25/04/2024 (Thursday) 13:00-14:00 E21B-G002
Thinking “Sissiness” through Trans/national Masculinities in Contemporary China
Abstract:
Based on a recent paper co-authored with Prof. Tingting Liu (Jinan University), this talk discusses China’s recent “sissy ban” by situating discourses of sissiness and sissyphobia in a field of complex and competing discourses amidst rising nationalist sentiments and intensified transnational flows of masculinity cultures. By probing into the cases of three celebrities – Zhou Shen 周深, Yuzuru Hanyu 羽生結弦, and Hins Cheung (Zhang Jingxuan 張敬軒) – we map out a typology of soft and queer masculinity expressions that intersect with state, popular, and peripheral nationalisms. We show that Chinese “sissyphobia” represents sophisticated technologies of governance that both encourage compliance and self-censorship, and engender creative tactics of negotiation, against the backdrop of growing tensions between the Chinese state’s construction of nationalist masculinities and the immense appeal of transnational masculinity ideals.
Bio:
Lin Song is an Assistant Professor in communication at Jinan University, Guangzhou, China. He holds a PhD in gender studies from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Queering Chinese Kinship: Queer Public Culture in Globalizing China (Hong Kong University Press 2021). He has also published extensively on gender and sexuality in journals such as Journal of Computer-mediated Communication, Feminist Media Studies, and Convergence.
