Routledge Handbook of East Asian Popular Culture

(Rick Simeone) #1
Fran Martin

late Hong Kong superstar and queer icon Leslie Cheung (Leung 2008, 85–105; Chan 2010);
another is Taiwanese singer-songwriter Sandee Chan, whose poetic, feminist lyrics have made
her a favorite with young, middle-class lesbian audiences in Taiwan and beyond (Martin 2003a);
and a third is mainland Chinese singer Li Yuchun (Chris Lee), the androgynous young pop
star who rocketed to fame when she won China’s Super Girl TV talent quest in 2005. In some
East Asian media cultures, queer and trans elements are an integral part of some of the most
popular commercial media forms. This is seen, for example, in the role of theatrically “queeny”
MtF (Male-to-Female) transgender hosts on Japanese variety and lifestyle television (Maree
2013), and in a spate of mainstream TV dramas focusing on FtM (Female-to-Male) transgender
experience in Japan since the late 1990s (Yuen 2011). Analyzing regular exposés of celebrities’
lesbian relationships in widely circulated gossip magazines in Hong Kong, Denise Tse-Shang
Tang argues that these reports at once sensationalize and normalize such relationships, and can
in some instances be seen as subversive cultural interventions by queer media workers (2012,
608–610). In Taiwan, meanwhile, “tomboys” or “T”s—that is, stylistically masculine, same-sex
attracted adult women—appear as sympathetic protagonists in what I have elsewhere dubbed
the “tomboy melodrama” narrative, which manifests in mainstream pop cultural forms including
pulp fiction, soap opera, and teenpics (Martin 2010, 93–117).
Somewhat distinct from these queer(ed) elements in mainstream commercial media, since
the 1990s there has also emerged from East Asia a growing genre of media that intentionally
targets queer and queer-friendly audiences. This media centers on non-straight protagonists
and points of view and is sometimes made by openly lesbian or gay artists and producers.
The appearance of what Tang calls “the inter-Asian flows of queer media production” follows
the consolidation of new sexual publics in several East Asian societies in this period (Tang
2012, 599). Reflecting, in part, the impact of cultural globalization in the field of minority
sexualities, many East Asian countries in the late-twentieth century saw the rise of LGBTIQ
political activism, the emergence of above-ground gay and lesbian commercial cultures,
and increasingly widespread identification with forms of individual identity in which non-
normative sexuality and/or gender are positioned as a defining element of social personhood
(Martin et al. 2008). In the ethnically Chinese societies of East Asia that are this chapter’s main
focus, the emergence of the term tongzhi—literally meaning “same will”; conventionally a
translation of “comrade” in a political sense; and more recently appropriated to designate a
Chinese version of something like LGBTIQ—provides a case in point. First used in a queer
sense in the late 1980s in Hong Kong, where it appeared in Edward Lam’s Chinese title for
a queer film festival (D. K-m. Wong 2011, 157), the term then traveled from Hong Kong to
Taiwan. There, it was taken up as a sexual- minority identity category by a generation of young
gay and lesbian activists and cultural workers who were elaborating a new queer public culture
in context of the cultural thaw that occurred in Taiwan following the abrogation of martial law
in 1987 (Martin 2003b). From there, the tongzhi identity and concept traveled on to mainland
China and out into the regional Chinese diaspora. While it is by no means the only Chinese-
language term for queer sexualities in circulation today, tongzhi has become the most common
term used in ways comparable to the English LGBTIQ, and arguably constitutes “the most
extensive non-English language medium of queer imaginaries in Asia today” (Martin et al.
2008, 14).^1 Along with the emergence of tongzhi as a queer social identity across the Chinese
societies of East Asia, there has appeared a raft of popular-cultural products drawn together
under the tongzhi title, from tongzhi fiction (Martin 2003b; Leng 2013) and tongzhi film and
film festivals (Lim 2006), to tongzhi travel agencies, tongzhi fashion retailers, and tongzhi Internet
cultures. All of these pop-cultural forms, in turn, tend to consolidate new queer publics across
the multiple communities in which they circulate.

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