Superhero fan fiction is increasingly popular in the Chinese boys' love (BL) community. An exploration of the fan fic Gangtiexia: Zhongdu Yilai (Iron Man: Overly attached) investigates how the Hollywood cultural icon Iron Man/Tony Stark is reimagined in Chinese BL culture and to what degree this kind of rendition both echoes and extends as well as challenges and deviates from our current insights into BL fandoms. Through the lenses of queerness and technological human transformation, I explore the fresh contribution of Iron Man fan fiction to both local BL cultures and global superhero fandoms.
Queer kinships are often physically and emotionally stretched when people leave their original families to pursue education and employment through internal or international migration. This chapter argues that the so-called “coming out as coming home” strategy no longer works, and “home” has often become an impossible location for people to return to. It proposes a new paradigm of “stretched kinship” to consider a wide range of practices in queer homecoming and homemaking to better understand and make sense of the changing queer kinship structures shaping and shaped by today’s queer Chinese cultures and mobilities. It further explores “alternative families” as an emerging form of queer family-building, through which “home” once again becomes a possible ontological and symbolic location and destination.
Kinship has been the primary concern among young queer people in today's China and other parts of Asia under the strong and ongoing familism, who often find it challenging to come out and negotiate their sexuality with their parental family. This paper adopts the concept of stretched kinship to critically analyze the digital videos released by PFLAG China (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays in China) from 2015 to 2020, focusing on the experiences of the parents in their responses to young people's coming out. It both extends and challenges the concept of stretched kinship by turning the spotlight from queer youth to their parents-a topic often overlooked in queer Asian and Chinese studies-to examine how Chinese parents reject and accept their queer child contextualized in the rapid and ongoing social change in twenty-first-century China and Asia.
Coming out videos have become an increasingly popular genre on social media among queer youths and YouTube celebrities, and a few most popular ones have generated tens of millions of views combined that have also caught wide public attention from traditional mass media. This paper considers and compares two (sets of) coming out videos on YouTube from the Rhodes brothers in the United States and the Huang brothers in Taiwan that both became landmark social media and mass media events. It questions the normative narrative of coming out and the uneven flows of youth cultures and celebrity cultures online, where the visibility of certain social groups has masked the invisibility of other marginalized people. The critique extends to the "YouTube celebrity economy" and video-based female queer fandom, as well as the parents' responses and reactions to their children's coming out that have been recorded on video-an important part of coming out that is often overlooked in queer studies and youth studies. This paper offers a unique lens that connects online stardom and fandom to parental responses to coming out, shedding further light on global youth cultures, YouTube economy and queer celebrities, and parent-youth relations in Asia and America.
Queer Chinese Cultures and Mobilities examines the germination and movements of emergent queer cultures and social practices in the early twenty-first century. Under the dual pressure of compulsory familism and compulsory development, the configurations and understandings of gender and sexuality have become less sedentary and increasingly mobilized beyond traditional frameworks, categories, and boundaries. Through a reconsideration and requalification of queer mobilities, this groundbreaking project integrates and intervenes into the changing family and kinship structure, internal and international migrations, cultural flows and counterflows, and social inclusion and exclusion in queer China and Sinophone Asia. It considers the values and pitfalls of the development-induced mobilities and post-development syndromes that have conjointly structured and sustained queer people’s ongoing longings and sufferings, establishing fresh concepts and new paradigms in a rich and provocative social analysis and cultural critique of queer homecoming and homemaking, cultural production and circulation, and middle class formation and position. Through an interdisciplinary approach and expansive scope, Queer Chinese Cultures and Mobilities offers a revolutionary framework that interweaves sexual mobility and modernity with geographical, cultural, and social class migration and mobilization to interrogate the meanings of mobilities for queer people amid China’s internal transformation and international expansion for its great dream of revival in the twenty-first century.
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