Koichi Iwabuchi, Eva Tsai, and Chris BerryIn Chapter 11, Jinhee Choi analyzes 1920s fiction and Korean women’s magazine writing,
both of which feature hybridized productions of Japan-influenced shōjo (girl) sensibilities. Her
focus on this historical–cultural moment decenters a subcultural, Japan-centered shōjo discourse
and contextualizes the mutual inter-Asian influences of the shōjo sensibility and iconography.
Themes of homosocial relationships, inner reflection, death, and nostalgia are common in East
Asian shōjo texts. The fluidity of female–female relationships also figures in queer media culture,
the subject of Fran Martin’s chapter (12).
Martin conceptualizes queer popular culture as a media and cultural field contingent on the
blurring of sexualities as well as hybrid media platforms. She alerts us to the fact that the impe-
tus to make queer media products comes not only from underground and above-the-ground
commercial gay and lesbian media platforms; mainstream media are also aware of the advantages
of sexually ambivalent narratives. In the Chinese-speaking sphere of queer popular culture, she
identifies two types of queer cultural forms among the wealth of film, television, fiction, manga,
and other cultural productions—the schoolgirl romance and BL (boys’ love) culture. While
schoolgirl romances idealize a nostalgic temporality and blurred sexual normativity, the BL
scene, which includes the performance and consumption of BL manga and fiction, offers a space
for predominantly straight women to imagine more egalitarian partnerships.
Sharing some common interests with Martin, Katrien Jacobs (in Chapter 13) draws attention
to the connections between gendered fantasies and certain digital practices—archiving, making
databases, posting, crossing the Great Firewall, linking to pornography, etc. Based on her obser-
vation of the Chinese pornosphere, Jacobs argues that the pornosphere allows social media users
to explore desire and share queer fantasies. In the process of aligning themselves with particular
Japanese porn stars, Chinese social media users often place local pornography and porn icons in
a transnational, cultural hierarchy.
The last chapter (14) in this section looks at the cultural translation of star-based Korean
masculinity in a Taiwanese men’s fashion magazine, Men’s UNO. In his analysis, Hong-chi Shiau
uncovers a collective, Asian tone in the magazine’s discourse and representation of popular
Korean film and television stars. Presented as having naturally sculpted physiques, being on good
terms with other men, and valuing responsibility, the stars resonate with both consumerist met-
erosexuality and wen, the Confucian notion of erudite masculinity also discussed by Deppman
in Chapter 7b.
IV Politics of the transnational commons
As the previous sections have suggested, intensified media and cultural flows in East Asia have set
off cultural hybridizations and the desire to make new cultural historiographies based on ongo-
ing mutual sharing. Much like the argument that the region effectively mediates the national/
local and the global (Ching 2000; Sinclair 2007), the circulation of media cultures in East
Asia promotes people’s mutual understanding in a transnationalizing world. Even if they do
not physically move across borders, many individuals in East Asia actively consume, circulate,
interpret, and reuse information, images, and commodities that have crossed borders. Yet we
should not assume a dialogic relationship would evolve as a natural or inevitable consequence
of this mixing. Globalization is an uneven process, after all. Just as the critique of the simplified
account of the meaning-making process in the thesis of cultural imperialism allowed for a more
nuanced understanding of cultural flows (Sparks 2007; Hafez 2007), we also benefit by carefully
analyzing the structural aspects of capital, geopolitics, and culture at the global level. This section
investigates how various structural forces—such as marketization, national cultural policy, and
nationalistic movements—both enable and disable shared cultural spaces.