Following the previous talk about the cultural policies in Thailand, Taiwan and Singapore, we are delighted to invite you to the forthcoming Asian Cultural Policy Seminar Series. This seminar is hosted by King's College London, Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries.

In this seminar, De Xiqing Zheng (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) investigates the debate on the issue of queerbaiting in Chinese online fan community, especially the debate on the so-called “official queerbaiting” phenomenon in Chinese media industry, and its negotiation with the ever tightening censorship and the homophobic social environment.

The abstract of the presentation is as follows:

This paper investigates the debate on the issue of queerbaiting in Chinese online fan community, especially the debate on the so-called “official queerbaiting” phenomenon in Chinese media industry, and its negotiation with the ever tightening censorship and the homophobic social environment.

“Queerbaiting ” refers to strategies taken by media producers that construct seemingly queer characters in a media text to encourage identification from queer audience but then refuse to acknowledge them (Ng, Eve, 2018). A general equivalence for “queerbaiting” in Chinese is “maifu,” literally, to sell rottenness, which usually refers to strategies taken by program producers and celebrities to induce female fans’ consumption of imaginary homoerotic relationship among fictional characters and real-life celebrities. The cultural differences between these two concepts reflects perfectly on the different connotation between “fu” and “queer.” In other words, as the queerness in media text is supposed to be purely imaginary in the Chinese context, discussion of civil right advocacy topics is absent from most discussions on media representations and implicit implication of homosexual relationships.

The flimsy boundary between an online space for Chinese fans’ queer imagination and the “mainstream” public is easily trespassed. This paper details and analyzes a set of fandom rules on Chinese social media to demonstrate how the Chinese fans reinforce the self-constructed invisible borderline of queer imagination through self-censorship to prevent any possible regulation or punishment from the government. Such self-censorship performances have a euphemism, “survival instinct.” Some of the most aggressive boundary policers even report certain transformative writings to the censors, in order to prosecute transgressors inside the online community. Under such circumstances, reading queer elements from mainstream media texts becomes delicate and conflicted dynamic between accusation of “maifu” and performance of “survival instinct.”

Xiqing Zheng is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Literature, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, China. She graduated from the University of Washington with her PhD. in Comparative Literature in 2016. Her research interest includes fan culture, new media, Chinese cinema, translation, etc. She is the Chinese translator of Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers.

The seminar will be chaired by Erika N. Wang (King's College London) and Liang Ge (King's College London, The London School of Economics and Political Science) will be a key commentator.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the event organiser: ningxin.wang@kcl.ac.uk