Critical approaches to East Asian popular cultureAsia during 2013 and 2014. It critiques the representation of Confucian ethics, such as the affir-
mation of wen (erudite masculinity), the virtue of the father figure, and filial piety. In the series,
such moral high ground serves to justify capitalistic behavior.
In considering how popular music crosses borders in East Asia, Hyunjoon Shin (Chapter 8a)
and Miaoju Jian (Chapter 8b) propose different spatial approaches—one as spatial-geographical
mapping, and the other as site-specific para-narratives. As the exemplar of East Asian pop music
in the twenty-first century, K-pop is often explained as a national pop music gone global. Going
beyond the business rationale, Shin renarrates K-pop from at once a globally subaltern and a
regionally dominant position. With multiple Asian-market considerations, K-pop evolved into
a cosmopolitan sound by adopting global music industry styles, the visual currency of idols and
dance, and international collaboration influenced by the United States and Japan.
In contrast to Shin’s global approach, Jian traces the micro-histories of two small, legendary
urban music venues in Taipei and Beijing—Underworld (1996–2013) and D22 (2006–2012),
respectively. For periods of time, both live venues grew independently into indie music hubs.
Their stories, juxtaposed in Jian’s work, illuminate the internationalization of indie music styles
as well as the turn to cultural governance, which eventually diluted the subcultural energy in
both scenes.
Bordercrossing is the norm for ordinary users of social media in East Asia. In Chapter 9a,
Dong Hyun Song delves into several key events of border control and border busting that
have shaped the terrain of South Korean social media in the past decade. In Chapter 9b, Love
Kindstrand, Keiko Nishimura, and David H. Slater identify the period following the 3/11 earth-
quake and disasters as a critical time during which netizens in Japan have reinvested themselves
in the everyday life politics. However, this does not necessarily lead to the liberalization of social
views and civil dialogues. Constrained by the Great Firewall, social media in China have evolved
into their own unique architecture of linkages, as shown in Jens Damm’s chapter (9c). These
chapters underscore the active creation of national and global imaginations in social media, but
they also leave many unanswered questions, including whether or how social media activisms
intervene in inter-Asian learning and common cultural historiography.
III Intersections of gender, sexuality, and cultural icons
Gender and sexuality have been an integral part of inter-Asian referencing from the beginning,
when the methodology was taken up and experimented with by practitioners in cultural studies,
literature, film, and media studies. As an inherently transnational mode of research, inter-Asian
referencing necessarily reformulates the study of gender and sexuality in non-nationalistic terms.
In the previous sections, the lives of women in Kim’s study of digital diaspora (Chapter 5) and
the media industries’ reworking of Confucian ideology in Fung’s and Deppman’s chapters
(7a and 7b) have hinted at emergent issues concerning media culture, gender, and sexuality. In
this section, we feature five chapters that deepen gender and sexuality theorization by reworking
media and cultural iconography. Celebrities, stars, and cultural figures are more than special sub-
jects in media and cultural studies; they are discursive, technological, and affective assemblages
where industry practices, cultural histories, community expectations, and political expressions
intersect.
In Chapter 10, Jocelyn Yi-Hsuan Lai calls for an inter-Asian approach towards East Asian star
studies as more and more transborder celebrities are actively or inadvertently made in regional
media industries and markets. Since stars often embody national and collective desires, media
industries must attend to the discerning opinions of audiences and even non-audiences, and
they should not naively believe in the power of marketing schemes like multiethnic casting.