Desiring China part 2

This is the first half of my notes on Desiring China...again, this will be boring.  These are just some points I liked from the book, but I have yet to go into any detail about how I felt about them.  So here are some glorious notes...please don't fall asleep.

Desiring China (first half)

 

Yearnings

-first melodrama to captivate Chinese audiences

-1991

-non-political

-realist portrayal of life

-taught the viewers to embody desires

            -gender class and positions

-it taught longing (?) (pg. 37)

            -repressed people allowed and deserve desire (?)

 

China

-“popular culture in China, as elsewhere, functions as a contradictory cultural site, where domination, opposition, and cultural creation coexist.” (pg. 40)

 

-“This relationship of culture to power is often mediated through such public culture phenomena as television.” (pg. 40)

 

-impossible to escape its (Yearnings) tenor in the lives of everyone

-show somehow became a social forece in people’s interpretations of it’s significance for their lives (pg. 41)

-personification of patriotism & nationness in Huifang’s character

            -giving up everything for the her family

            -aka a country giving things up for their nation

                        -war justifies in this context (?)

-Huifang represents China

-intellectual hero: Luo Gang

            -embodies hope

            -China needs its intellectuals (pg. 60)

            -represents masculinity

-Modleski says that American heroes are feminized and have an appreciated of domesticity

            -Luo Gang in not effeminate.

 

-“Yearnings demonstrates the capacity of allegory to generate a range of distinct meanings simultaneiously.” (pg. 61)

 

-the gay people in China are predominantly 30 or younger

            -older generations do not come out?

            -being gay is about sex, not part of culture? (pg. 87)

            -socialism a big factor

-cultural citizenship à ESSENSE OF BELONGING (pg. 94)

-homosexuality is not illegal, but considered immoral

            -police use “public morality” to close bars and to arrest people. (pg. 96)

-gay kindship and the need to carry on the patrilineal line

-Dennis Altman (pg. 90)

            -global gay identity (?)

            -what constitutes a universal gay identity?

            -“contests sexual rather than gender norms; replaces the idea of the male…” (???)