ABSTRACT
Many advertisements in Taipei’s MRT mall contain striking images of women with consuming passion. Their captions often consist of intimate stories, brief and disjunctive narratives using innovative hybrid languages that draw on themes from the traditional romance novel to address the secret hopes and fears of young female shoppers, and to enhance the flaneuristic pleasure of romancing the stores. It is precisely in this peculiar form of semantic or even semiotic innovation, of redeploying romantic tropes in emergent consumer cultures, that advertising gives new life to the early twentieth century Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies tradition. In response to such innovative discursive practices, spectators, especially those belonging to the “new, new human species” (xinxin renlei ) or the so-called “X” and “E” generations, see something both fascinating and familiar in the images.1 These publicity-driven images actually produce a politics of recognition in contemporary Taiwan.
