Miss Xiaofei Yang1, Ms Zhuying Li
1Rmit University, City Campus, 澳大利亚
The animation film Ne Zha was a hit in the summer of 2019 in Chinese cyberspace. The film generated a lot discussion and user generated content from online fans. This is due largely to the film’s nuanced depiction of the relationship between its protagonist Ne Zha and his friend/enemy, Ao Bing. The homosocial/homoerotic undertone in their interactions had provoked the production and distribution of various forms of gay-themed fan art (drawings, remixed short videos, photo-shopped pictures, etc.) regarding the two characters across the internet. This phenomenon is all the more thought-provoking when situated in China’s particular cultural environment, where depictions of non-heterosexualities or behaviors online are officially prohibited, inviting thorough scholarly scrutiny. Taking a post-modernist feminist perspective, this study examines fan-produced drawings and pictures of the film Ne Zha on Douban.com, one of the top rating websites in China. By interpreting selected fan works through semiotics, the study aims to explore representations of the two characters in these works, the extent to which they comply with and/or diverge from China’s existing gender norms, and their role in negotiating with China’s shifting and contesting cyberspace and gender ideology at large.
Biography:
Xiaofei Yang is a research student at RMIT University, School of Media and Communication. Her research interests are Chinese new media, cultural studies, gender studies, post-modernist feminism and queer theory. She got her master’s degree in Global Media Communication at the University of Melbourne in 2017.