From ‘Kill This Love’ to ‘Cue Ji’s Love’: The Convergence of Queer, Feminist and Global TV Cultures in China

Abstract

ABSTRACT This research looks at women-centred Chinese competition-style programmes that are adapted from foreign TV formats and synthesise transnational televisual elements, idol cultures and gendered aesthetics. With particular attention to imaginaries of women with nonnormative gender and sexual identities, I expound how and why representations of female gender and sexuality on Chinese TV are fashioned by the intersected discourses on China’s TV and cultural globalisations and digitisation, the party-state’s manipulations and regulations of feminism, androgyny and homoeroticism, and the entertainment industry’s capitalisation of queer women’s stardom and fandom. My analysis reveals that the emergence, survival and endurance of queer women on Chinese TV has coincided with China’s appropriations of both global formats and twenty-first-century idol girl group cultures. Through examining some key moments in popular idol group-cultivating shows produced in 2020 and 2021, I capture a multilevel, ambivalent queer convergence that transforms these televisual stages into queer-charging venues through which queer imaginaries of womanhood have actively incorporated local situations and transcultural televisual, gender and sexual knowledge to bypass, compromise with – and even partly connive with – the government’s ideological and moral controls.