Yearnings: televisual love and melodramatic politics in contemporary China

Abstract

To trace the complex “passion for meaning” (Barthes) that animated the consumption and interpretation of Yearnings, a television melodrama that aired in China just a year and a half after the Tiananmen demonstrations, requires moving beyond a dichotomy between “the political” and “the popular.” This article argues that Yearnings became a nationwide controversy because it allegorizes post‐Tiananmen dilemmas of national identity in relation to socialism and in relation to the diverse class and gender positionings of the characters as well as the viewers. Textualist and reader‐response analyses of popular culture need to be broadened by an ethnographic approach that asks sociodiscursive questions about the operations of popular culture as a site for the constitution of national subjects, one that offers complicated possibilities for oppositional practices. [China, national identity, popular culture, gender and class, politics of representations, the state]

State of the Field: Women in China's Long Twentieth Century

“…Nevertheless, those women whose paid labor has taken them outside their family's domestic space, however capaciously and flexibly that space is defined, have felt themselves and have been seen by others to be vulnerable to kidnapping, trafficking, sexual violation, and potential disgrace (Pruitt 1967;M. Wolf 1985;Rogaski 1997;Rofel 1999b). Important as this normative inner-outer boundary is, however, attention to the specificities of women's work redefines and often collapses the boundary between workplace and household as well as that between paid and unpaid labor.…”

“…Wang 2003). Young women, in contrast, are valorized in both state-owned and private factories for their productivity (Rofel 1989(Rofel , 1999b, docility, nimbleness, and low wage cost (Croll 1995).…”

“…Yang (1999bYang ( , 1999a sees the public sphere moving out of a period of state-sponsored "gender erasure" in the Mao years to a period of intensified attention to gender difference and awareness of new forms of gender discrimination. She and others identify specific sites of an emergent women's discourse, including a women's museum opened by Li Xiaojiang in Henan (the museum is unfortunately now closed) (Rofel 1999a), women's publications and conferences, fiction and literary criticism by woman writers (Dai 1999;Roberts 1999), telephone hot lines (Cornue 1999;Erwin 2000), media productions and media criticism (Bu 2004;Shou 2004), and attention to gender in the university curriculum (X. . Many of these venues, the authors point out, exist in a "blended" relationship with state feminism, as do the emergent NGOs that sponsored them (Cornue 1999; see also Hsiung and Wong 1998).…”

Morality Discourse in the Marketplace: narratives in the Chinese television news magazine Oriental Horizon

“…In China the state has always tried to portray itself as the embodiment of the will of the masses. This has become more complicated in recent years, and after the Tiananmen incident of 1989 the state seems to be scrambling to nd the site upon which it could claim to stand for the common people, and speak in the name of the people (Rofel, 1994). While television stations are adopting modern notions of communication and seeking new measures to attract audience, the state is seeking new approaches to enhance the role of itself as representative of people's desire for socialist morality.…”

Re-Locating the Spaces of Television Studies

“…Published in English with international readerships, such work has for some time now increasingly diversified the knowledge base from which media and cultural studies scholars are understanding their field globally, in addition to the many specific histories and debates that occupy national and regional networks of media scholars in different parts of the world. What Curran and Park proposed as the 'de-Westernization of media studies ' (2000) was aided in part by a wave of interest from adjacent disciplines, including cultural anthropology, in the diverse social consequences of the growing presence of television and other media across different parts of the world (Abu-Lughod, 2005;Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, & Larkin, 2002;Mankekar, 1993;Rofel, 1994). These developments have made an impact, as Graeme Turner recently argued:…”