Some of Us Are Looking at the Stars: Japanese Women, Hong Kong Cinema, and Transcultural Fandom

Abstract

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 alternative lens through which to comprehend the meanings and implications of transcultural media fandom. Employing contemporaneous fan-produced writing, film criticism, journalism, and promotional literature for films, media technologies, and transnational travel to Hong Kong in the reconstruction of its discursive surround, the dissertation interrogates the dialectical relationship between fan practices and subjectivities. Through examination of the media discourses that produced this fandom in the Japanese popular imagination, the material means by which fans pursued their interest in Hong Kong stars, and the intersection of fan affect and transnationally-situated experience, the dissertation makes the case for a pragmatics of transcultural fandom that accounts for not only its transnational socio-political context, but also the gender and popular/fan cultural contexts through which it was experienced and understood.