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

This research focuses on Xianqing, an online Chinese danmei (Boys’ Love) forum established under the aegis
of a women-oriented literature website in 2003. Although dedicated mainly to popular media consumption,
Xianqing has over the years become both a part of the larger online Chinese public sphere and a unique
queer space that defies any simple classification, offering pleasures, meanings, and identities to numerous
diehard danmei fans despite recurrent technical problems, managerial failures, and tightening censorship.
This research investigates how Xianqing positions itself both within and beyond normative ideologies, how it
negotiates contesting claims of women’s culture and queer culture in mainstream society, and how it
transgresses the boundary between the fantasy world and the real one, interweaving a massive discursive
web extending from the most intimate and personal to the most public and political. Through revealing
some of the paradoxes and ambiguities of this alternative public sphere, we seek to highlight the
understudied gendered dimension of online public sphere in China and question and challenge the rigid
divide between politics and entertainment in academic discourse.
Jing Jamie Zhao The Chinese Tale of a Danish Lesbian Prince: Queerly Normalizing Freja Beha Erichsen
This paper presents a deconstructive reading of the queer gossip surrounding the Danish lesbian model,
Freja Beha Erichsen, in one of the most influential Chinese fandoms of Western media and celebrities, The
Garden of Eden (GE). It reveals the self-reflexive, yet often conflicting, moments in GE fans’ reinterpretations
of transculturally-circulated information about Erichsen’s lesbianism. It explores whether and how Chinesespecific
socio-familial and marital ideals pertaining to women’s genders and sexualities, such as performing
the roles of good wife and mother, constructing a perfect family, and fitting into the “mainstream,”
complicate the fans’ transcultural imaginations of Western butch lesbian, bisexual women, and adult lesbian
relationships. It argues that GE fans’ tendency to craft socio-culturally “desirable” and “respectable” lesbian
fantasies against a globalist, non-Chinese backdrop exemplifies a subjective queer normalizing discourse
whereby transcultural lesbian imaginaries are destabilized by real-world queer encounters at both local and
global scales.
10O
Queer knowledges (Chair, Jaya Keaney)
Sonia Wong
Kong
Pornography, flow of “queer knowledge”, and sexuality formation among young lesbians in Hong
Existing studies on lesbian spectatorship of pornography focused much on the consumption and reception of
queer pornography by lesbian audience, and its role in shaping their identity and sexual expression. In this
presentation, I would like to suggest, through my research with a group of young Hong Kong lesbians, that
we should also pay closer attention to the interactions between lesbian spectators and more mainstream
pornography, namely porn targeting a heterosexual male audience. By tracing the respondents’ initial
exposure and access to pornographic materials and lesbian-related information, and their subsequent
reading of them, I would like to investigate the relationship between flows of “queer knowledge”, sexuality
and identity formation, to explore the potentials and effects of heterosexual conditioning of homosexuality,
to shed light on the many possible ways of being lesbians in the Hong Kong context.
Grace Sharkey Queer Genres, Queer Promises: Representing authenticity on screen
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