Queer pop culture in the Sinophone mediasphereThis chapter focuses on queer pop culture in the Chinese-speaking societies of East Asia:
communities across Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, parts of the Chinese mainland, and the
Chinese diaspora that are connected by media in Chinese languages. Shu-mei Shih has charac-
terized such dispersed and “peripheral” forms of Chinese culture—with the arguable inclusion
of socially marginal populations, such as sexual minorities, on the Chinese mainland (Chiang
and Heinrich 2014; Martin 2014)—as constituting a “Sinophone” cultural sphere (Shih 2007);
while Chua Beng Huat refers to the network of media flows that connect these dispersed com-
munities as “pop culture China” (Chua 2012). Chua proposes that pop culture China is structur-
ally central to the wider East Asian pop culture economy. Observing that transnational flows of
popular media to ethnically Chinese communities across Asia have been in motion for nearly a
century, he reminds us that since the 1930s, the Chinese-language commercial cinema industry,
centered in Hong Kong, has been exporting films right across Asia (see also Fu 2003). Since
the 1970s, the television and pop music industries of both Hong Kong and Taiwan have been
exporting content to ethnically Chinese audiences across the region including, since around
1980, to those in mainland China (Chua 2012, 15, 31–50). Chua’s charting of the Japanese and
Korean “Waves” in Asia since the early 1990s highlights how popular media from these non-
Sinophone countries were able to slot into the existing distribution networks of this transna-
tional pop culture China:
Japanese and Korean products [are] exported to areas which have a predominantly
ethnic Chinese population—China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. [...] This
transnational ethnic Chinese population constitutes the largest consumer market for
Japanese and Korean pop culture exports; without it they would likely have remained
local industries.
(Chua 2012, 30)Such a mapping underlines the fact that today, the transnational Sinophone mediasphere is
intrinsically interlinked with other forms of media and pop culture within the East Asian region,
especially those of Japan and Korea. In this chapter, then, while my central focus is on queer
Sinophone media and pop culture, it will quickly become apparent that it is impossible to con-
sider this in isolation from its interactions with Japanese and Korean forms.^2
A decisive turning point in the transnationalization of the popular mediasphere in East Asia,
including the queer pop culture that is this chapter’s focus, has been the increasing accessibility
of online communication technologies since the mid-1990s. In the relatively developed capi-
talist “tiger economies” of Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore (as well as in Japan,
whose entrance into the global industrial capitalist economy occurred a decade or so earlier),
young urban queer people were actively using Internet platforms like BBS boards to meet
each other and organize as early as 1994–1995 (Berry, Martin, and Yue 2003). Internet techno-
logy became widely available later in mainland China, with its massive geographic territory,
less developed capitalist economy, and wider gap between rich and poor (Martin 2009). Today,
however, online communication is undoubtedly a—if not the—major channel used by sexual
minorities across Sinophone East Asia to meet each other, organize politically, and create and
exchange various forms of queer pop culture (see also Yue 2012).
Indeed, the prevalence of online communication for the “digital natives” who comprise the
current generation of younger LGBTIQ people in urban Sinophone East Asia has spawned
whole new forms of queer pop culture. These include the massively popular e-novel form as a
branch of popular queer fiction in Chinese (Feng 2013; Leng 2013). The best-known example
here is the mainland Chinese e-novel, Beijing Comrades by Bei Tong, first serialized in 1998 and