Starring Asian Femininities: Evolutions of Femaleness on Asian Screens
Editors: Lisa Gotto, Kirsty Fairclough & Ian Dixon
Series Editors: Sean Redmond & Jian Xu
What is it that Asian female stars offer the silver screen and the worshippers who dedicate themselves to the confluence of gender and sexual identity of such stars? What media conditions underlie the production of Asian images of femininity? To what extent do female stars in Asia transcend Western notions of fame, popularity, and celebrity? What positions do they take on issues such as selfhood and identity? How do they mediate unique combinations of conflicting ideologies? Often incorrectly perceived as supporting dominant thought, normative body images and the patriarchal order, this book shows how women stars in Asia are developing voices of their own and challenging such strictures. This is especially poignant because Asian stars often face societal repressions uncommon in the West. While the subject of Asian stardom has been broached convincingly in the last decade, the femaleness of such stars is often subsumed within greater debates on the validity of national cinemas and emerging technologies. Leung and Willis’s East Asian Film Stars (2014) asks whether star power is losing its edge in the West where, as Mike Goodridge (2010) surmises, high-concept cinema is overtaking its high-powered stars. By contrast, Leung and Willis argue that Asian stars are still on the rise over the digital vehicles supporting them – especially in East Asia. While Leung and Willis feature some significant female stars including Maggie Cheung, Zhang Ziyi and Joan Chen, their focus is less on gender issues than race, culture, nationality and industrial relations. Similarly, Dorothy Wai Sim Lau’s study Chinese Stardom in Participatory Cyberculture (2018) concentrates on new media and Internet developments that have broken ground for Asian Stars, rather than on the stars themselves. Cosmopolitan Cinema: Cross-cultural Encounters in East Asian Film (2018) by Felicia Chan critiques the ethics of engendering a star’s sense of belonging and the ‘cosmopolitan allure’ of foreigners as a ‘psychic revolt’ against Asian hegemonic ‘parent culture’. Chan’s worthy argument questions the validity of national cinema boundaries concentrating on East Asian film from Hong Kong, China, Malaysia and Singapore, throwing doubt on national cinema delineations and definitive cultural boundaries. Further, apart from Paula Yoo’s Shining Star: The Anna May Wong Story (2009) and Irene González-López and Michael Smith’s study of Tanaka Kinuyo (2018), biographies of Asian stars tend to focus on male celebrities such as Tony Leung, Jackie Chan and (new) Orientalist narratives such as those espoused by Simu Liu. With the exception of Female Celebrities in Contemporary Chinese Society by Shenshen Cai, the above publications highlight industrial practices for both (traditional) genders. By contrast, our dedication to exclusively female pan-Asian stars remains unique. Contributors might also like to consider stars who may not be exclusively cisgender women but who identify as female on screen. The focus of Starring Asian Femininities also covers stars from feature films under the influence of social and new media – rather than the other way around. For this co-edited volume in the series Asian Celebrity and Fandom Studies we feature all female Asian celebrities with book editors Lisa Gotto, Kirsty Fairclough and Ian Dixon. All currently engaged editors have a history of collegiality and collaboration in film and celebrity studies including the soon to be released I’m Not a Film Star: David Bowie as Actor (2022) co-edited by Dixon. Fairclough recently published her co-edited books The Legacy of Mad Men: Cultural History, Intermediality and American Television (2019) as well as Prince and Popular Music (2020). Gotto’s far reaching scholarship includes the publication of a plethora of books such as Passing and Posing in Black and White: Calibrating the Color Line in U.S. Cinema (2021) and Big Screens, Small Forms: Visual Varieties in Digital Media Culture (2022).
Potential Subject Matter
- Gender representation
- Classic Stars
- Screen Elegance vs Tomboy-ism
- Comediennes
- Stars of Third Cinema
- Asian and Subcontinental Stars
- Crossover stardom
- Orientalism in contemporary iteration
- Oriental mistresses
- Trauma and Star Image
- Asia as feminised spectacle
- Ideology and Stardom
- East-West transference
- Celebrity Scandal
- Star Auteurism
- Female evolutions on screen
- Ideology and the star vehicle
- Stars and politics
We look forward to your contribution. Please send 300-word abstracts by October 30th 2022 to (ian.dixon /at/ ntu.edu.sg)