ABSTRACT

This collection offers a range of cultural studies perspectives on the ways gender and modernity intersect in media produced in the Asia-Pacific region. It spans different ideas about modernity in the region, different approaches to cultural analysis, and different media forms: from Taiwanese lifestyle television to avant-garde Indian cinema, from the emergence of a Chinese youth culture in online social networks to the alienation of country girls as imagined by Australian soap opera, and from the fantastic politics of migrating bodies in Korean cinema to the masculine mimicry of fighting women in South-East Asian action movies. Together, these essays explore the ways that media both records and helps produce images and experiences of modernity and the integral role gender plays in those processes.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Cultural Studies.

chapter |21 pages

Introduction

Gender, modernity and media in the Asia-Pacific

chapter |21 pages

Subjects of Distance

The modernity of the Australian country girl

chapter |18 pages

‘A Tangle of People Messing around Together’

Taiwanese variety television and the mediation of women's affective labour

chapter |17 pages

Cuteness as a Subtle Strategy

Urban female youth and the online feizhuliu culture in contemporary China

chapter |15 pages

Fighting Women in Contemporary Asian Cinema

The celebration of the inauthentic in My Wife is a Gangster and Chocolate

chapter |14 pages

The State of Fantasy in Emergency

Fantasmatic others in South Korean films

chapter |18 pages

To Derail Thinking

On shuttling between Australia and India as a former Ceylonese 1