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ABSTRACT
This article delves into the relationship between reality television and the politics of subject-making in contemporary Chinese media culture. Offering a critical discourse analysis of the recent hit reality TV/game show Chinese Dating with the Parents (2017–2018), the case-study explicates how the show’s inclusion of a normalized transgender celebrity host and its Confucianized approaches to dating, marriage, and family relations are connected to the re-packaging and re-articulation of Confucianism at the state and personal levels in China. By shedding light on the interconnectedness of state ideology, celebrity culture, and subject-making in reality television, the discussion points out television functions in creating and circulating new state-sanctioned subjectivities.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Jocelyn Yi-Hsuan Lai, Liew Kai Khiun, and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on earlier drafts of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Additional information
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Lin Song
Lin Song (PhD) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Communication, University of Macau, Macau. His research focuses on gender, sexuality, and nationalism in popular and digital cultures in contemporary China and East Asia. His works can be found in journals including Feminist Media Studies and Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, as well as edited books such as Queering Paradigms VII: Contested Bodies and Spaces (Peter Lang 2018) and The Cosmopolitan Dream: Transnational Chinese Masculinities in a Global Age (Hong Kong University Press 2018).