[Commlist] cfp:Starring Asian Femininities: Evolutions of Femaleness on Asian Screens

CALL FOR PAPERS

Starring Asian Femininities: Evolutions of Femaleness on Asian Screens

Editors: Lisa Gotto, Kirsty Fairclough & Ian Dixon
Series Editors: Sean Redmond & Jian Xu

What is it that Asian female stars offer the silver screen and the 
worshippers who dedicate themselves to the confluence of gender and 
sexual identity of such stars? What media conditions underlie the 
production of Asian images of femininity? To what extent do female stars 
in Asia transcend Western notions of fame, popularity, and celebrity? 
What positions do they take on issues such as selfhood and identity? How 
do they mediate unique combinations of conflicting ideologies?
Often incorrectly perceived as supporting dominant thought, normative 
body images and the patriarchal order, this book shows how women stars 
in Asia are developing voices of their own and challenging such 
strictures. This is especially poignant because Asian stars often face 
societal repressions uncommon in the West.
While the subject of Asian stardom has been broached convincingly in the 
last decade, the femaleness of such stars is often subsumed within 
greater debates on the validity of national cinemas and emerging 
technologies. Leung and Willis’s East Asian Film Stars (2014) asks 
whether star power is losing its edge in the West where, as Mike 
Goodridge (2010) surmises, high-concept cinema is overtaking its 
high-powered stars. By contrast, Leung and Willis argue that Asian stars 
are still on the rise over the digital vehicles supporting them – 
especially in East Asia. While Leung and Willis feature some significant 
female stars including Maggie Cheung, Zhang Ziyi and Joan Chen, their 
focus is less on gender issues than race, culture, nationality and 
industrial relations. Similarly, Dorothy Wai Sim Lau’s study Chinese 
Stardom in Participatory Cyberculture (2018) concentrates on new media 
and Internet developments that have broken ground for Asian Stars, 
rather than on the stars themselves. Cosmopolitan Cinema: Cross-cultural 
Encounters in East Asian Film (2018) by Felicia Chan critiques the 
ethics of engendering a star’s sense of belonging and the ‘cosmopolitan 
allure’ of foreigners as a ‘psychic revolt’ against Asian hegemonic 
‘parent culture’. Chan’s worthy argument questions the validity of 
national cinema boundaries concentrating on East Asian film from Hong 
Kong, China, Malaysia and Singapore, throwing doubt on national cinema 
delineations and definitive cultural boundaries. Further, apart from 
Paula Yoo’s Shining Star: The Anna May Wong Story (2009) and Irene 
González-López and Michael Smith’s study of Tanaka Kinuyo (2018), 
biographies of Asian stars tend to focus on male celebrities such as 
Tony Leung, Jackie Chan and (new) Orientalist narratives such as those 
espoused by Simu Liu.
With the exception of Female Celebrities in Contemporary Chinese Society 
by Shenshen Cai, the above publications highlight industrial practices 
for both (traditional) genders. By contrast, our dedication to 
exclusively female pan-Asian stars remains unique. Contributors might 
also like to consider stars who may not be exclusively cisgender women 
but who identify as female on screen. The focus of Starring Asian 
Femininities also covers stars from feature films under the influence of 
social and new media – rather than the other way around. For this 
co-edited volume in the series Asian Celebrity and Fandom Studies we 
feature all female Asian celebrities with book editors Lisa Gotto, 
Kirsty Fairclough and Ian Dixon. All currently engaged editors have a 
history of collegiality and collaboration in film and celebrity studies 
including the soon to be released I’m Not a Film Star: David Bowie as 
Actor (2022) co-edited by Dixon. Fairclough recently published her 
co-edited books The Legacy of Mad Men: Cultural History, Intermediality 
and American Television (2019) as well as Prince and Popular Music 
(2020). Gotto’s far reaching scholarship includes the publication of a 
plethora of books such as Passing and Posing in Black and White: 
Calibrating the Color Line in U.S. Cinema (2021) and Big Screens, Small 
Forms: Visual Varieties in Digital Media Culture (2022).

Potential Subject Matter
•	Gender representation
•	Classic Stars
•	Screen Elegance vs Tomboy-ism •	Comediennes
•	Stars of Third Cinema •	Asian and Subcontinental Stars
•	Crossover stardom
•	Orientalism in contemporary iteration
•	Oriental mistresses
•	Trauma and Star Image
•	Asia as feminised spectacle
•	Ideology and Stardom
•	East-West transference
•	Celebrity Scandal
•	Star Auteurism
•	Female evolutions on screen
•	Ideology and the star vehicle
•	Stars and politics

We look forward to your contribution. Please send 300-word abstracts by 
October 30th 2022 to (ian.dixon /at/ ntu.edu.sg)

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