The years since 2010 have seen a burgeoning of queer TV culture in China, that is, a discursive result of refined, multidimensional negotiations with non-normatively gendered and/or eroticized performances, sentiments, and embodiments. Facilitated by China’s media globalization, commercialization, and digitization, this queer TV phenomenon has emerged in a mainstream space where the Western-defined “mainstreaming” (Barnhurst 2007; Gross 2001) of gay and lesbian characters has never occurred. As Asian queer scholar Peter A. Jackson notes, “some Asian erotic identities are ‘pre-gay,’ while others are ‘post-queer’ in the sense that they exist outside Eurocentric understandings of sexual and gender difference” (2001, 7). Following this de-Western-centric logic in global queer studies, this special panel session refuses to simplify post-2010 China’s queer TV as a capitalist exploitation and stereotyping of gay identities, lives, and politics. Rather, the panel couples the conceptual framework of global TV and queer TV studies (Parks and Kumar 2003; Aaron 2009) to work against the universalization of Western culture-defined sexuality as the only way to represent queerness in non-Western media. We understand queer as “a political or ethical approach, an aesthetic quality, a mode of interpretation or way of seeing, a perspective or orientation, or a way of desiring, identifying or disidentifying” (Taylor 2012; Doty 1993). In turn, our discussions recognize the inherently entwined queer and normative dimensions of TV as a sociocultural platform in contemporary China and unveil the potential and problems of queer-natured televisual-cultural production, distribution, and consumption.

The session is composed of three presenters and one respondent. Panelists are invited to challenge the dichotomy of “positive” and “negative” representations of gender and sexual minorities by reflecting on specific case studies. We are attentive to the queer televisual spectacle crystalized in mainstream culture’s censoring, appropriation, mobilization, and commercialization of local, transnational, and global gender and sexual knowledge. We also unravel the intricacies and controversies in China’s televisualization of norm-defying forms of gender, sexuality, body, identity, and desire. In so doing, we consider the following questions:

1. In what ways can this queer TV culture interrogate and/or mediate the state’s economic, social-political, and ideological projects?
2. What is the relationship between queer TV images, China’s media regulatory policies, and being and performing gender and/or sexual non-normativities in the off-screen Chinese society?
3. How does queer TV studies situated in China, a largely authoritarian, heteronormative nation-state, open up new scholarly understandings and analytical possibilities of post-2010 Asian media and cultural studies?

The panel will start with Aobo Dong’s provocative question: why are some gay portrayals on TV considered sensitive and censored by the government while others are not? Dong studies the recently banned, online-distributed gay TV drama Addicted (iQiyi, 2016). Drawing on theoretical interventions from Judith Butler (2004, 2014) and José Muñoz (1999, 2009), Dong reveals the key role of grief in the drama’s gay story line. Dong finds that Addicted constructed a queer utopian world in its narration of gay romance where same-sex love trumps class hierarchies and heterosexual filial piety rooted in traditional Chinese values. Dong argues that this framing of same-sex desire as both ubiquitous within and unsettling to China’s heteronormative kinship system led to the official censoring of Addicted.

While Dong focuses on China’s official censorial practices on online gay TV, Xiaomeng Li and Eve Ng’s study (will be presented by Li) sheds light on the mutually shaping relationship between fan practices and the state’s ideological/commercial interests in China’s TV adaptation of online gay novels. Li and Ng identify a “queerbaiting” nature of the most recent online TV series Guardian (Youku, 2018). The series removed explicit depiction of gay romance as in the original novel yet kept tantalizing the queer expectations of its viewers and fans by high-profiling male homosociality in the TV adaptation. Li and Ng’s analysis shows that this queerbaiting strategy exemplifies how China’s media regulators, political authorities, grassroots publics, and commercial power have all actively contributed to the thriving of today’s TV production, consumption, and remaking of queer-connotated stories. This situation eventually leads to multiple, and sometimes, self-contradictory media and cultural discourses surrounding queer desire and fantasy in China’s TV culture.

While the first two presenters pay special attention to the official culture’s careful treatment on same-sex intimacies in online-distributed TV productions, Zhiqiu Zhu troubles the public panic toward a queer form of masculinity represented on national TV—“sissy boys.” Zhou inspects the public and pop cultural discourses surrounding the male femininity of many male pop stars featured in the state-controlled central TV station–produced TV program, The First Class of School (CCTV-1, 2018). Zhou contextualizes these TV images of “sissy boys” in the sociocultural, economic, and ideological transformations of postsocialist China. He demonstrates that mainstream culture has framed normative Chinese manhood as a gendered manifestation of China’s national power and social-political stability on a global stage. Thus, the panic can be understood as a nationalistic reaction, showcasing the public’s fear of the breakdown of moral and political systems during Chinese society’s capitalization and globalization.

Following the three presentations, the respondent Jamie J. Zhao discusses the promise and peril of queer TV cultural phenomena thriving within and surviving from a largely heteronormative media environment. In response to the case studies presented, Zhao also reflects on how queer TV studies in a globalized, digitized Chinese media landscape can be a productive, generative analytical framework that offers multiple paths and directionalities in scholarship on contemporary Asian media and societies.

Collectively, this panel highlights how the political-ideological manipulations, the commercial and censorial practices, and the grassroots voices intersect, compete, and/or collaborate with each other in contemporary China’s queer TV culture.

Logistically, the session will proceed with a one-minute introduction of all participants’ institutional affiliations. Every presenter will speak for 16 minutes (48 minutes in total), and the respondent will speak for 6 minutes. There will be ample time at the end (20 minutes) for conversations with the audience. Our goal is to attract a wide range of audience from China studies, media and visual studies, critical and cultural studies, film and TV studies, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, and queer studies.