Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

collaborations that exists between these two cities and the impact transpacific migration and mobility may
have on their potential for alliance and cooperation.
Jia Tan Digital Masquerading as Mobility: Remaking Publicness in Chinese Feminist Media Activism
In March 2015, five young feminists were detained and accused of “disturbing public order” through their
plan to circulate messages against sexual harassment in public transportation. Exploring the practices of the
Feminist Action School, it argues that this new wave of feminist media activism (re)negotiates the line
between the public and the private through mobilized tactics of “digital masquerading” in three ways. First,
these feminist media practices in the digital era are active and self-conscious masquerading acts leveraging
the specificity of media practice to increase public influence, mobilize participation, and avoid censorship.
Second, these practices tactically use women’s body and the digital alterability of these images as
masquerading in order to circumvent censorship and possible criminalization. Third, the notion of digital
masquerade points to the interface between the medium and the subjects, which involves collective efforts
in mobilizing activist activities and remaking publicness.
Tzu-hui Celina Hung
Staging New Immigrants in Multicultural Taiwan
Since 2000, Taiwan has seen a growing body of media representations of marriage immigrants from
Mainland China and Southeast Asia, with female subjects being the usual focus. Frequently portrayed “like a
family but not quite” (Huang and Li), the new immigrant women occupy a distinctly gendered, racialized,
working-class, and critically “accented” presence (Hamid Naficy) in the middlebrow Taiwanese imagination.
This talk discusses the promises and problems of the evolving neoliberal multicultural mediascape. A fictionfilm
series We Are Family (2012) will be analyzed: how the series promotes a touch-feely imagination of
“foreigners” among the local viewership; how it tackles prejudice by capitalizing on indigenous and
immigrant actors, their mixed-race offspring, and characters of African backgrounds; how it masks the
country’s economic and political marginalization in the Asia Pacific and the predominantly Han Taiwanese
viewers’ anxiety over miscegenation; and lastly, how, amid debates over Taiwaneseness, token immigrant
figures are staged as advocates of multicultural tolerance with sardonic, two-edged effects.
10B
Participant Writing in Indigenous Australia (a pop-up workshop) (Chair, Stephen Muecke)
Non-Aboriginal writers (writing ethnography, policy, history, law, etc) are engaged by Indigenous organisation and
communities to translate their matters of concern across institutional boundaries such that these matters are kept
“alive”. In this session we will discuss how such participant writers earn and maintain their “engagement” with
Indigenous groups while also maintaining their engagement with the whitefella institutions that tend to control
funding, publication, etc. This workshop will not involve presentations but, instead, a dialogue and a shared space
for inspired discussion about the issues raised by participant writing in indigenous Australia. It will be chaired by
Stephen Muecke with invited participants working on related issues from across the program. Speakers: Stephen
Muecke, Tess Lea, and others to be advised.
10C
Affect and Temporalities in Intimate Relationships (Chair, Katrina Schlunke)
The temporal dynamics in and around intimate relationships form a focal point between gendered and sexualized
societal power relations, social interactions and personal experiences. All intimate relationships have their own
affective textures. Those textures can give the relationships a persisting and meaningful nature that makes them
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