1st Edition

Gender, Media and Modernity in the Asia-Pacific

Edited By Catherine Driscoll, Meaghan Morris Copyright 2014

    This collection offers a range of cultural studies perspectives on the ways gender and modernity intersect in media produced in the Asia-Pacific region. It spans different ideas about modernity in the region, different approaches to cultural analysis, and different media forms: from Taiwanese lifestyle television to avant-garde Indian cinema, from the emergence of a Chinese youth culture in online social networks to the alienation of country girls as imagined by Australian soap opera, and from the fantastic politics of migrating bodies in Korean cinema to the masculine mimicry of fighting women in South-East Asian action movies. Together, these essays explore the ways that media both records and helps produce images and experiences of modernity and the integral role gender plays in those processes.

    This book was originally published as a special issue of Cultural Studies.

    1. Introduction: Gender, modernity and media in the Asia-Pacific Catherine Driscoll and Meaghan Morris

    2. Subjects of Distance: The modernity of the Australian country girl Catherine Driscoll

    3. ‘A Tangle of People Messing Around Together’: Taiwanese variety television and the mediation of women’s affective labour Fran Martin

    4. Cuteness as a Subtle Strategy: Urban female youth and the online feizhuliu culture in contemporary China Qiu Zitong

    5. Fighting Women in Contemporary Asian Cinema: The celebration of the inauthentic in My Wife is a Gangster and Chocolate Jan Chi Hyun Park

    6. The State of Fantasy in Emergency: Fantasmatic others in South Korean films Kim Soyoung

    7. To Derail Thinking: On shuttling between Australia and India as a former Ceylonese Laleen Jayamanne

    Biography

    Catherine Driscoll is Associate Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at The University of Sydney, Australia. Her recent books include Modernist Cultural Studies (2009) and Teen Film: A Critical Introduction (2011).

    Meaghan Morris is a leading international figure in cultural studies. She is currently Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at The University of Sydney, Australia, and Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. Her recent books include Identity Anecdotes (2006) and Creativity and Academic Activism (ed. with Mette Hjort, 2012).