School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemGendered Mobility, Cosmopolitanism, and Western Women's Writing on China, 1895-1937( 2021)In much early-twentieth-century Anglophone writing, the imagining of China see-sawed between high Modernist Chinoiserie and the Yellow Peril. This thesis looks elsewhere for a different China, one which is found in the overlooked, non-canonical works of women travellers to and residents in China, published between 1895 and 1937. It examines the writings of both well-known and under-studied authors: Isabella Bird, Mary Gaunt, Emily Georgiana Kemp, Dorothea Hosie, and Florence Ayscough, in order to reconsider the complex relationship of gender, mobility, affect, and cosmopolitanism. Foregrounding elements of disorderly mobility and affective sociability, I explore how movement and transcultural encounters are gendered, embodied, and configured through relationships with Chinese people, places, objects, landscape, language and literature. In the process, I show how these very different women found themselves adopting creative approaches to the contested relations between self and other, home and abroad, root and route, tradition and modernity, configuring various forms of gendered cosmopolitanism. In addressing the ongoing re-examination of women writers’ contribution to the intellectual, literary, and cultural history, this thesis shows how a better, fuller understanding of women’s mobility demands new ways of appreciating the history of women’s lives as well as the history of West/East cultural exchanges.
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ItemSketching out the Tomboy: Contemporary Conceptualisations of the Tomboy Identity in Lesbian Communities in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan( 2021)This thesis examines the conceptualisations, uses, and politics of the lesbian secondary gender “tomboy” within lesbian communities in China (PRC), Hong Kong, and Taiwan during the late 2010s. The term tomboy has been widely used by queer women in these communities to describe masculine lesbian expressions, fashion, and/or gender role for over four decades. Screen representations of tomboy originating from within the Chinese-speaking world and from neighbouring Asian regions were particularly popular among these women during the late 2000s and early 2010s. And yet, since the 1990s and increasingly today, a growing section of these communities has been calling for a collective rejection of tomboy, claiming that it reinforces conservative patriarchal and heteronormative values and is therefore anti-feminist. This thesis draws on life stories from those caught between the once-popular use of tomboy and their newfound anti-tomboy feminist sensibilities. It explores the stories of the many women who decided to abandon their tomboy identity in search of their real gender, women who turn to American queer media in hopes of finding true feminist lesbian representations, those who struggle with whether to identify as tomboy or not, and those who in the process of self-searching no longer see themselves as lesbians or women at all. It analyses how contemporary debates about the tomboy in turn shape the ways in which these individuals think about gender, sexual identity, the self, geographies, and cultures. This thesis also examines the contributions that transnational queer screen representations make to popular conceptualisations of the tomboy and these related ideas. It combines textual analysis of relevant screen texts circulating within the communities in question with in-depth empirical interview data revealing participants’ interpretations of these screen texts. This thesis thus offers a critical engagement with the media materials that contribute to the cultural production of the tomboy identity, and more urgently, it is also a critical engagement with the intimate, conceptual, and affective worlds of those who live out this identity.
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ItemFrom diplomacy to diffusion: the Macartney mission and its impact on the understanding of Chinese art, aesthetics, and culture in Great Britain, 1793-1859( 2018)Recent art historical scholarship has begun to expand with studies in cross-cultural convergences and transferences garnering newfound attention. This dissertation, through a series of close readings, examines how the deterioration in the relationship between China and Britain manifests in art. In particular, I am concerned with the corollary concepts of depiction and diffusion: that is, how do British artists depict China and the Chinese, and then, how do these depictions diffuse into British visual and material culture more broadly? The primary temporal focus begins with the Macartney diplomatic embassy of 1793, and ends with Victoria’s accession. Through a semiotic interpretation, I demonstrate that the subtle changes in the British visual depiction of recurring Chinese signs (such as the pagoda or ladies of rank) reveal concomitant shifts in attitudes towards China. The concepts of depiction and diffusion comprise the first and second halves, respectively. Chapter Two examines the visual templates that the Jesuit missionaries based at the Beijing court created. Chapters Three and Four center on the imagery of William Alexander, who served as junior artist to the Macartney mission. His two illustrated travelogues (published 1805 and 1814) synthesized signifiers of China that had circulated in Britain for over a century, but his reinterpretation, in addition to his anthropological approach, anticipate an imperialistic turn. His images—which, notably, departed from the the fantastical chinoiserie which predated them— purported to demonstrate to armchair-travelers the way China ‘looked,’ but it is this very claim to authenticity which requires that the images be read anew through a postcolonial lens. Alexander’s images inform the work of Thomas Allom, who created entirely new Chinese scenes in the wake of the Opium Wars; this is taken up in Chapter Five. Chapters Six and Seven seeks to understand the diffusion of Chinese imagery in Britain, and what the cultural signification of that diffusion is. Chapter Six discusses the role of the anglo- chinois garden in eighteenth-century Britain. It also examines the role that William Chambers played in popularizing Chinese motifs, and how his legacy and contribution to an emerging Romantic aesthetic has been obscured in previous literature. Chapter Seven details the interior design scheme of the Royal Pavilion, Brighton (decorated 1802-1823). In the Music Room, Alexander’s documentary imagery has been transformed into decorative spectacle, and pagodas were miniaturized, trivialized, and brought inside: in this regard, Britain sought to possess China by proxy. By interpreting Britain’s Chinese imagery through a semiotic framework, I examine how artists and audiences negotiated increasing contact with China. Evocations of familiar signs belie a deteriorating relationship, which was hastened by Britain’s rapid industrialization and the unabating desire for Chinese goods. As art history embarks on an intercultural turn, connections between China and Britain in the early modern, proto-global world must be included in this field. This dissertation serves as one such point of departure.
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ItemSomewhere, between 'in' and 'out': locating Jia and internet in Baling-jiulinghou Chinese gay subjectivities( 2016)Informed by face-to-face interviews with over twenty young gay men during a 2013 field trip to five cities across Mainland China, this research thesis critically examines the everyday articulations of their sexual subjectivities both in the space of family and in cyberspace. By contemplating the state of existence experienced by these young men—specifically, their management of parent-child relationships and their utilization of Internet and geo-locative social media in negotiating their sexual identities—this thesis seeks to provide a framework to theorize broader socio-cultural specificities lived by this generation of urban Chinese gay men. A central argument of this dissertation is that contemporary Chinese gay subjectivities are not only defined by constant negotiations between ‘closetedness’ and ‘outness’, they are also paradoxically constituted vis-à-vis rapid, ongoing, socio-cultural shifts experienced by the Chinese baling- jiulinghou generation. Focusing on family and filiality, as well as the rise of geo-locative media, this thesis explores how these shifting circumstances are generating conflicting sets of expectations for young Chinese gay men, and constructing them as queer subjects of contradictions and incoherencies.
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ItemChinese media spectacles in the new millennium: counternarratives of modernity in China( 2006)This thesis investigates the centrality of media spectacles in contemporary Chinese media culture, as sites of contestation over identity, citizenship and ethics. It examines four media spectacles - the media event of the new millennium celebrations, the news event of SARS reportage, the media stories about AIDS and SARS by new media users, and the media campaign war between Falun Gong and the Chinese state - to show how such contestation occurs in the interplay between the state and the non-state. It argues that the praxis to define identity, citizenship and ethics is not only in contestation (featuring resistance and opposition), but also in conjunction (characterized by mutual accommodation and appropriation) between the state and the non-state. Chinese modernity is produced in such interplay. This thesis is an interdisciplinary study of Chinese media culture, which combines theories from media studies and critical theory with those from China studies, particularly cultural studies in and about China. Chapter One examines trajectories of studies on Chinese media and culture within the context of China's structural transformations in the post-Mao era. It also offers conceptual discussions of counter narratives of modernity as a tripartite concept and Chinese media spectacles in relation to the thematic structure of the thesis. Chapter Two examines the interplay of the state and the non-state through a case study of the new millennium celebrations. It argues that the interplay produces a rejuvenation millennialism that harbingers China's second coming in the third millennium. This rejuvenation millennialism is a hybrid discourse of nostalgia, nationalism, and utopianism, all of which require a post as their signifier. Chapter Three uses SARS reportage as a case study to examine the intellectual politics of Chinese journalists in their interplay with the state and the society. It shows how journalists use strategies of double-time narration to mediate the different logics that are imposed upon them. It argues that mediation journalism defines and confines contemporary Chinese journalism. Chapter Four studies media stories about AIDS (the case of Li Jiaming) and SARS (the cases of Sun Zhigang and SMS rhymes about SARS) that are produced, circulated and consumed by Internet and mobile phone users in urban China. It shows how new media users are able to re-configure their subjectivities through the interplay with the state and intellectual/journalist communities. It argues that by allowing the reformation of political subjectivities, talking, linking and clicking has become an important means of exercising citizenship for the subjects of postsocialist China. Chapter Five examines Falun Gong's media campaign war with the state, with the focus on their representations of the body, in order to argue that the contestation between the state and the non-state constitutes a crisis not only for body politics but also for ethics. Falun Gong represents an historical force to split the ethics of the self and the nation from the politics of the state. Representing four aspects of counter narratives of modernity in China, these four media spectacles will inform Chinese politics, culture, society and everyday life in the 21st century.
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ItemPower and counter-power in a global information age: public relations and new media technologies in China( 2010)Through interdisciplinary engagement with political-economic analyses of new media, the public sphere, public relations and environmental communication, this thesis examines the social implications of the Internet for the practice of public relations (PR) in China in both corporate and activist settings. The notion of power is introduced to posit the research within the broader theoretical framework of power-making in the ‘network society’ (Castells, 1996) by linking the discussion to critical perspectives on cyberpower (Hindman, 2009; Jordan, 1999), technocapitalism (Mosco, 2009; Schiller, 1999, 2007) and technostruggle (Dyer-Witheford, 1999; Juris, 2004; Kahn and Kellner, 2004; Kellner, 2004). Triangulating traditional and virtual ethnographic methods, fieldwork was conducted at the PR and Communications Department of General Electric Company (GE) China and a Chinese grassroots environmental NGO (ENGO) called the Global Village of Beijing (GVB). Development in Internet technologies, especially the rise of the so-called Web 2.0 applications, has renewed optimism within the PR industry and scholarship about the enhancement of interactivity, which is best embodied by the concept of two-way symmetrical dialogue proposed by James E. Grunig and Todd Hunt (1984). The Internet has also been hailed as a ‘potential equaliser’ (Coombs, 1998) that is capable of bridging the resource gap for activist organisations. Such generalisations lean towards technological-determinism and do not recognise the complex and organic relationship between technology use and its social context. The study offers ‘thick’ descriptions that both document the contextualised incorporation of Internet technologies into daily PR work and connect it with critical theory. It is found that Internet-based technologies are only capable of re-configuring the power balance to a limited degree. The corporate example shows that the interactive and dialogic potential of the Net has not been fully exploited, and most network strategies remain online extensions of one-way and two-way asymmetric PR models. The ‘potential equaliser’ (Coombs, 1998) thesis also proves weak given the resource shortage suffered by activists in constructing their online presence, which is exacerbated by the increasing commodification of information and attention in cyberspace that further disadvantages the resource-short. Nevertheless, it is also found that Internet technologies can assist activists in their self-representation, network building, information brokering, agenda setting, public mobilisation and construction of discourse communities. This demonstrates the counter information flow online in which civil society actors adopt the same network strategies to promote counter ideologies. To a certain extent, the activists’ online activities have contributed to the formation of an incipient and (electronically) mediated counter public sphere in China – a ‘green’ public sphere (Torgerson, 1999; Yang and Calhoun, 2007) that fosters a counter discourse, or ‘greenspeak’ (Harré, Brockmeier, and Mühlhäuser, 1999), to counterbalance fast-tracked neoliberal globalisation. The issues that hamper this process are also highlighted, including lingering resource shortage, the fragmentation of online discourse communities, and the marginalisation and ‘caging’ of environmental discourses. The study concludes that neither public relations nor the Internet can be reduced to simple generalisations. Both are dialectical concepts that reflect power contestations. The Internet is not a panacea that can transform public relations overnight and make it two-way symmetrical. It remains to be seen if interaction and dialogue will further enter the (corporate) PR psyche, although little optimism exists given the seemingly irreconcilable relationship between system organisations and discourse ethics. It would be equally mistaken to label online public relations as simply extending the discursive and symbolic power of the powerful, in light of the innovative online public relations strategies adopted by activists and NGOs to set agendas and communicate with their publics.