A Bakhtinian Analysis of Language and Multiculturalism in Iwai Shunyi’s Swallowtail Butterfly

Scholarship on representations of East Asian women has honed on the ubiquity of a ‘geisha’ stereotype in Asian-themed Hollywood films: women who willingly acquiesce to the prerogatives of Western men and, in so doing, symbolically affirm the subordination of East Asian political autonomy to a paternalistic United States. Within this context, the…[Read more]

When I proposed this paper, the idea was to examine a number of global iterations of Sherlock fandom from a transfandom perspective. However, as doing this in fact involvesgoing ‘deep’ in at least two popular cultural contexts in order to effectively pull out examples of how I believe transfandom works more generally in a transnational set…[Read more]

In December 2012, Benedict Cumberbatch arrived in Japan for the first of two “Star Trek Into Darkness” junkets and was greeted at the airport by 500 Japanese fans of his work in the BBC drama “Sherlock” (2010-), the first two seasons of which had aired on subscription satellite channels to niche acclaim. This unanticipated turnout did not go…[Read more]

Michael Newman and Elana Levine observe that “much of what we identify as Quality, complex, and sophisticated in American television since at least the 1980s achieves that status in part through its ability to mark itself off from soap opera” (2012, 99), particularly through the rejection or containment of signifiers of soap opera’s feminine orien…[Read more]

This dissertation offers a historical materialist perspective on the Japanese female fandom of Hong Kong stars that arose in the mid‐1980s and peaked in the late 1990s. This fandom was unique among non‐diasporic, transnational audiences of Hong Kong cinema for its female composition and its star‐centeredness, which together constitute an alter…[Read more]

In this discussion, we advocate for a broad(er) model of transcultural fandom studies that, in shifting focus to the affective affinities that spark fan interest in transcultural fan objects, is intended as a corrective to nation-centred analyses of border-crossing fandoms. It is our contention that the binary approach to transnational fandom…[Read more]

This essay examines the ways in which affective desire and new media technologies were mobilized by Japanese female fans of Hong Kong films and stars to produce a fan subjectivity that was at once cult and transcultural. The origins of this fandom, which flourished from around 1985 through the 1990s, lay in structural affinities of the Japanese…[Read more]