The Production and Consumption of Inter-Asian Love Dramas in Taiwan

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This talk uses inter-Asian television  love dramas to illustrate the issues pertinent to the discussions on the concept of “East Asian pop culture” as a sphere of production, circulation, and consumption. In particular, this talk uses Taiwan as a case study to unpack the tensions between the local and the regional, with women caught in this process as consumers, workers, and citizens. If production for regional audiences aim to transcend the local,  what are the strategies the TV industries use to reach regional audiences? what are the textual politics that are negotiated in order to reach regional female audiences? What are the tensions between the regional and the local?  Practices of consumption are always embedded in local dynamics, what are the local politics that enable Taiwanese women to interpret these inter-Asian TV love dramas? What functions do these interpretations perform in the larger social and political domains in Taiwan? This talk will explore these questions.

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Author Bio

Fang-chih Irene Yang is a professor at National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan and currently a visitor scholar at the Institute of East Asian Studies at UC Berkeley. Prof. Yang's publications are situated at the emgerging field of East Asian pop culture, including pop music, TV dramas, and women's magazines. As a feminist cultural critic based in Taiwan, her works respond to the timely political issues through ephemeral popular cultural phenomena while giving them a historical dimension. Prof. Yang approaches all her research topics from the intersecting perspective of gender, class, ethnic, and national(list) politics and tries to make sense of the politics of popular culture within the tensions and contradictions generated through the forces of localization, regionalization, and globalization in contemporary East Asia.