Officially Sanctioned Adaptation and Affective Fan Resistance: The Transmedia Convergence of the Online Drama Guardian in China
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2421-454X/9156Keywords:
Adaptation, Media Censorship, Chinese TV drama, Boys’ Love Fandom, Fan FictionsAbstract
This article examines how the adaptation process and fan engagement are constituted in the Mainland China media landscape by focusing on the phenomenally popular online drama Guardian (镇魂2018). Through an in-depth analysis of this series, the article explores the contestation and negotiation between the “top-down expurgation” from the drama’s production team during its adaptation process and the “bottom-up subversion” from the fans of this series during its reception and consumption. If the intentional expurgation signifies a strategy of survival confronting the restrictions imposed by censors, then the fans’ creative activities work as a kind of resistance to the (post)socialist ideology in China, where homosexuality has been considered a violation of traditional Confucian values, where supernatural narratives have been viewed as backward superstitions, and socially wronged lower-class members are seen as a threat to social stability. The adaptation of Guardian from novel to drama and its reception becomes a battlefield of strategic compliance and resistance, where economic demand and political power, modern liberal attitudes toward gender, sexuality, and equality and traditional values concerning harmony, conformity, and authority contest and negotiate.
References
Adamczyk, Amy and Yen-hsin Alice Cheng (2015). “Explaining Attitudes about Homosexuality in Confucian and non-Confucian Nations: Is There a ‘Cultural’ Influence?” Social Science Research 51: 276-89. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2014.10.002.
Aoyama, Tomoko (1988). “Male Homosexuality as Treated by Japanese Women Writers.” In The Japanese Trajectory: Modernization and Beyond, edited by Gavan McCormack and Yoshio Sugimoto, 186-204. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brooks, Peter (1995). The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Chiang, Feichi (2016). “Counterpublic but Obedient: a Case of Taiwan’s BL Fandom.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 17(2): 223-38. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2016.1170311.
Driscoll, Catherine (2006). “One True Pairing: The Romance of Pornography and the Pornography of Romance.” In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 79-96. Jefferson: McFarland.
Duara, Prasenjit (1991). “Knowledge and Power in the Discourse of Modernity: The Campaign against Popular Religion in Early Twentieth-Century China.” Journal of Asian Studies 50(1): 67-83. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2057476.
Feng, Jin (2009). “‘Addicted to Beauty’: Consuming and Producing Web-based Chinese ‘Danmei’ Fiction at Jinjiang.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21(2): 1-41 https://www.jstor.org/stable/41491008.
Gray, Jonathan, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, eds. (2007). Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World. New York and London: New York University Press.
Gwenllian-Jones, Sarah (2002). “The Sex Lives of Cult Television Characters.” Screen 43(1): 79-90. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/43.1.79.
Herman, David (2002). Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Hinsch, Bret (1992). Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hogan, Patrick Colm (2011). Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Hutcheon, Linda (with Siobhan O’Flynn) (2013). A Theory of Adaptation. Second Edition. London and New York: Routledge.
Jacobs, Katrien (2015). The Afterglow of Women’s Pornography in Post-Digital China. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Jenkins, Henry (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York and London: New York University Press.
Kapurch, Katie (2012). “‘Unconditionally and Irrevocably’: Theorizing the Melodramatic Impulse in Young Adult Literature through the Twilight Saga and Jane Eyre.” Children's Literature Association Quarterly 37(2): 164-87. https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.2012.0014.
Kuriyama, Shigehisa (1993). “Concepts of Disease in East Asia.” In The Cambridge World History of Human Disease, edited by Kenneth F. Kiple, 52-9. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lee, Haiyan (2007). Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Leitch, Thomas M (2003). “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory.” Criticism 45(2):149-71. https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.2004.0001.
Martin, Fran (2012). “Girls Who Love Boys’ Love: Japanese Homoerotic Manga as Trans-national Taiwan Culture.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 13(3): 365-83. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2012.689707.
McLelland, Mark J (2000). “The Love Between ‘Beautiful Boys’ in Japanese Women’s Comics.” Journal of Gender Studies 9(1): 13-25. https://doi.org/10.1080/095892300102425.
Nagaike, Kazumi (2003). “Perverse Sexualities, Perversive Desires: Representations of Female Fantasies and ‘Yaoi Manga’ as Pornography Directed at Women.” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal 25: 76-103. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42771904.
Ng, Lynda (2015). “China’s Elusive Truths: Censorship, Value and Literature in the Internet Age.” In Censorship and the Limits of the Literary: a Global View, edited by Nicole Moore, 233-46. New York and London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Pagliassotti, Dru (2009). “GloBLisation and Hybridisation: Publishers’ Strategies for Bringing Boys’ Love to the United States.” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 20. http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue20/pagliassotti.htm.
Pang, Laikwan (2011). “The State against Ghosts: A Genealogy of China’s Film Censorship Policy.” Screen 52(4): 461-76. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjr039.
Penley, Constance (1991). “Brownian Motion: Women, Tactics, and Technology.” In Technoculture, edited by Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, 135-61. Minnesota and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Russ, Joanna (1985). “Pornography by Women, for Women, with Love.” In Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts: Feminist Essays, 79-99. New York: The Crossing Press.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1992). Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press.
Song, Geng (2004). The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Thomas, Bronwen (2011). “What Is Fanfiction and Why Are People Saying Such Nice Things about It?” Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 3:1-24. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/storyworlds.3.2011.0001.
Wood, Andrea (2006). “‘Straight’ Women, Queer Texts: Boy-Love Manga and the Rise of a Global Counterpublic.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 34(1/2): 394-414. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40004766.
——— (2013). “Boys’ Love Anime and Queer Desires in Convergence Culture: Transnational Fandom, Censorship and Resistance.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 4(1): 44-63. https://doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2013.784201.
Wu, Cuncun (2004). Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China. London and New York: Routledge.
Xiao, Zhiwei (2013). “Prohibition, Politics, and Nation-Building: A History of Film Censorship in China.” In Silencing Cinema: Film Censorship around the World, edited by Daniel Biltereyst and Roel VandeWinkel, 109-30. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Xu, Yanrui and Ling Yang (2013). “Forbidden Love: Incest, Generational Conflict, and the Erotics of Power in Chinese BL Fiction.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 4(1): 30-43. https://doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2013.771378.
Yang, Ling and Yanrui Xu (2017a). “Chinese Danmei Fandom and Cultural Globalization from Below.” In Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, edited by Maud Lavin, Yang Ling, and Zhao Jing Jamie, 3-19. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
——— (2017b). “‘The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name’ The Fate of Chinese Danmei Communities in the 2014 Anti-porn Campaign.” In The End of Cool Japan: Ethical, Legal, and Cultural Challenges to Japanese Popular Culture, edited by Mark McLelland, 163-83. London and New York: Routledge.
Yang, Peidong and Lijun Tang (2018). “‘Positive Energy’: Hegemonic Intervention and Online Media Discourse in China’s Xi Jinping Era.” China: An International Journal, 16(1):1-22. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/688045.
Zhang, Charlie Yi (2017). “When Feminist Falls in Love with Queer: Dan Mei Culture as a Transnational Apparatus of Love.” Feminist Formations 29(2):121-46. https://doi.org/10.1353/ff.2017.0019.
Zeitlin, Judith T (2007). The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
Ziv, Amalia (2015). Explicit Utopias: Rewriting the Sexual in Women’s Pornography. New York: State University of New York Press.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2019 Cathy Yue Wang
Copyrights and publishing rights of all the texts on this journal belong to the respective authors without restrictions.
This journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (full legal code).
See also our Open Access Policy.
