Audiences’ multi-role in cultural co-production and its impact on masculinity and feminism in Asian popular culture.
What is the role of audience reception in the co-production with blurred boundaries between producers and consumers, does it affect the social condition of femininity and masculinity and what are the consequences?
The audience reception can be both producers and consumers. As a producer, Fandom can offer an effective labor in its co-production and circulation. In the sub-fan community composed of adoring fans, the Internet has been used by different categories of fans who create fanworks, spread the products, and then gain profits, although the requirement of profit can be replaced by a self-serving motive. However, fandom can also be a pirate in without a feeling of qualms, and downloading, copying, and selling the sub-fan subtitled product usually happens in the market. Thus the original property of cultural enterprises can be violated sometimes.
When fandom reception plays the role of consumer, their reaction to the industry can have a referencing and orienting effect, which means the content of imported cultural products need to fit the audience's cultural background and national identity to be accepted. Also, the operation of producers is fed by consumers' innovation and preference, which would direct a market route in the exploration of the cultural industry. Moreover, a mass reception can promote conformity psychology, the culture that lacks fans’ support is not likely to be mass-produced or invested, such as commodity fetishism can be blown up by audiences’ psychological needs of groups.
One of the reasons that shape consumers’ multi-role in the co-production is the blurring boundary between producers and consumers, firstly it can promote cultural diversity and offer more opportunities for different voices to be noticed in public discussion since audiences’ opinions can be reflected in the pop industry more visibly. As a result, a fair condition can be built between consumers with different cultural expressions. Such as the blurred boundaries of gender identity in Asian pop culture, and consumers’ need for a fair condition for different genders are the reasons that caused this phenomenon which results in a merging cultural market for males and female.
Furthermore, producing, consuming and recreation integrate and form a complex cultural sphere, which increases the difficulty of censorship. Therefore the contradiction between the patriarchal superstructure and the mass culture would be emphasised. Such as the conflict happens between the popular feminine boys state masculinity in elites’ intends. Consequently, the market of varied gender identities would take persuasion for academia to renew the study on gender studies.
Structure
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Introduction
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Body
Identify: the co-production process and the fandom’s roles as producers and consumers
- Argument 1, the producing role offers labor but also piracy.
- Argument 2, The consuming role has referenced and unifying impact.
Identify blurring boundaries. Link to the previous paragraph.
- Argument 3, Audiences requirements of varied cultural expression can help to build a fair condition for feminism.
- Argument 4, The blurring boundaries between consumers and production emphasizes the contradiction between elite and mass intentions, and a new viewpoint on gender studies would be noticed.
Conclusion
Annotated Bibliography
- Chua, B. (2012). Structure, audience, and soft power in East Asian pop culture. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp.105-117.
In the 6th chapter of the book, Huat identifies the definition of a sub-fan community and concludes several types of fandom roles. He considers this as a case in which the audience is both consumers and producers of culture. Via his introduction of the Korean fan club system, they try to maintain ‘grace’ as fans that are worthy of the star’s status by purchasing hundreds of the same album, creating fanworks, spreading their images, and producing advertisements to introduce their idols to more audiences. This process is evidence of the fan's role in the “labor of love”. In addition, he points the 2 directions of the life of fan cultural co-production and circulation in the future, one is that production companies might restrict audiences’ right to recreate and spread the reason to avoid fan’s privacy of original works, like the policies of Johnny's Entertainment in Japan. Furthermore, the profit reasons might direct the market to produce similar works and the competition would be dramatic. The book is useful to my research, the terms and theories it mentioned form a basis for understanding my research, and some of the arguments are inspiring. Nonetheless, I didn’t find any discussion about the effects caused by the fandom’s activities on the social depth. Therefore, a study of the relationship between pop culture and fandom reception will be invested with the contemporary social background in my upcoming research.
- Atkins, E. (2017). A history of popular culture in Japan. London: London New York Bloomsbury Academic, pp.197-210.
Chapters eight and nine introduced how Japan grew from a consumer and imitator of Western popular culture to a producer and how it successfully exported its cultural national identity to the world in the 1980s to 1990s. Atkins argues that the workaholic social environment made a large requirement for sexual manga as a method to relax Japanese men’s exhausting workdays. However, a lot of content is about raping, sex with underage girls, and sex slavering which shows disrespect to females. Atkins points out that compared with China and Korea's pop industry, the Japanese pop-cultural economy grew much slower after 2005. One reason she identified is that sexual consumption drives Japanese feminism to be weak in an unfair social condition, which might fit into the trend of blurring and equaling gender identity. When the Korean pop industry is showing an obvious welcome to the exporting programs, Japanese protecting policies of intellectual and original property restrict fandom communication and recreation in global width. Atkins also analyzed the market for males and females respectively with the cases of girl idols and shojo manga (Comic for female readers) which offered me a wide range of materials in gender study. This book is in lack of a comprehensive view of Japan's cultural industry as the market for females is mentioned very few, also the perspective that can respond to my research question is not raised in the book, but the analysis of the cases will inspire me a lot to understand how the boundaries of consumers and producers, masculinity and femininity were blurred and how this can influence the social environment.’
Bibliography
- Chan, A. (2000). Consumption, Popular Culture and Cultural Identity. popular Culture Association in the South, [online] 23(1), pp.35-55. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23414566 [Accessed 10 Oct. 2019].
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