scholarly journals Queerly imagining Super Girl in an alternate world: The fannish worlding in FSCN femslash romance

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jing (Jamie) Zhao
Keyword(s):  
Female Gender ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Mainland Chinese ◽  
Commercial Success ◽  
Writing Strategy ◽  
Public Cultures ◽  
Contemporary Chinese

A globally formatted, Idol-style, reality singing contest produced by a Chinese provincial TV station, Super Girl (SG; Hunan Satellite TV, 2004–2006) received staggeringly huge commercial success nationwide. It only allowed female participants and featured a large number of gender-defying finalists. This article explores femslash fan fiction published and circulated on feise chaonü (FSCN), one of the most popular Mainland Chinese femslash fandoms of 2006 SG participants. The lesbian romance depicted in FSCN fan fiction is inspired by and further articulates the intentionally "queered" content of SG. However, these lesbian stories are often narrated within culturally distant, fictional settings, such as Western, futuristic, or historical backdrops. My reading of FSCN femslash fan fiction explores how and why this prevailing, yet self-contradictory, femslash writing strategy helps the fans to queerly construct an "alternate world" that enacts, facilitates, or legitimizes Chinese lesbianism. I reveal the underlying ways in which this FSCN worlding practice ambiguously appropriates and ridicules contemporary Chinese female gender- and sexuality-related norms and ideals. Ultimately, I argue that the "worlded" contexts and plotlines of queer fantasy in FSCN femslash can be construed as active fannish responses to and negotiations with the realities and histories of Chinese lesbian-related public cultures.

Freedom and its limitations: The contemporary mainland Chinese debate over liberalism

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 315-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lu Hua ◽  
Matthew Galway
Keyword(s):  
New Left ◽  
World Order ◽  
New World Order ◽  
Chinese Tradition ◽  
Mainland Chinese ◽  
Classical Liberal ◽  
New Synthesis ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Contemporary Chinese

The emergence of Chinese liberalism carries with it a specific China-centric character that reflects both a Chinese and a foreign focus on the nation’s complicated domestic situation. As part of the research dialogue on the intellectual public sphere in China, this article provides a historical perspective of the development of contemporary Chinese liberalism and explores the complexities of those Chinese liberals’ engagement with a number of key issues in political thought, both among themselves and with their principal opponents, the New Left. We review four themes in these ongoing debates: the relationship between freedom and equality; the liberals’ demands for a more open civil society; their call for balanced social structures, including a mechanism for expressing interest; and their search for a new synthesis of Chinese tradition with a strong nation state. Contemporary Chinese liberals propose their visions for a China that operates within and against a Euro-American-dominated system. Thus, their interpretation of classical liberal texts is characterized by one of creative adaptation, and informed by both local and foreign intellectual resources. The article’s ultimate goal is to provide a deeper understanding of the internal debates among Chinese liberals, which may give a sense of the multifarious predicaments and opportunities that China’s intellectuals face as China attempts to pursue wealth, power, and a revitalized role in a new world order.

Latina and Chicana Butch/Femme in Literature and Culture

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stacy I. Macías
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Female Gender ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
Essential Components ◽  
Feminist Theories ◽  
Sexual Cultures ◽  
Literary Archive

Latina butch/femme literatures and cultural productions are essential components of the lesbian, gender, queer, and ethnic literary canons of the late 20th century. While butch/femme—a term that references particular lesbian sexual cultures and queer female gender practices—emerged within working-class and lesbian-of-color communities roughly in the 1940s, Latina lesbians in the 1980s and 1990s began to use the anthology form to pronounce boldly how their lesbian sexualities, erotic desires, and alternative gender expressions mutually informed their racial, ethnic, and class-based identities. While anthologies created the space to engage butch/femme and its racialized class meanings of butch/femme, the growth in women of color feminist theories further catalyzed writers to contextualize their earlier provisional embrace of Latina butch/femme, which feminist, lesbian, and ethnic nationalist ideologues variously derided. Still, while Latina lesbian cultural production and literary output increased, engagements with butch/femme were veiled, with some accounts paralleling the larger social unease with what many believed enforced the reproduction of oppressive heterosexual dynamics. While photographic images indelibly document the ubiquity of butch/femme lived practice, the literary archive of explicitly imagined and referenced Latina butch/femme is limited, and its overall force lies in its suggestive discursive qualities and a late 20th century iconic set of authors with which it is associated. Key writers of the period tended to meditate extensively on Latina butch gender and sexuality concerns, while it was not until the turn of the 21st century that the Latina femme garnered the same in-depth critical treatment. The decoupling of butch/femme also enables an expansion of discrete critical and creative femme and butch offerings, while writers settle into unequivocally evoking the erotic grammars of butch/femme gender and sexuality in forms of poetry, novel, and film.

scholarly journals Contemporary Chinese parents' needs and questions of parenting for young children: a Web text-mining approach.

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Huihua He ◽  
◽  
Si He ◽  
Yan Li ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Text Mining ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Parental Knowledge ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Mainland Chinese ◽  
Care Givers ◽  
Chinese Parents ◽  
Web Text Mining ◽  
Contemporary Chinese

Introduction. The current study investigated characteristics of parenting needs and questions of Mainland Chinese parents of young children. Specifically, Web text-mining technology was used to identify themes of parenting needs and questions, and parents' emotional status hidden in their question texts. Method. Total of 921,483 questions that parents posted from the top five parenting Websites in China during a 36-month study period were collected. Results. Daily care is one of the most important topics that concerned parents. Contemporary Mainland Chinese parents tend to raise questions about parental knowledge and skills. Different themes of questions could also be identified from different care-givers and different age groups of young children. Conclusions. From a parenting-oriented perspective, contemporary Chinese parents asked pesonalised questions through the Internet frequently. The considerable needs of grandparenting emerged. Programme designers and social policy makers should empower and support young children's parents with their parental knowledge, skills and emotional competence.

Gentō

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-85
Author(s):  
Hana Washitani
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Motion Picture ◽  
Female Gender ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Political Protest ◽  
Projection System ◽  
Protest Movements ◽  
Still Image ◽  
Magic Lantern

Japanese gentō (originally a translation of the English term “magic lantern”) is a still-image projection system that enlarges images on a transparent slide or film and projects them onto a large screen. Most studies argue that the magic lantern, stereopticon, or gentō thrived from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries and that their use declined in the early twentieth century with the arrival of the motion picture. This article examines the revival and redevelopment of gentō in mid-twentieth-century Japan, focusing on its use in 1950s social movements (including labor, social welfare, and political protest movements) and exploring how independent gentō works represented the landscapes, histories, and everyday lives threatened by the presence of U.S. military forces in Japan. It also examines the representation of female gender and sexuality in these gentō works, looking at the ways they depict women as both symbols of a victimized and humiliated homeland and as threats to the order of paternalistic family and society in Japan.

La Malinche at the Intersection: Race and Gender in Down These Mean Streets

PMLA ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 113 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marta E. Sánchez
Keyword(s):  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Female Gender ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Chicana Literature ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
La Malinche ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The 1960S

Piri Thomas's Down These Mean Streets (1967) challenges binary notions of whiteness and blackness by valorizing a third term—mestizaje. And yet the novel enlists dominant views of female gender and sexuality to affirm the protagonist's ethnic male identity. In my Chicana feminist reading of this Puerto Rican text, I import the reinterpreted figure La Malinche and its companion figure La Chingada—prevailing tropes in Chicano and Chicana literature and discourse of the 1960s—to illuminate the complex intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. These intersections are key to social analyses that transcend binary conceptions of race and paradigms of dominant and subaltern.

Sex versus Gender

Sociology ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jill Conte
Keyword(s):  
Female Gender ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Conceptual Distinction ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Cultural Component ◽  
Gender Paradigm

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a conceptual distinction between “sex” and “gender” arose in the clinical literature on human psychosexual development. Sex came to signify the biological or bodily component of difference, that is, male and female. Gender, on the other hand, came to signify the social or cultural component of difference, that is, masculine and feminine. This sex/gender distinction, as it is often called, was heartily embraced by many feminists of the day who sought to account for differences between the sexes as well as explain and remediate women’s second-class status in society. The establishment of gender as a distinctly “social” concept appealed to feminists because it opened up an intellectual and political space—a space beyond biological determinism—for inquiry into the causes of “male domination” and “female subordination” that were not essential, universal, or fixed. In this space, social change was possible; gender relations could be reconfigured. To that end, the sex/gender distinction became, by and large, paradigmatic in feminist thought and social science, and from it grew a burgeoning body of gender theory loosely characterized as the social construction of gender. Intersectional, post-structural, postmodern, and queer schools of thought produced new insights and advanced theory in ways that posed challenges to the viability and utility of gender as a concept as well as to the sex/gender paradigm. The ensuing debates were highly productive, ushering in a new era of social theory on the body that centered corporeality and embodiment and that sought to deconstruct binary thinking. As thinking on sex/gender evolved, the conceptual split was no longer understood as a simple separation between the biological and the social. Feminist and queer scholars problematized the distinction, reformulating it as an interlocking set of relationships: the sex/gender/sexuality system. Interdisciplinary gender scholars, including prominent feminist scientists, began theorizing the complex interrelationship between sex and gender with greater sophistication in an attempt to more firmly discredit biological determinist approaches to the study of difference based on sex, gender, or sexuality. Advancing theory, research, and praxis has not only deepened understanding about a wider variety of identities, experiences, and practices around sex, gender, and sexuality but has also won greater recognition in the early 21st century for them. This multiplicity of sexes, genders, and sexualities has brought with it unique methodological concerns in the social sciences, which represent a new frontier of research and activism in gender and sexuality studies.

scholarly journals Text mining, Hermione Granger, and fan fiction: What's in a name?

2021 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Leigh Rowe ◽  
Tolonda Henderson ◽  
Tianyu Wang
Keyword(s):  
Text Mining ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Harry Potter ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Fan Studies ◽  
Social Constructions ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Specific Reading ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fiction Writers

When fans rewrite characters, how do they engage that character's identity and the social constructions around it? Fan fiction writers resist, replicate, and create oppressive social systems by changing characters between published and fan texts. As such, fan studies scholars have long been interested in how fans construct characters, an interest that has often been paired with readings of race, gender, and sexuality. Digital humanities can help confirm and nuance extant fan studies scholarship around specific characters popular in fan fiction. We used Word2Vec software to mine the text of 450 pieces of fan fiction based on J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. By focusing on the depiction of Hermione Granger in both Rowling's novels and Harry Potter fan fiction, we tested how text mining character names can reveal properties closely tied to a specific character through the relationships between the target name and other characters. Analysis via Word2Vec found that "Hermione" is used grammatically and contextually differently in the books (in which she is most like Harry and Ron) than in our fan fiction corpus (in which she is most like other girls/women). This difference suggests that these fans have a specific reading of Hermione that is communally understood even if Rowling's diction offers a different reading.

scholarly journals Homophobia, heteronormativity, and slash fan fiction

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
Author(s):  
April S. Callis
Keyword(s):  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Slash Fan Fiction

I analyze the relationship between homophobia/heteronormativity and slash fan fiction. Through reading and coding almost 6,000 pages of Kirk/Spock fan fiction written from 1978 to 2014, I illuminate shifts in how normative gender and sexuality are portrayed by K/S authors. Writers of K/S, while ostensibly writing about the 23rd century, consciously or unconsciously include cultural norms from the 20th and 21st centuries. Thus, slash becomes a lens through which readers can view a decrease in both homophobia and heteronormativity in US culture over the past several decades.

“It’s like, ‘I’ve never met a lesbian before!’”

Pragmatics ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 799-818 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natasha Shrikant
Keyword(s):  
Personal Experience ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Female Gender ◽  
Female Identity ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Racially Diverse ◽  
Membership Categorization Analysis ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Membership Categorization ◽  
Personal Experiences

This paper uses membership categorization analysis to illustrate how five women invoke multiple female gender and sexuality identity categories in personal narratives to construct the device of womanhood. The five racially diverse women include four self-identified lesbians and one heterosexual and range in age from mid-twenties to early forties. Analysis of their two hour audio recorded interaction illustrates that gender and sexuality cannot be understood as a binary difference between men and women. These women use revolutionary categories, defined on their own terms rather than by outsiders, to characterize women they encounter in their personal experience (lesbian and otherwise). The revolutionary categories exemplify a diversity of female gender and sexuality identities and ultimately challenge heteronormative conceptions of female identity while simultaneously constructing a lesbian counterpublic. Thus, the personal experiences of these women, as related through everyday narratives, turn out to be highly political.

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