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As Normal as Possible: Negotiating Sexuality and Gender in Mainland China and Hong Kong

Ching Yau

This volume poses new challenges to queer studies and demonstrates the study of Chinese sexuality as an emergent field currently emanating from multiple disciplines. Issues related to sexuality have ... More

This volume poses new challenges to queer studies and demonstrates the study of Chinese sexuality as an emergent field currently emanating from multiple disciplines. Issues related to sexuality have acquired a new visibility in China in the past several years. The growth of religious fundamentalists and global gay discourses, heightened media attention and even more intense censorship, LBGTIQ activist movements, and the struggles of sex workers, have all contributed to this visibility. There is an urgent need for intellectual work to articulate and analyze the complexity of issues of sexuality, and the ways in which different norms line up and become synonymous with one another, in order to build situated knowledge in strengthening the discursive power of non-normative sexual-subjects-in-alliance. This book showcases the work of scholars working mostly outside Euro-America and focuses on cities including Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing. It is a sustained collections on Chinese non-normative sexual subjectivities and contemporary sexual politics published in English. It highlights the various ways in which different individuals and communities — including male sex workers, transsexual subjects, lesbians, and Indonesian migrants — negotiate with notions of normativity and modernity, fine-tuned according to the different power structures of each context, and making new and different meanings.Less

The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist Development, Singapore

C. J. W.-L. Wee

This book is an account of how the modernization processes for postcolonial societies in Asia such as India, Malaysia, and Singapore are fraught with collaborations and conflicts between different ... More

This book is an account of how the modernization processes for postcolonial societies in Asia such as India, Malaysia, and Singapore are fraught with collaborations and conflicts between different socio-political, historical, economic, and cultural agents.Less

Beyond Imperial Aesthetics: Theories of Art and Politics in East Asia

Mayumo Inoue and Steve Choe (eds)

Observing that the division between theory and empiricism remains inextricably linked to imperial modernity, manifest at the most basic level in the binary between "the West" and "Asia," the authors ... More

Observing that the division between theory and empiricism remains inextricably linked to imperial modernity, manifest at the most basic level in the binary between "the West" and "Asia," the authors of this volume reexamine art and aesthetics to challenge these oppositions in order to reconceptualize politics and knowledge production in East Asia. Current understandings of fundamental ideas like race, nation, colonizer and the colonized, and the concept of Asia in the region are seeped with imperial aesthetics that originated from competing imperialisms operating in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Such aesthetics has sustained both colonial and local modes of perception in the formation of nation-states and expanded the reach of regulatory powers in East Asia since 1945. The twelve thought-provoking essays in thiscollectiontackle the problematics that arise at the nexus of aesthetics and politics in four areas: theoretical issues of aesthetics and politics in East Asia, aesthetics of affect and sexuality, the productive tension between critical aesthetics and political movements, and aesthetic critiques of sovereignty and neoliberalism in East Asia today. If the seemingly universal operation of capital and militarism in East Asia requires locally specific definitions of biopolitical concepts to function smoothly, this book critiques the circuit of power between the universalism of capital and particularism of nation and culture. Treating aesthetic experiences in art at large as the bases for going beyond imperial categories, the contributors present new modes of sensing, thinking, and living that have been unimaginable within the mainstream modality of Asian studies, a discipline that has reproduced the colonial regime of knowledge production.Less

Buying Beauty: Cosmetic Surgery in China

WEN Hua

Cosmetic surgery in China has grown rapidly in recent years of dramatic social transition. Facing fierce competition in all spheres of daily life, more and more women consider cosmetic surgery as an ... More

Cosmetic surgery in China has grown rapidly in recent years of dramatic social transition. Facing fierce competition in all spheres of daily life, more and more women consider cosmetic surgery as an investment to gain “beauty capital” to increase opportunities for social and career success. Building on rich ethnographic data, this book presents the perspectives of women who have undergone cosmetic surgery, illuminating the aspirations behind their choices. The author explores how turbulent economic, socio-cultural and political changes in China since the 1980s have produced immense anxiety that is experienced by women both mentally and physically. This book will appeal to readers who are interested in gender studies, China studies, anthropology and sociology of the body, and cultural studies.Less

Cantonese Society in Hong Kong and Singapore: Gender, Religion, Medicine and Money

Marjorie Topley

Jean DeBernardi (ed.)

This volume contains published articles by the author, who was a pioneer in the field of social anthropology in the post-war period and also the first president of the revived Hong Kong Branch of the ... More

This volume contains published articles by the author, who was a pioneer in the field of social anthropology in the post-war period and also the first president of the revived Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. Her ethnographic research in Singapore and Hong Kong set a high standard for urban anthropology, and helped create the fields of migration studies, gender studies, and medical anthropology.Less

Celebrity in China

Louise Edwards and Elaine Jeffreys

Celebrity is a pervasive aspect of everyday life and a growing field of academic inquiry. This is a book-length exploration of celebrity culture in the People's Republic of China and its interaction ... More

Celebrity is a pervasive aspect of everyday life and a growing field of academic inquiry. This is a book-length exploration of celebrity culture in the People's Republic of China and its interaction with international norms of celebrity production. The book comprises case studies from popular culture (film, music, dance, literature, the Internet); official culture (military, political, and moral exemplars) and business celebrities. The breadth of inquiry here illuminates the ways capitalism and communism converge in the elevation of particular individuals to fame in contemporary China.Less

Chinese Art and Its Encounter with the World

David Clarke

This book offers a bridge into the critical understanding of modern Chinese art through its encounter with the world beyond China's borders. It demonstrates Chinese art's interconnections with ... More

This book offers a bridge into the critical understanding of modern Chinese art through its encounter with the world beyond China's borders. It demonstrates Chinese art's interconnections with Western cultures while exploring its inherited cultural traditions and internal historical change. The first section deals with the cross-cultural trajectories of individual Chinese artists who travelled from China to the West and then returned. In the second section, the focus shifts from the movement of individual artists between cultures to the process by which specific genres of Western art have been interpreted by Chinese artists. The final section illuminates the encounter of cultures via visual representations of Macau and Hong Kong.Less

The Chinese Exotic: Modern Diasporic Femininity

Olivia Khoo

This book examines new representations of diasporic Chinese femininity emerging from Asia Pacific modernities since the late twentieth century. Through an analysis of cultural artefacts such as ... More

This book examines new representations of diasporic Chinese femininity emerging from Asia Pacific modernities since the late twentieth century. Through an analysis of cultural artefacts such as films, popular fiction, food, and fashion cultures, the book challenges the dominant tendency in contemporary cultural politics to define Chinese femininity from a mainland perspective that furthermore equates it with notions of primitivism. Rather, it argues for a radical reconfiguration of the concept of exoticism as a frame for understanding these new representations. The study raises questions on the relationship between the Chinese diasporas and gender, and provides a critical intervention into the current visualizations of diasporic Chinese femininity. It contends that an analysis of such images can inform the reconfigured relations between China, the Chinese diasporas, Asia, and the West in the context of contemporary globalization, and in turn takes these new intersections to account for the complex nature of modern definitions of diasporic Chinese femininity.Less

Chinese Opera: The Actor's Craft

Siu Wang-Ngai

Chinese opera embraces over 360 different styles of theatre that make one of the richest performance arts in the world. It combines music, speech, poetry, mime, acrobatics, stage fighting, vivid ... More

Chinese opera embraces over 360 different styles of theatre that make one of the richest performance arts in the world. It combines music, speech, poetry, mime, acrobatics, stage fighting, vivid face-painting and exquisite costumes. First experiences of Chinese opera can be baffling because its vocabulary of stagecraft is familiar only to the seasoned aficionado. Chinese Opera: The Actor's Craft makes the experience more accessible for everyone. This book uses breath-taking images of Chinese opera in performance by Hong Kong photographer Siu Wang-Ngai to illustrate and explain Chinese opera stage technique. The book explores costumes, gestures, mime, acrobatics, props and stage techniques. Each explanation is accompanied by an example of its use in an opera and is illustrated by in-performance photographs. Chinese Opera: The Actor's Craft provides the reader with a basic grammar for understanding uniquely Chinese solutions to staging drama.Less

Christian Women in Chinese Society: The Anglican Story

Wai Ching Angela Wong and Patricia P. K. Chiu (eds)

This volume expands on the long-standing debates about whether Christianity is a collaborator in, or a liberating force against the oppressive patriarchal culture for women in Asia through the ... More

This volume expands on the long-standing debates about whether Christianity is a collaborator in, or a liberating force against the oppressive patriarchal culture for women in Asia through the accounts of the Anglican church in China. Women have played an important role in the history of Chinese Christianity, but their contributions have yet to receive due recognition, partly because of the complexities arising out of the historical tension between Western imperialism and Chinese patriarchy. Single women missionaries and missionary spouses in the nineteenth century set the early examples of what women could do to spread the Gospel. The education provided to Chinese women by missionaries, which was expected to turn them into good wives and mothers, empowered the students and allowed them to become full participants not only in the Church but also in the wider society. Together, the Western female missionaries and the Chinese women whom they trained explored their newfound freedom and tried out their roles with the help of each other. These developments culminated in the ordination of Florence Li Tim Oi to priesthood in 1944, a singular event that fundamentally changed the history of the Anglican Communion. At the heart of this collection lies the rich experience of those women in the Anglican church, both Chinese and Western, who devoted their lives to their evangelizing and civilizing mission across mainland China and Hong Kong. Contributors make the most of the sources to reconstruct their voices and present sympathetic accounts of these remarkable women’s achievements.Less

The Cinema of Feng Xiaogang: Commercialization and Censorship in Chinese Cinema after 1989

Rui Zhang

Beginning first as a case study of Feng Xiaogang, this book explores Chinese film history since the early 1990s in terms of changes in the Communist Party's film policy, industry reforms, the ... More

Beginning first as a case study of Feng Xiaogang, this book explores Chinese film history since the early 1990s in terms of changes in the Communist Party's film policy, industry reforms, the official promotion of Main Melody films, and the emergence and growth of popular cinema. The image of Feng that emerges in the book is of a filmmaker working under political and economic pressures in a post-socialist state while still striving to create works with a personal socio-political agenda. In keeping with this reality, the book approaches Feng as a special kind of film auteur, whose works must be interpreted with attention to the specific social and political context of contemporary China.Less

Civility and Its Development: The Experiences of China and Taiwan

David C. Schak

How does civility, defined as considerate treat of others, including strangers, and of the public space, develop in a society? This book aims to answer this question by comparing the processes and ... More

How does civility, defined as considerate treat of others, including strangers, and of the public space, develop in a society? This book aims to answer this question by comparing the processes and outcomes to date of efforts to develop civility in China and Taiwan, two societies that. It first examines the origins and development of civility in Europe questions and whether there was a comparable concept in dynastic China. It follows with arguments for the comparability of China and Taiwan on the basis of their shared cultural heritage, including a conceptual basis for and a history of incivility, authoritarian governance for most of the period since the seventeenth century when the Qing first controlled Taiwan, and top-down civilizing campaigns by the governments of each. It then examines the levels of civility first in China then in Taiwan and examines how Taiwan evolved from an uncivil society composed of myriad small, inward-looking communities, a society in itself, to a very civil society unified by civic nationalism, a society for itself. The concluding chapter examines differences between Taiwan and China that shed light on why the latter has been less successful in developing civility than the former and compares the development of civility with that of democracy, arguing that self-expression values are a prerequisite for both.Less

Conditional Spaces: Hong Kong Lesbian Desires and Everyday Life

Denise Tse-Shang Tang

Dense living conditions in Hong Kong do not provide much privacy for lesbians and other sexual minorities living with their families. As a result, lesbians often locate alternative spaces to develop ... More

Dense living conditions in Hong Kong do not provide much privacy for lesbians and other sexual minorities living with their families. As a result, lesbians often locate alternative spaces to develop support networks with other women. Others reject the notion of lesbian spaces and instead assert their visibility in different aspects of everyday life. Based on life-history interviews with several dozen lesbians living in Hong Kong, this book maps the complex relations between personal subjectivities and spatialities as they emerge and interact with various social-justice movements and alternative communities. It explores how the impossibly dense spaces of neoliberal Hong Kong enable and curtail the emergence of lesbian life.Less

Contact Moments: The Politics of Intercultural Desire in Japanese Male-Queer Cultures

Katsuhiko Suganuma

This book analyses a rich archive of cultural texts from gay male subcultures in the postwar period, depicting moments of contact between Japanese and Western queer cultures. The author demonstrates ... More

This book analyses a rich archive of cultural texts from gay male subcultures in the postwar period, depicting moments of contact between Japanese and Western queer cultures. The author demonstrates how ideals about the West impacted processes of identity formation, and challenges and reworks existing models of the East/West binary paradigm. The instances examined range from the perverse magazines in the 1950s and their depiction of men who had sex with foreign men (mostly American servicemen); the depiction of race in the gay magazine Barazoku; John Whittier Treat's memoir of his sabbatical in Japan and his depiction of his own Orientalism; the writings and strategies of OCCUR and Fushimi Noriaki in the 1990s; and the queer oriented news portal site Gay Japan News. Each chapter demonstrates that the binary discourses of Japan and the West do not always fix the character of Japan's queer culture in the context of cross-cultural contact, but rather that they also facilitate the emergence of new forms of identity and desire that transgress pre-existing sets of categories. In other words, binaries are often deployed to express identities in motion. The author further argues that the binaries of East/West and local/global will continue to be not only a means of reinvigorating the binary but also a critical tool to dismantle the binary itself in the context of queer globalisation.Less

Contemporary Hong Kong Government and Politics

Wai-man Lam and Percy Luen-tim Lui (eds)

This new and fully revised edition of Contemporary Hong Kong Government and Politics critically assesses the main strands of continuity and change in Hong Kong's government and politics since the ... More

This new and fully revised edition of Contemporary Hong Kong Government and Politics critically assesses the main strands of continuity and change in Hong Kong's government and politics since the creation of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in 1997. It first investigates the core institutions of the SAR, focusing on the Executive, the Legislature, the Judiciary, the civil service, District Councils, and advisory and statutory bodies. It then examines progress in democratic reform in Hong Kong and the main components of civil society, including political parties, elections, political identity, and mass media and public opinion. Analyses of key policy sectors then follow. In its concluding chapters, the volume explores Hong Kong's relations with the Mainland and the wider world.Less

Contesting the Myths of Samurai Baseball: Cultural Representations of Japan's National Pastime

Christopher T. Keaveney

The Japanese passion for the game of baseball stretches back over one hundred years, and has its origins in the Meiji period. Baseball has long been Japan’s national pastime, and the game constitutes ... More

The Japanese passion for the game of baseball stretches back over one hundred years, and has its origins in the Meiji period. Baseball has long been Japan’s national pastime, and the game constitutes an important part of the social fabric of Japan. Moreover, baseball occupies a prominent position in modern Japanese culture. Starting with Masaoka Shiki’s poetry and fiction about baseball in the Meiji era and continuing all the way up to the recent baseball manga of Adachi Mitsuru, this work chronicles cultural representations of baseball in Japan with chapters devoted to poetry, fiction, manga and films that incorporate or represent baseball. The book makes the case that in Japan baseball has been used by writers, filmmakers and artists both to validate the time-honored model of Bushidō-inspired “Samurai baseball” and to challenge rigid cultural values and assumptions. Baseball has served in the modern era as a cultural touchstone to which artists have returned again and again. Less

The Cosmopolitan Dream: Transnational Chinese Masculinities in a Global Age

Derek Hird and Geng Song (eds)

What does it mean to be a mainland Chinese man in a transcultural world? What resources do mainland Chinese men utilise to perform a masculinity that is both Chinese and cosmopolitan? This volume ... More

What does it mean to be a mainland Chinese man in a transcultural world? What resources do mainland Chinese men utilise to perform a masculinity that is both Chinese and cosmopolitan? This volume demonstrates that the newly emerging formations of mainland Chinese masculinity, whether located in China or overseas, can only be fully understood through attending to the transnational dimensions of their construction. This volume maps multiple instantiations of the 'transnational turn' in Chinese masculinities, including portrayals of the transnational business masculinity of globe-trotting Chinese businessmen in Chinese and German TV dramas, transcultural models of caring fatherhood in Chinese reality TV shows, the transnational journeys of young Chinese entrepreneurs in search of a sense of cultural identity in Chinese blockbuster movies, filmic portrayals of Chinese gay identities ‘haunted’ by premodern masculine models, the integration of sexually liberated Western masculinities and historical caizi images in contemporary fiction, the culinary masculinity of cosmopolitan Chinese TV chefs, the representation of Chinese masculinities in Japan and in online Chinese-language forums in the US, the effect of migration to Africa on Chinese fathering subjectivities, and Chinese fathers' involvement in the growing transnational phenomenon of 'birth tourism' in California.Less

Crime and the Chinese Dream

Børge Bakken (ed.)

“Crime and the Chinese Dream” is edited by Børge Bakken. Although official propaganda emphasizes the Chinese Dream as the dream of all Chinese - a strong China with a prosperous population - but the ... More

“Crime and the Chinese Dream” is edited by Børge Bakken. Although official propaganda emphasizes the Chinese Dream as the dream of all Chinese - a strong China with a prosperous population - but the opportunities of achieving prosperity by legal means are distributed unequally. Crime and the Chinese Dream reveals how people on the margins of Chinese society find their way to the Chinese Dream through illegal or deviant behaviours. The case studies in this book include corrupt doctors in public hospitals in Beijing, fraudsters in a village called “cake uncles”, illegal motorcycle taxi drivers in Guangzhou, drug users being “re-educated” in detention centres, and alleged internet addicts who are treated as criminals by the system in boot camps under an unqualified and uncertified psychiatric regime. Despite the patriotic and collectivistic tint of the official dream metaphor, the contributors to this volume show that the Chinese Dream is essentially a state capitalist dream, which is embedded within the problems and opportunities of capitalism, as well as a dream of control where a vast number of people are excluded from achieving the official dream of prosperity.Less

Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia: What a Difference a Region Makes

Chris Berry, Nicola Liscutin, and Jonathan D. Mackintosh

These essays highlight regional cross-fertilization in music, film, new media, and popular culture in Northeast Asia. They include analysis of gender and labor issues amid differing regulatory ... More

These essays highlight regional cross-fertilization in music, film, new media, and popular culture in Northeast Asia. They include analysis of gender and labor issues amid differing regulatory frameworks and public policy concerning cultural production and piracy.Less

Desiring Hong Kong, Consuming South China: Transborder Cultural Politics, 1970-2010

Eric Kit-wai Ma

This book is a study of consumer desire and cultural production in China through the lived experience of ordinary people. It focuses on the complex and changing cultural patterns in Hong Kong's ... More

This book is a study of consumer desire and cultural production in China through the lived experience of ordinary people. It focuses on the complex and changing cultural patterns in Hong Kong's relationship with the neighbouring mainland. From interviews, TV dramas, media representations and other sources, the book traces the fading of Hong Kong's once-influential position as a role model for less-developed Mainland cities and explores changing perceptions as China grows in confidence. The first part examines the history of cross-border relations and movements from the 1970s, focusing on Hong Kong as an object of desire for people in South China. The second part moves to the turn of the century when, despite increased communications and a ‘disappearing border’, Hong Kong is no longer a powerful role model; it nevertheless continues to be an important link in the chain of global capitalism stretching across southern China.Less