Abstract: Some of the most notable cultural ‘undercurrents’ to emerge in East Asia over recent decades are those of variously queer sexual movements, practices, representations and identities. Over recent decades, forms of queer pop culture have become significant vehicles for cultural trans-nationalization in East Asia. These include both mainstream-popular and minoritarian-subcultural media forms, as well as examples that blur simple distinctions between both straight versus queer sexuality and mainstream versus subcultural media. In this paper, I consider a variety of examples in order to explore the idea that queer pop culture in late-modern East Asia is pulling in two contradictory directions: both toward an ever intensifying minoritisation of gay and lesbian identity, and toward an ever more thoroughgoing universalization of queer potential.

Registration required online 

Contact: Peter Jackson, 02 6125 3142

Associate Professor Fran Martin is Reader in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. Drawing on her fluency in Mandarin, her research focuses on television, film, literature, Internet culture and other forms of cultural production in contemporary transnational China (The People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong), with a specialisation in representations and cultures of gender and queer sexuality. She is co-author, with Tania Lewis and Wanning Sun, of Telemodernities: Life Advice Television and Transformations of Selfhood in Asia (Duke U.P., forthcoming 2016). Her major publications include Backward Glances: Contemporary Chinese Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary (Duke UP, 2010); Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia (co-edited with C. Berry and A. Yue, Duke UP, 2003); Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture (Hong Kong UP, 2003); Angelwings: Contemporary Queer Fiction from Taiwan (Hawaii UP, 2003); AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities (co-edited with P. Jackson, M. McLelland and A. Yue, Illinois UP, 2008); and Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation and Chinese Cultures (co-edited with LN Heinrich, Hawaii UP, 2006). Fran is currently working on a 5-year longitudinal ethnographic study of the social and subjective experience of Chinese women students living and studying in Australia.