School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemWomen on this planet: globalisation and girl rock in Taiwan( 2006)Pop music culture in Taiwan has undergone a striking metamorphosis over the past decade. Industrial reorganisation in the second half of the 1990s following the advent of the ‘Big Five’ global music corporations has occurred alongside a series of cultural shifts resulting from the localisation of global flows of musical styles and movements. In this paper I analyse some of the local effects of a particular cluster of globalising movements: those of musical ‘girl cultures’. I discuss Taiwanese manifestations of globally mobile configurations of ‘girl rock’ and ‘girl power’ through analysis of two examples with which I became familiar following extended periods living and researching in Taipei in the mid to late 1990s: all-girl punk band Ladybug and independent folk-rock singer-songwriter and producer Sandee Chan. These examples were not chosen with the aim of offering a representative overview of women in Taiwanese popular music, but rather as a pair of case studies interesting to consider together in the light of the way in which they each draw upon globalising musical and cultural trends. By considering these case studies I aim to explore three sets of interrelated questions. First, I consider how to conceptualise the complex cultural interchanges between globalising musical girl cultures and their local instances in Taiwan. Through what channels are movements like Riot Girl or the ‘girl power’ of the Spice Girls translated into Taiwan’s local contexts, and what effects do they produce for Taiwanese women musicians? Second, I reflect on how best to figure the relations between a musical ‘mainstream’ and its ‘alternative’ in the context of the changing configurations of Taiwan’s music industry today.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableHigh anxiety: cultural studies and its uses(Informa UK Limited, 2003-12)
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ItemThe Perfect Lie: Sandee Chan and lesbian representability in Mandarin pop music(Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2003)Framed by this understanding of recent transformations in musical and sexual cultures as a function of globalization, the paper situates Sandee Chan’s music within the local context of its production and consumption in Taiwan and works toward a “microscopic” perspective on experiences of the music by nu¨ tongzhi fans. In particular, it asks about a possible relationship between how nutongxinglian (female homosexuality) is spoken (or unspoken) in Sandee’s music, and the conditions of nutongxinglian representability within Taiwan’s contemporary public culture more broadly. The paper considers both the rhetorical figuration of nutongxinglian as subtextual reticence in the texts of Sandee’s song lyrics and music videos, and the activity of Sandee’s nutongzhi fans who find material here for the elaboration of oppositional meanings. Such a hybrid methodology — a combination of textual analysis and fan ethnography —represents the union of two approaches whose conceptual bases are sometimes taken to be discontinuous or incommensurable, if not opposed. The 1990s high moment of “queer theory,” for example, was frequently criticized for its supposedly narrow emphasis on the textual at the expense of the more broadly social (Seidman 1995). While one might respond effectively to this charge with the observation that representation is nothing if not thoroughly social, historical, and political, nevertheless it is instructive to combine the insights garnered through textualist close-reading strategies with understandings of the lived consumption of texts by their audiences.