A dialectical-relational approach to anti-trans sentiments on Hupu (original) (raw)
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A wen-wu approach to male teenage Chinese sports fans' heteronormative interpretation of masculinity
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This article analyses how performatively heteronormative, male teenage Chinese fans consume sports games through the prism of masculinity, using secondary school students' engagement with the NBA (National Basketball Association) as a case study. Drawing on focus groups of 23 participants, we discover that male teenage sports fans constantly evoke elite NBA athletes as male ideals to define a desirable, heteronormative wen-wu masculinity specific to the post-reform era. In this process, they often engage in a double-standard practice, manifesting as their appropriation of the CP (coupling) rhetoric to "ship" athletes and their problematisation of heterosexual women and LGBTQ fans' similar usage of it. This double-standard practice constitutes an attempt to monopolise the interpretation of masculinity both within and outside of the sporting context. It sheds light on the heteronormative male cohort's rejection of alternative masculinities, underscoring how aspects of gender politics unfolding in wider society are reflected in China's teenage sports fandom.
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China’s 2009 new regulations on sex-change operations were passed with the stated intention of protecting patients. These regulations offer the only path to legal gender change on ID documents, becoming a necessary condition to be fulfilled before participating in legal, public, and heteronormative institutions such as marriage, family, and adoption. Looking at the relationship between Chinese media discourse on transgender before and after the formation and promulgation of the 2009 sex-change regulations suggests the construction of a legal, heteronormative transgender man, often at the cost of constituting other expressions of transgender as sexually deviant and morally corrupting forces that threaten Chinese society. From transgender celebrities in the media to online public “accusations” of lesbianism, I examine both state and social media discourse on transgender, revealing a complex and dynamic relationship between law, filial piety, and gender in contemporary China.
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The focus of this thesis is twofold: 1) the construction of Japanese female athletes in ‘masculine’ sports by Japanese media in terms of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and nation; and 2) Japanese female and ‘trans’ athletes’ negotiation with Japanese gender and sexuality norms in the formation of their gendered subjectivities. A theoretical framework informed by feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories is used to analyze the discursive constructions and constitution of subjectivities of Japanese female and ‘trans’ athletes in the ‘masculine’ sports of soccer and wrestling. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) was employed to analyze Japanese mainstream newspaper and magazines published between 2001 and 2012 and in-depth interviews with twelve Japanese female and ‘trans’ athletes in wrestling and soccer. The result of the media analysis illustrates that Japanese mainstream media used multiple normative and normalizing discursive tactics to construct Japanese female athletes within patriarchal, sexist, and heterosexist gender and sexual norms. These discourses were also mobilized in the reporting of international competitions in which the success of Japanese female athletes was appropriated to construct Japanese national identity in order to recuperate Japanese masculinity. The analysis of interviews with female and ‘trans’ athletes illustrates their intricate processes of negotiation with male domination of their sport, Japanese gender and sexual norms, the conflicting demands of athletic careers, and the medicalized discourse of ‘Gender Identity Disorder (GID)’. The discursive fissures opened up by these conflicting and oppressive discourses, however, provided a ‘third’ gender space in which ‘female sporting masculinity’ is recognized as the ‘norm’ and not as ‘queerness’. Although this ‘third’ space may be temporary, it provided female and ‘trans’ athletes a space to negotiate heterosexist and cisgenderist Japanese sporting spaces and the society at large.