL TV) have been published in recent
years in both English and Chinese languages. Yet most of the works tend to
cluster around ethnographical approaches to specific fan sites (Zhao, Yang,
and Lavin 2017, xiii). Even today, critical analyses that can meaningfully fuse
Euro-American queer TV theories with Chinese media studies to inspect queer-
natured Chinese TV formats, adaptations, and cross-media and cross-cultural
flows and to produce a “more global synthesis” (Chiang 2014b, 355) remain
sporadic. Further, the research methods and topics of some QTC chapters, such as
the non-participant observation used in Chapter 2 to explore online queer gossip
surrounding female TV stars, have often been marginalized in existing media
scholarship, if not negatively feminized and trivialized in both social-scientific-
centric communication studies and heteropatriarchal societies. The diversity and
novelty of the methodologies employed by the contributors, therefore, can be
seen as a particular strength of this volume.
Acknowledging the importance and fruitfulness of scholarly publications
on LGBTQ lives in contemporary China (see, for example, Engebretsen 2014;
Kam 2013; Bao 2018, 2021), QTC is one of the first English-language schol-
arly projects that strives to establish queer Chinese-language TV studies as a
critical field of inquiry and look at queer lives, politics, voices, and struggles
through entertainment media and pop cultural imaginaries. Far from narrowly
focusing on a dashing, cosmopolitan, middle-class-oriented urban scene and a
Euro-American-centric celebrity-fan economy, QTC has an emphasis on queer
cultural-televisual landscapes and takes pains to join more social scientific,
political-economic analysis-endorsed, and ethnographic approach-based queer
research. This book showcases that boundary-transgressing, norm-contesting
subjects, knowledge, and voices have been made and remade omnipresent in
mainstream media and cyber spaces, despite the plural, unpredictable censorial
practices from both commercial and political sectors. It ultimately problematizes
and deconstructs the cosmopolitan, neoliberal bubble of queer Chinese media
cultures from the inside out.
In addition, the past decade has witnessed both an enhanced visibility of
ethnic-Chinese or foreign lesbian celebrities, leftover women, divorced women,
women with immense political-economic power, or female sex workers (who
are often positioned in highly homosocial scenarios in women-centered
Chinese dramas) on TV and a growing number of cyber-TV programs that are
produced by and for Chinese lesbians, such as online talk shows and sitcoms.
Nevertheless, research dedicated to such topics remains particularly rare. To
26 Introduction: Making “TV China” Perfectly Queer

fill the gap in studies of queer women’s TV images and fandom in the existing
scholarship, QTC contains a number of chapters scrutinizing queer TV represen-
tations of and queer fannish imaginations about women. Some other promising
directions for future research that can be generated from the discussions in the
book include Anglophone, especially English-speaking, fandom of Chinese BL
and other queer TV productions; the queer-initiating potential of TV genres and
formats, such as sports TV and factual TV, that have previously been assumed
to be hypermasculine, nationalistic, hegemonic, heterosexual-oriented, or under
strict official surveillance; the norm-defying power of too-often femininized TV
genres and means of communications, such as talk shows and gossip; and the
nonnormative imaginaries of ethnic-minority Chinese nationals on mainstream
TV that often frame Han-centered, Confucian gender and sexual norms as the
ultimate ideals in the Chinese-specific heterosexual matrix. Of course, along
with the drastic transformation in sociocultural contexts, global flows, and trans-
national relations with regard to Chinese feminist and LGBTQ rights and queer
media productions in the post-2020 years, these will become only a few among
numerous emerging queer Chinese pop scenes, for which QTC hopes to stir up
scholarly attention and critical conversations.
I. Queer/ing Genders and Sexualities
through Reality Competition Shows
1
Growing Up with “Tomboy Power”
Starring Liu Yuxin on Post-2010 Chinese Reality TV

Jamie J. Zhao

Introduction

On May 30, 2020, a twenty-three-year-old boyish girl, Liu Yuxin (刘雨昕), from
Guizhou province in Southwest China, won first place in the hit girl-group
cultivation reality show Youth With You 2 (青春有你2; iQIYI; YWY2 hereafter)
with over seventeen million audience votes. Taking the “center position” (C 位;
meaning the most important all-around member) in the group, Liu formed the
new Chinese girl band THE9 with the eight other girls who received the most
votes in the competition. Over the past fifteen years, mainland China has seen
several waves of reality singing competitions (Keane and Zhang 2017; Yang
2014), starting with the female-only Idol-style singing contest Super Voice Girl
(超级女声; Hunan TV, 2004–2006, 2009, 2011, 2016; SVG hereafter) and followed
by The Voice of China (中国好声音; Zhejiang TV, 2012–2021), which was adapted
from a format originating in the Netherlands, the celebrity singing competition
show I Am a Singer (我是歌手; Hunan TV, 2013–2020), the rap competition The
Rap of China (中国有嘻哈; iQIYI, 2017–2020), and the music-group manufacturing
show Produce 101 (创造101; Tencent Video, 2018–2021).
Reality talent shows have been credited with the emergence and popularity
of young Chinese female idols with masculine personas or cross-dressing looks
(Huang 2013; Xiao 2012; Yang and Bao 2012; Yue and Yu 2008; J. Zhao 2016, 2018b,
2019b; Zhao, Yang, and Lavin 2017). A classic example that has been frequently
discussed in existing scholarship is Li Yuchun (李宇春; also known as Chris Lee),
who rose to fame after unexpectedly winning the 2005 season of SVG with her
androgynous onstage persona and unconventional singing style (Meng 2009;
Xiao 2012, 2020; Yang 2009; Yue and Yu 2008). Following Li’s sudden success,
there was a boom of gender-nonnormative female reality TV stars, especially in
singing and dancing competition shows produced between 2005 and 2016 (Zhao
2018b, 2019b). This androgynous TV hype was often interpreted as part and
parcel of a new wave of contemporary Chinese feminism and the democratic
30 Growing Up with “Tomboy Power”

potential of the post-2000 Chinese pop cultural landscape (Meng 2009; Yue and
Yu 2008).
In the late 2010s, the local Chinese entertainment industry witnessed the rise
of feminine girl pop, which was marked by East Asian hyperfeminine beauty
norms featuring “white, skinny, young, and innocent” women (白、瘦、幼; Ma
2018; see also Jung 2018; Xiao 2020, 146). For instance, the girl group Rocket Girls
(火箭女孩), formed during the 2018 season of Produce 101, was emblematic of
this rejuvenated sexualization and commodification of young women’s bodies in
the Mainland. This girl group culture has been naturalized through a neoliberal
discourse of “girl power” (Hains 2012), which has been commonly deployed in
the mainstream commercialization of young women’s sexual empowerment in
the Euro-American and South Korean music and idol industries. Within the East
Asian context, this discourse projects a desirable girlhood “within the entangling
discourses of feminism, neoliberalism and conventional femininity” (Jackson
and Westrupp 2010, 348) and thus perpetuates “the neo-cultural imperialist con-
vergence between patriarchal nationalism, nationalistic ambition for global com-
petition, and corporate interests in the maximization of economic profits from
the governance of young femininity” (Kim 2011, 336). Although some “feminist”
voices and “unconventional” personas of young women are identified in the
recent wave of Chinese girl pop (Xiao 2020, 148),1 this form of women’s agency
replicates a “pseudo-feminist” rhetoric in a neoliberal, consumerist China that
emphasizes “self-expression and self-actualization” (Peng 2020, 67). Marshaled
by the “neoliberal globalization” of Chinese entertainment and digital media
(Xiao 2020, 130), the retrieving and marketing of traditional female gender and
sexual ideals through the televisual manufacturing of young Chinese girl idols
have been simultaneously encouraged by East Asian kawaii (cuteness), girl-group
cultures, and the state’s gender policies, as well as the multivalent feminist and
queer thoughts glocalized and proliferating in mainstream Chinese society in
more recent years.
Since the late 2000s, in response to the increasing gender imbalance of the
Chinese population and the growing number of “leftover women” (referring to
groups of educated, single, urban women who are over twenty-seven years old),
the government has employed its mass media and cyberspace “to concertedly
push young women to marry at all costs, including foregoing their careers and
entitlement to marital property” (Wu and Dong 2019, 478; see also Hong Fincher
2014). Furthermore, on January 1, 2016, the government ended its one-child rule,

1. For instance, one of the most popular participants of the show Produce 101 in 2018, Wang Ju
(王菊), was said to be “China’s Beyoncé” for her tanned skin tone and curvy figure, as well
as for “her candid personality, independence and ambition” (RADII China 2018; Zhang
2018). Wang also received massive support from Chinese feminist and queer groups during
the competition (Xiao 2020, 148). Yet, she was eventually eliminated and did not make it to
the top eleven finalists who formed the Rocket Girls band.
Jamie J. Zhao 31

which had been in effect since 1979 (Coonan 2016). Instead, a two-child policy,
which encouraged married couples to have two children, was enacted.2 These
changes to the local family-planning system aimed to “ease demographic pres-
sures,” remedy the “labor shortage,” and “boost the birth rate,” especially in
urban areas of mainland China (BBC 2021; Coonan 2016). Since 2018, the growing
popularity of Chinese effeminate male stars in the past decade, which was influ-
enced by the inter-Asian androgynous beauty cultures circulated to mainland
China in the late 1990s, has generated further nationalistic-masculinist anxieties
over the “national virility” and led to an official “sissyphobic discourse” that
denigrates and even censors gender-nonnormative male representations on TV
(Song 2022a, 70). In the meantime, socioeconomic situations, the government’s
political agenda, and the “rekindled patriarchal values” of mainland China in
the late 2010s have all aligned to produce public and official backlashes against
the hitherto-booming Chinese feminist cultures and practices (Wu and Dong
2019, 478). These intertwining social-political, cultural, and economic factors and
forces have, in turn, reinvigorated certain heteropatriarchal-endorsed gender
norms and expectations, especially manifesting through China’s TV representa-
tions of young women.
It is also worth noting that the highly gender-norm-deviating televisual
phenomenon mentioned at the beginning of this chapter is emblematic of an
intriguing “youth”-focused political rhetoric revived by the contemporary
government. Rather than serving as “a category of biological age or a transi-
tional stage of human development,” the word youth (青年) was used in modern
Chinese culture to signify the dual projects of “self-reformation” and “national
rejuvenation” (Xiao 2020, 2; see also Song 2015, 3). Nevertheless, in postsocial-
ist, neoliberal China, its political edge has mostly evaporated. Instead, social-
political imaginaries and aspirations associated with the idea of youth or of
being youthful have often been revamped in gendered narratives and spaces to
perpetrate a market-oriented, consumerist economy (Xiao 2020, 20). For instance,
the youthful and nonnormatively gendered discourses surrounding Li Yuchun’s
TV stardom and fandom have largely contributed to a “marketable diversity”
pursued and favored by the Chinese entertainment industry (Xiao 2020). Li’s
queer persona, in this sense, becomes part of “an all-inclusive . . . post-Fordist
cultural industry” that can “attest to the mainstream neoliberal discourse of
self-sufficiency and individual fulfillment, and attac[h] a more liberal and more
individualized humane face to the grand discourse of China Dream” (Xiao 2020,
156).
Against this background, this chapter explores the (nonnormatively) gendered
televisual phenomenon exemplified through Liu Yuxin’s rise to fame during the

2. Later, in May 2021, the government announced that married couples are allowed to have up
to three children (BBC 2021).
32 Growing Up with “Tomboy Power”

first half of 2020. Liu’s career as a girl pop idol started with her participation
in the reality show Up Young! (向上吧！少年; Hunan TV, 2012). After that, she
participated in several high-profile reality singing and dancing shows. This
study looks at Liu’s nonconforming persona as it was performed, revised, and
eventually mainstreamed and celebrated on reality TV between 2012 and 2020.
Methodologically, I employ a queer televisual discourse analysis. TV itself is
“an, if not the, agent of forms of queer life” (Villarejo 2014, 55). Nonnormatively
defined forms of life and televisual temporalities have been in symbiotic relation-
ships and have mutually contributed to one another’s development (Villarejo
2014, 15). As Richard Dyer eloquently stated, “How social groups are treated in
cultural representations is part and parcel of how they are treated in life” (1993,
1). This is particularly true for gender-norm-defying young women featured on
contemporary Chinese reality TV.
Michael Lovelock (2019) once elaborated on the complexities of queer images
on Western reality TV in this way:
reality television itself—its generic conventions, thematic norms and network
contexts—functions as the discursive matter which brings LGBTQ (short for
“lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer”) identities into being through
representations. These televisual factors form the conditions of possibility for
these very identities. (Lovelock 2019, 23)

In this vein, a critical reading of Liu’s reality TV appearances between 2012 and
2020 reveals how her embodiment of “tomboyism” (denoting a Chinese-specific
form of a young, masculine female persona) was manufactured, rejected, evalu-
ated, modified, and commercialized alongside the development of reality TV
formats in post-2010 China. This televisual queer-feminist analysis also captures
the ways in which contemporary Chinese gender/sexual minority identities and
cultures have been actively negotiating with, yet also inevitably subjugated by,
local gender traditions, market forces, official policies, and transnational pop-
cultural flows.
In the rest of this chapter, I first explain my use of the term “tomboyism” and
its connotative (dis)association with lesbianism in the Chinese-speaking context.
I also briefly trace a social-political trajectory of female gender and sexuality in
mainland China that has heavily shaped today’s Chinese tomboyish subjectivi-
ties. Then, I explore Liu’s reality TV performances and career development. My
analysis pays special attention to Liu’s gendered, youthful persona in YWY2 to
understand how the show produced “tomboy” stars and legitimized the pre-
scribed sociocultural non-normativities associated with tomboyism. I reveal that
with constantly revised formats, reality talent shows afford a queer platform for
subject making in contemporary China.
My discussion is situated within the post-2010 postsocialist Chinese feminist
context in which “a market-individual discourse” is appropriated in the official
Jamie J. Zhao 33

and public patriarchal backlash against “the socialist feminist legacy” (Zhu
and Xiao 2021, 12), while glocalized postfeminist thoughts emphasizing “the
formation of an expressive personal lifestyle and the ability to select the right
commodities to attain it” are promoted (Negra 2008, 4). To some extent, YWY2
neutralized tomboyism to an innocuous and ubiquitous gendering process
for girls and young women in a heterosexual-dominated, Chinese-specific,
party-state-endorsed feminist context that does not necessarily threaten heter-
onormative expectations for adult women. This manufacturing of young adult
“tomboy” idols contributes to the imagining of China as an open-minded, glo-
balized, inclusive society that appreciates the form of “tomboy power,” selling
the seemingly progressive ideas of female gender diversity and fluidity, female
empowerment, and self-cultivation. Ultimately, I argue that the televisual repre-
sentation (and documenting) of Liu’s growing-up as a “tomboy” onscreen over
the years demonstrates how Chinese entertainment media crops and regulates
desiring queer female subjects in intertwined discourses of neoliberal reform,
“feminisms with Chinese characteristics” (Zhu and Xiao 2021), and gender and
sexual globalization. Diverging from the scholarship concerning the “crisis” of
authenticity on reality TV (Banet-Weiser 2012; van Leeuwen 2001), my critical
analysis demystifies this televisual discourse as an “authentic” elegy of younger
generations of queer women in mainland China. The historicization of gendered
local Chinese reality TV culture in this chapter poignantly and vividly records
the social pressure, traumas, compromises, and sacrifices adolescent girls and
young women of nonnormative gender and/or sexual identities are forced to
face, experience, and cope with in real life.

Embracing Tomboyism in Mainland China

To unpack the unique subject-making and -negotiating processes revolv-

ing around tomboyism (rather than exclusively on identitarian lesbianism) in
this study,3 I use the terms “androgynous,” “tomboyish,” and “masculine” to
describe norm-disruptive gendered personas and performances of young female
stars on post-2010 Chinese reality TV and in mainland Chinese public and pop-
cultural discourses generally. While the notion of androgyny usually describes
people who “combine masculine and feminine or male or female traits or a
person whose gender or sex is difficult to determine” (Califia 2004, 58), the word
“tomboy” is used in this chapter to denote masculine or androgynous women
who are widely believed by the public to be nonheterosexual, yet who may not
be explicitly self-identified as such. Additionally, it is worth noting that most

3. The striving of nonnormatively gendered groups for sociocultural recognition and identity
categorization can sometimes “resolve into new and counter-productive forms of identitari-
anism” (Halberstam 2012, 337).
34 Growing Up with “Tomboy Power”

of the well-known stars manufactured in the talent shows are adolescent girls
or young women (under thirty years old), though there are some middle-aged
Chinese female celebrities who exhibit visibly masculine personas, such as the
fifty-year-old Tibetan musician Han Hong (as well as some “big sister” celebri-
ties discussed in Chapter 2 in this book). Rather than being interpreted as a sign
of adult lesbianism, their female masculinity is often reduced by mass media or
by the celebrities themselves to “a gendered imitation of a preadolescent, asexual
girl,” thereby offering an imitated form of tomboyism (Zhao 2021b, 3).
The word “tomboyism” is a Western-originated notion that describes a form
of female masculinity embodied by young (often prepubescent or adolescent)
girls (Halberstam 1998). Unlike the adult lesbian identity of “butchness,” tom-
boyism has been commonly considered as a transient gendered phase for women
(Halberstam 1998; Martin 2010a), a “fashion statement” (Skerski 2011), a “protec-
tive identity” (Craig and LaCroix 2011), or girls’ positive expressions of “self-
assertion” and “independence” that are usually appreciated and rewarded in
a (Western) masculinist society (Burn, O’Neil, and Nederend 1996). Frequently,
because of social and psycho-physical changes (such as peer and social pressure,
and “menstruation and the development of secondary sex characteristics”), mas-
culine girls either are expected to “grow out of” this form of “childhood tomboy-
ism” or will “self-regulat[e]” to conform to conventional adult femininity in a
later stage of life (Burn, O’Neil, and Nederend 1996, 420; see also Hyde 1991;
Martin 1990). In other words, tomboyism is a fluid, subjective gender display
closely associated with girlhood in Western societies, the embodiment of which
does not necessarily signal adult lesbianism (Carr 2005).
Nevertheless, shaped by cross-linguistic and trans-geocultural flows of queer
politics and information, the meanings of tomboyism in the Chinese context,
especially its relationship to lesbianism, have been rendered more intricate and
multidimensional. As an imported term from modern Western sexology, the
neologism “lesbianism” was only adopted after the modernization of China in
the early twentieth century (Sang 2003). Nonetheless, Chinese female same-sex
eroticism has had a long history that can be traced back to premodern times, the
various paradigms and patterns of which were often made invisible (in the form
of Confucian-charged heterosexual polygamous marriage or through female
same-sex relationship’s emphasis on “sentiment” rather than sexual encounters)
to a Euro-American-centric or a contemporary heteropatriarchal position (Sang
2003; see also Martin 2010a). Meanwhile, the English word “tomboy” has been
glocalized and rendered into “T” in the Chinese-speaking world, denoting a
butch or masculine lesbian who presumably prefers the dominant, active role
during same-sex sexual activities (Zhao 2021b). The term T/tomboy has been
specifically widely known and used within post-2000 Chinese and Sinophone
lesbian communities (Chao 2000; Engebretsen 2014; Kam 2013). Thus, unlike
its loose linkage with adult lesbianism in the Western context, contemporary
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