Global TV Formats Queer Contemporary China

TV formats are sets of transferable ideas, principles, and procedures to produce and remake television programs.² They "are designed to 'travel well' across national boundaries" and are adaptable to various domestic markets.³ While the transnational exchange of TV formats was considered "an Anglophone development,"⁴ the rapid integration of television production, circulation, and consumption into a global trade system since the 1990s has created many popular global TV formats that have become profitable media franchises and been widely (re)made in different parts of world.⁵ A case in point is the Dutch reality television franchise Big Brother (Veronica, 1999–) that has been adapted in more than sixty regions worldwide as of August 2021.⁶ Since the late 1990s, the television industry of the People's Republic of China has also started to creatively appropriate standardized global media and cultural formulas to produce content compatible with local political-ideological projects. Toward the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, a few highly popular TV formats originally developed in Euro-America, such as Idol and Survivor, were employed as efficient catalysts of the party-state's strategic goals of media marketization and cultural globalization.⁷ Global TV formats have thus played an indispensable role in the economic, cultural, and social-political transformations of contemporary Chinese media landscapes.⁸

In the meantime, gender and sexual television images that subvert local heteronormative ideals have proliferated in entertainment TV shows made, distributed, and consumed in contemporary China. Most of these productions are variety or reality TV shows adapted from global TV formats. Notable beneficiaries of these productions include numerous tomboyish (meaning young, masculine) female singers who have risen to stardom in Idol-style reality singing competitions and effeminate, beautiful male stars who have enjoyed wide popularity for their appearances in the trans-Asian idol group training programs.⁹ In both cases, the nonbinary personae of these celebrities and their television performances are socioculturally legitimized in the Chinese context. These adapted Chinese shows do not present the stars' nonconforming images as visual signs for more politically sensitive and censorable lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) identities and sexualities.¹⁰ Rather, the shows subtly depoliticize and explain their gender-nonconformity as expressions of Chinese-specific individualism, feminism, cosmopolitanism, or fashion styles that synthesize characteristics of local and global public and pop cultures.¹¹ Such dissociation and depoliticization also result from these television stars' frequent cultural references to premodern and modern Chinese gender norms and paradigms, their incorporation of inter-Asian and cosmopolitan gender aesthetics, and their promotion of official ideologies.

Existing scholarship has considered local adaptations of global TV formats as "gendered and gendering" venues that both circulate and reconfigure various patriarchal elements transnationally.¹² For example, dating show formats, such as The Bachelor (ABC, 2002–), often feature a highly hetero-centric setting and mobilize "culturally specific gender tropes" to reproduce and promote various forms of misogyny and hegemonic male masculinity in their local adaptations.¹³ Yet I take a different approach, conceptualizing certain global TV formats, such as those featuring intensive homosocial bonding and settings (e.g., the reality singing competitions shows with an all-female cast) or those promoting heteropatriarchal ideals (e.g., heterosexual matchmaking shows), as inherently queer-enacting, queer-structured, and queer-scripted. These queer-inflected formats and their localization speak volumes about the coexistence and mutual implications of queer and heterosexual sentiments in normative Chinese societies.

Specifically, I employ a queering lens to analyze the formats of and dramatic moments in several popular reality shows in contemporary China. I pay particular attention to the long-running popular dating show Feicheng wurao (If You Are the One, JSTV, 2010–) and unfold the ways in which heterocentric TV formats might queer and be queered despite predominantly heteronormative media and public discourses. I see queer as a critical, analytical practice to interrogate "nonnormative ways of being, doing, desiring, and imagining in and cross various forms of traditionally defined boundaries."¹⁴ My discussion explores the queer-enabling potential and queered adaptations of global TV formats and unravels the nonnormative meanings and connotations...