When Sissy Boys Become Mainstream: Narrating Asian Feminized Masculinities in the Global Age

Yıl 2009, Cilt: 2 Sayı: 2, 55 - 74, 30.05.2016

Hongg-Chi Shıau Chi-Chien Chen

Öz

Since the 1990s, the appropriation of unconventional dressing codes to perform a new masculinity has gradually been normalized as a mainstream practice in East Asian societies. This paper addresses contradictory currents concerning gender representations operating in East Asia, a fast-growing, rapidly changing region. The personal narratives of nine Taiwanese men, who use unconventional dressing codes to present desirable selves, are analyzed. The men were asked to reflect upon life moments when their dress codes were either pleasurably achieved or bitterly confronted by significant others and higher authorities. The study emphasizes that researchers should place a greater emphasis on how individuals’ lived experiences respond to the postmodern, highly intertextual media environment, rather than on content or textual analysis of media representations of the popular culture scene. Our research participants’ narratives illuminate a site where hegemonic and alternative masculinities contest one another in search of an ever-changing self. Through an examination of the life narratives of these nine men, our study elicits meta-narratives to illustrate how some local and global actors become established in the East Asian post-capitalist identity politics.

Anahtar Kelimeler

Narrative, Masculinity, Identity Politics, Men’s Fashion, Dressing codes

Kaynakça

• Aizura, A. (2006). Of borders and homes: the imaginary community of (trans)sexual citizenship. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 7: 2, 289-309.
• Aoki A. L.& Nakanishi. D.(2001). Asian Pacific Americans and the New Minority Politics. Political Science and Politics, 34:3, 605-610.
• Atkinson, P. & Silverman, D. (1997). Kundera’s Immortality: the Internview of the Society and Invention of Self, Qualitiative Inquiry, 3(3): 304-25.
• Barthes, R. (1975). Pleasure of the text. New York: Hill & Wang.
• Bordo, S. (1999). The male body: A new look at men in public and private. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
• Bourdieu, P. (2001). Masculine domination. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• Bowker, L. (1998). Masculinities and violence. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
• Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge.
• Butler, J. (1997) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge.
• Butler, J. (1999) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
• Ching, L. (2000) Globalizing the Regional, Regionalizing the Global: Mass Culture and Asianism in the Age of Late Capital. Public Culture 12.1: 233-57.
• Chua, B. (2004) Conceptualizing an East Asian Popular Culture.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. 5:2, 200-21.
• Connell, R. W (2000). The men and the boys. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
• Connell, R. W (2002). Gender. Oxford, UK: Polity.
• Connell, R. W. (2005). Globalization, imperialism, and masculinities. In Handbook of studies on men & masculinities. Thousand Oaks, CA and London: Sage.
• Consalvo, M. (2003). The Monsters Next Door: Media Constructions of Boys and Masculinity, Feminist Media Studies, 3:1, 27 – 45.
• Craig, S. (1992). (Ed.) Men, Masculinity and the Media. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
• Darling-Wolf, F. (2003). Male Bonding and Female Pleasure: Refining Masculinity in Japanese Popular Cultural Texts, Popular Communication 1(2): 73-88.
• Darling-Wolf, F. (2004). Virtually Multicultural: Trans-Asian Identity and Gender in an International Fan Community of a Japanese Star, New Media & Society, 6: 507 - 528.
• Dyer, G. (1982). Advertising as Communication. New York: Methuen.
• Evans, T.& Wallace P. (2008) A Prison within a Prison? The Masculinity Narratives of Male Prisoners, Men and Masculinities, 10: 4, 484-507.
• Felluga, D. (2006). “Modules on Butler: On Performativity.” Introductory Guide to Critical http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/theory/genderandsex/modules/butle rgendersex.html Article retrieved on May
• Franklin, C. (1984). The Changing Definition of Masculinity. New York: Plenum Fontana A. & Frey, J. (2000). The interview: from Structural Questions to Negotiated Texts” in Densin, N. and Lincoln, Y. (eds), Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks, CA. Cage)
• Fontana A.& Frey, J (2001), Postmodern Trends in interviewing, in Gubrium J. and Holstein, J. and Lincoln Y. (eds), Handbook of Interview Research: Context and Method (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage).
• Foucault, M. (1980) Power and Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings New York: Pantheon Press.
• Funabashi, K. (1995). Pornographic culture and sexual violence. In K. Fujimura-Fanselow & A. Kameda (Eds.), Japanese women: New feminist perspectives on the past, present and future (pp. 75–90). New York: Feminist Press.
• Garde, J. (2003). Masculinity and madness. Counselling and Psychotherapy Research 3 (1): 6-16.
• Gubrium, J. & Holstein, J. (2001) Handbook of Interview Research: Context and Method (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage).
• Hall, S. (1980). Encoding/decoding. In S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe,&P.Willis (Eds.), Culture, Media, and Language: Working papers in cultural studies, 1972–79 (pp. 128–138). London: Hutchinson.
• Hanke, R. (1990). Hegemonic masculinity in thirtysomething. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 7, 231–248.
• Holloway, W., & Jefferson T.. (2000). Doing Qualitative Research Differently. London: Sage.
• IIDA Y. (2005). Beyond the 'feminization of masculinity': transforming patriarchy with the 'feminine' in contemporary Japanese youth culture. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 6:1, 56-74.
• Ito, K. (1995). Sexism in Japanese weekly comic magazines for men. In J. A. Lent (Ed.), Asian popular culture 127–137. Boulder, CO: Westview.
• Kameda, A. (1994). (Eds.), Japanese women: New feminist perspectives on the past, present and future (pp. 255–263). New York: Feminist Press.
• Kervin, D. (1990) Advertising Masculinity: The Representation of Males in Esquire Advertisements. Journal of Communication Inquiry; 14: 51.
• Kimmel, M. (1987). (ed.) Changing Men. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
• Kivel, B. D. & Kleiber, D. A. (2007), 'Leisure in the Identity Formation of Lesbian/Gay Youth: Personal, but Not Social', Leisure Sciences, 22:4, 215 – 232.
• Li, J. (2008). "Negotiating Masculinity and Male Gender Roles in Korean TV Drama" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, Marriott Downtown, Chicago, IL Online, 2008-10-22 from "http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p271953_index.html".
• Martin F. (2003) Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
• Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen, 16:3, 6-18.
• Nixon, S. (1992). Have you got the look? Masculinities and the shopping spectacle, In: Shields, Rob, (ed), Lifestyle Shopping: The Subject of Consumption (Routledge, London), pp 149–169.
• Patton, M., Q. (1990). Qualitative evaluation and research methods (2nd ed.). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
• Patterson M.& Elliott R. (2002) Negotiating Masculinities: Advertising and the Inversion of the Male Gaze. Consumption, Markets and Culture, 5:3, 231-249.
• Pollack, W. (1995). Deconstructing dis-identification: Rethinking psychoanalytic concepts of male development. Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy 12 (1): 30-45.
• Potts, A. (2002). The Man with Two Brains: hegemonic masculine subjectivity and the discursive construction of the unreasonable penis-self. Journal of Gender Studies, 10:2, 156.
• Rosenberger, N. (1996). Fragile resistance, signs of status: Women between state and media in Japan. In A. E. Imamura (Ed.), Re-imaging Japanese women (pp. 12–45). Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Saco, D. (1992). Masculinity as signs. In S. Craig (Ed.), Men, masculinity, and the media (pp. 23–39). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
• Sandelowski, M. (1995). Sample size in qualitative research. Research in Nursing and Health 18:179-83.
• Shiau, H. (2008a) Performativity, Intertextuality and Social Change: An Ethnographic Analysis of Taiwanese Gay Personal Ads” Gender Forum: An Electronic Journal of Women Studies: Gender and Language, (20).
• Shiau, H. (2008b) Migration and Identity Negotiation: Exploring East Asian Gay
• Men’s Fantasy upon James Dean” Americanist –Warsaw Journal for the Studies of United States, 24: 85-100 (2007/2008).
• Strate, L. (1992). Beer commercials: A manual on masculinity. In S. Craig (Ed.), Men, masculinity, and the media (pp. 78–92). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
• Suzuki, M. F. (1995). Women and television: Portrayal of women in the mass media. In K. Fujimura-Fanselow & A. Kameda (Eds.), Japanese women: New feminist perspectives on the past, present and future, p75–90, New York: Feminist Press.
• Tanaka, Y. (1995). Contemporary portraits of Japanese women. Westport, CT: Praeger.
• Toomey, M. 2001. How gender affects our relationship to anger and violence. Article accessible at http://www.mtoomey.com/book_gender.html (accessed November 2008).
• Turner, B. S. (1996). The discourse of diet. In M. Featherstone, M. Hepworth, & B. S. Turner (Eds.) The Body: Social process and cultural theory, 157 – 165, London: Sage.
• Van Manen, M. (1990). Researching lived experience: Human science f or an action sensitive pedagogy . The State University of New York by The University of Western Ontario, London , Ontario, Canada.