Live Fast Die Young, Bad Gurls Do It Well: Transgender issues, modernity and media in the Asia-Pacific

Jamez Ahmad (seiling)

CTCS 517

April 13, 2014

Paper Proposal (Live Fast Die Young, Bad Gurls Do It Well:  Transgender issues, modernity and media in the Asia-Pacific)

The Special issue that I will be working with is Gender, Modernity and Media in the Asia-Pacific. I know that based on the articles that were available I was more concerned with the content that focused on materials emanating from East Asia. There were four articles that focused on this region and they offered a wide range of topics on gender. The areas included Fighting Women in Contemporary Asian Cinema, The State of Fantasy in Emergency (phantasmagoric other in South Korean cinema), Cuteness as a Subtle Strategy (urban youth in online culture in contemporary china),  and Taiwanese variety television and the mediation of women’s affective labor (A Tangle of People Messing Around Together). While I am clearly good at listing I actually would like to focus on these issues of gender in relation to Transgender representations in media from the Asia-Pacific.

The introduction defines three areas that appeared to exist throughout all of the articles in the special edition. “The first is the role of popular media in negotiating the ongoing and changing internal tensions of modernity, not only for the nation-states that regulate, frame, import, export and often fund discrete media industries, sometimes as part of a project of ‘policing… cultural distinctiveness’, but above all for the everyday lives of people as cultural participants” (Driscoll and Morris 165). I am curious as to whether notions of modernity and cultural distinctiveness actively include transgender individuals in the participation of national culture or whether these activities exclude indigenous transgender individuals and communities. “The second theme is the importance of gender to the way media manifest this negotiation of tensions – the continuing significance, in particular, of images of women and girls to representing ‘’modernity now’ as an experience of transient historical location and relative cultural identification” (166). The role of gender in media representations is often contentious in one way or the other and I am intrigued by how these tensions might play out for a transgender person particularly in regions with the establishment of three gender categories (such as Thailand) as well as in locales where modernity (often read westernization) has come to hinder trans-inclusive performances and representations. Finally, “ the third theme is the staging of gender (and particularly female gender) as a problematic site in which everyday norms and customs lived or inherited as national and often seen as traditional negotiate with the industrial forms of transnational media culture popular across the region” (166). I find it crucial to examine not only why gender is often considered a problematic site in the region but also how transgender portrayals (including drag performances) have been destabilized by national constructions of tradition that seek to maintain a cultural identity in the face of modernity, often through the flow of media (also known as western cultural imperialism).

While it is fun to bring up westernization and western cultural imperialism I will probably stay away from this during my examination of these issues at hand. I want to use the Iron Pussy films and some other transgender focused materials to look at how violence, fantasy, and otherness work within and around these three areas as they become destabilized by the appearance of Transgender individuals, transgender audiences, and the participation in gender bending activities.