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Abstract

Super Voice Girl (SVG) was an Idol-style Chinese reality show that allowed only female contestants. The show became famous worldwide for featuring gender-nonconforming contestants. This article examines the rise and fall of the most popular online Chinese queer fandom of the 2006 SVG in the forum feise chaonv (FSCN). I focus on the fans' ambivalent play with Chinese-specific female homoerotic imaginaries that initially popularized and protected but eventually led to the decay of FSCN as a queer fantasy space. First, I look at the subtle ways in which the 2006 SVG tactically normalized the female homoerotic imaginaries surrounding its tomboyish national finalists. Then, I examine FSCN fans' struggles with both this female homoeroticism and the stigmatization of real-world lesbianism. I demonstrate that the fictional imagination of female homoeroticism sustained FSCN as a popular queer fantasy space after the show ended. Additionally, I detail the fans' self-contradictory reactions to several real-life lesbian incidents involving the finalists that gradually came to light in the post-show years. I argue that the fans' confinement of female homoeroticism to a youthful, memorable fantasy scenario that was substantially shaped by both Chinese mainstream and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender cultures eventually contributed to the abrupt end of FSCN's queer-themed practices.

The 2010s have seen an explosion in popularity of Chinese television featuring same-sex intimacies, LGBTQ-identified celebrities, and explicitly homoerotic storylines even as state regulations on 'vulgar' and 'immoral' content grow more prominent. This emerging 'queer TV China' culture has generated diverse, cyber, and transcultural queer fan communities. Yet these seemingly progressive televisual productions and practices are caught between multilayered sociocultural and political-economic forces and interests. Taking 'queer' as a verb, an adjective, and a noun, this volume counters the Western-centric conception of homosexuality as the only way to understand nonnormative identities and same-sex desire in the Chinese and Sinophone worlds.

In this viewpoint essay, using 'queer/ing China' as a heuristic, we explore 'queerness' and 'Chineseness' through an intersectional approach that is attuned to the encounters, syntheses and dissonances of local, transnational and global queer and feminist studies, knowledge and movements. We thus propose 'queer/ing China' as an innovative, productive conceptual framework to critically examine contemporary gender and sexual cultures, subjectivities and politics within and beyond the normative imaginaries of China and Chineseness.