Lesbianism in China: Gender Images and Self-Identification as Reflected in Online Pop Culture

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Wenxuan Peng, Lesbianism in China: Gender Images and Self-Identification as Reflected in Online Pop Culture
Supervisors: Eliza Steinbock and Maghiel van Crevel (Leiden University)

This proposed research will focus on digital culture and pop cultural representations regarding lesbianism within and without the ‘la quan’ (Chinese slang for “lesbian circle”) and the lala (abbreviation of the transliteration of ‘lesbian’ in Chinese) community, with special focus on the language and ideological negotiations emerging from the lala culture. My research will investigate how various types of pop cultural productions, such as films, videos, memes, novels, etc. make available and rework social gender images for the lesbians in China. I will track how gender and sexual ideologies are negotiated through the borrowing and remixing of heterosexual terms, gender roles and economic arrangements, and further, consider the broader influence of these cultural formations on the self-identification of the lala in China. Accordingly, I will analyse lesbian-related case studies of incidents, which are either sensational, or considered indicators of trends, as well as the users themselves and the texts, including speech and works of cultural production they create on the most influential websites and smart phone applications. During my study, I will be alert to current relevant activities on social media platforms that are popular in China such as Weibo, Baidu Tieba, WeChat Moments, Qzone, etc., as well as video sharing and livestreaming websites, for example Bilibili, Tik Tok (Douyin), Kuaishou. Cultural contents created on Chinese lesbian dating applications, such as Rela and Lesdo, especially the video / livestreaming sections, will also be studied.

The illustrated cityscape: imperfect lines of urban exploration

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The illustrated cityscape: imperfect lines of urban exploration

Tânia A. Cardoso

Supervisors: Pr. Dr. Emilie Sitzia & Dr. Carolyn Birdsall

Cities have been a vital component of visual storytelling and reportage since illustration became a product for the masses disclosing modern urban life and its practices. Illustration as an exercise of critical, creative and artistic freedom allows for an intensive engagement between its creators and the city and simultaneously explores the potential to create discursive space revealing the city as a complex entity to its inhabitants/audience while enabling alternative and multiple perspectives. Combining theory and praxis this research intends to demonstrate how the phenomenon of “illustrated cities” can be found at the intersection between urban experience, place and illustration.

Fathers of the Nation: White Masculinities and Fatherhood in Contemporary U.S.-American Television Series (2001-2015)

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Sandra Becker, University of Groningen

Fathers of the Nation: White Masculinities and Fatherhood in Contemporary U.S.-American Television Series (2001-2015)

Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Michael Stewart Foley (Université Grenoble Alpes), Dr. Dan Hassler-Forest (Utrecht University), and Dr. Tim Jelfs (University of Groningen)

2015-2019

From Founding Fathers to Homeland Security and Daddy Trump – U.S. political discourses have a long tradition of relying on the rhetoric of family and family values. Early-2000s’ Quality TV drama series – the ‘pre-eminent narrative medium of our time’ (Dean J. DeFino) – have likewise been dominated by portrayals of families and their white patriarchs, whether they be serial killers (Dexter), meth-cooking teachers (Breaking Bad), firefighters (Rescue Me), zombie apocalypse survivors (The Walking Dead), Sixties sexuality researchers (Masters of Sex), or callboys (Hung).

Drawing upon Raymond Williams’ concept of the ‘structure of feeling,’ I argue in my dissertation project that these series operate and reflect on a similar affectively experienced cultural zeitgeist in the United States – which is at once characteristic of this troubled period marked by the gendered twin crises of 9/11 and the Great Recession, but also forms part of a continuing, cyclic nostalgic desire in times of change and uncertainty.

I hence read my corpus of series often labeled as ‘Quality TV’ or ‘Complex TV’ and the portrayal of their male lead protagonists against the backdrop of earlier moments of rupture and settlements in the history of the United States (and the Western world) and their manifestations in media discourses and cultural representations. This British Cultural Studies-based approach to history allows for reflecting upon and dismantling the well-established crisis discourses that surround both the medium television in the digital age and white masculinity in the twentieth and early twenty-first century.

Human Taxonomies: Knowing, Counting and Ordering the Spanish Americas (1790-1804)

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Carlos E. Flores Terán, Human Taxonomies: Knowing, Counting and Ordering the Spanish Americas (1790-1804) | Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Hubertus Büschel and Dr. Xavier Guillaume

Recent scholarship suggests that the production of population knowledge throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century can be read as a vehicle of (re)producing colonial/metropolitan orders. In such corpus, modalities of difference, such as race, are posited as technologies of governing and heuristic instrument in the colonies as well as in the metropolis This research aims at contributing to this scholarship by exploring the population categories used in the first population surveys in the Spanish Americas throughout the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth centuries. By way of researching an often overlooked space, this project is set to make two distinct contributions: 1) Presenting the emergence of a complex conflation between physical markers of difference and socio-political position, gender, and desired religious lineages before the emergence of race 2) Illustrating the distinct epistemological strategies, practices, and discourse employed by colonial administrators and cleric scientists in the effort of scientifically calculating and distinguishing between individuals in the the Spanish Americas.

This research will examine population categories used in the population surveys of the two largest  viceroyalties in the Spanish America: the New Spain and Peru. Such surveys begun 1790 in the New Spain, and in 1795 in Peru, and concluded in 1803 and 1803 respectively. In order to investigate the practices of counting, classifying, and distinguishing human bodies, this research draws from late-eighteenth century human taxonomies, categories in vital records, and visual representations of the “natural” body. From these sources, my intention is to highlight how the form in which European and American scientists, as well as colonial administrators, drew from an array of localized categorizations, known as castas, lineages and social structures in order to articulate and fix rational-scientific markers of difference. If once the grammars of difference was grounded in the demarcation between colonizers and colonized subjects, these surveys posited an unprecedented form of reading and organizing difference based in the marks of what is both observable–skin color socio-political position–and concealed–lineages and gender.

The Politics of Depression. A critical analysis of the political-epistemological limits of major depressive disorder

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Joe van der Eerden | University of Amsterdam | The Politics of Depression. A critical analysis of the political-epistemological limits of major depressive disorder  | Supervisors: Patricia Pisters, Julian Kiverstein | 2017-2021

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, approximately 6.7% of adults in the United States suffered from a major depressive episode in 2014. The goal of this research will be to argue that this prevalence of depression should be understood as a function of the operation of contemporary knowledge about depression, and of the normative forces that underlie, and arise from, this knowledge. This statement will be supported by critical analyses of professional scientific texts relating to depression, as well as the diagnostic tools that are used in psychiatric practice. Although what we know about depression appears to move towards a definitive, objective body of knowledge, its conceptual limits are inscribed in the normative, highly volatile domain of cultural dynamics. This is why the analyses central to this research shall be indebted to theoreticians who acknowledge this feature of knowledge, such as Nikolas Rose, Michel Foucault, and Ian Hacking.

Through these analyses, I shall argue that knowledge about depression is conceptualised, according to the logic of scientific objectivism, as if its object is a natural, apolitical, individualised occurrence. Paradoxically, however, most of the terms and actions that this knowledge discusses are fundamentally historical, and do not have any meaning without a political, normative framework that transcends the individual experience. My aim is to formulate and apply a critical perspective that enables an understanding of this complex epistemological situation, by regarding the existence of depression as a function of the normative principles that govern the production of knowledge about it.