Ng, H. 2024. Working-class Masculinities in Postsocialist Chinese Television: Mediating (Im)potency and Reproducing Transnational and Localised Inequalities. in: Border Masculinities in Literary and Visual Cultures London Palgrave Macmillan.
| Chapter title | Working-class Masculinities in Postsocialist Chinese Television: Mediating (Im)potency and Reproducing Transnational and Localised Inequalities |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ng, H. |
| Abstract | This chapter examines Chinese masculinities in the popular television series, Garrulous Zhang Damin’s Happy Life (Pinzui Zhang Damin de xingfu shenghuo, 2000), which can be read as a national allegory of postsocialist China grappling with the gender and social inequalities of a market economy. In a society where successful businessmen and high achieving white-collar men now occupy the social apex, working-class Damin embodies a border masculinity that is economically precarious. Under postsocialist neoliberalism, Beijinger Damin can only rehabilitate his sub-hegemonic masculinity through the assertion of his power relationships with other men, all of which position women bodies as a tool of mediation and self-aggrandisement. By discriminating against the Shanghai urban male Other, belittling the Shandong rural male Other, and asserting a panoptic patriarchy over women and men in his family, he achieves a tantalising agency by mediating concerns of men’s (im)potency. The trope of libidinal capacity also serves as allegory to entrench and reproduce localised inequalities through legitimising the marginalisation of men from other regions within a Beijing-centric discourse. By glossing over injustices of unemployment and social inequalities suffered by Damin, the series suggests that the individual, through channelling energies to the domestic realm and with self-determination and personal connections, can overcome socioeconomic hardship. In Damin’s case, he succeeds with his gift of the gab, a symbol of his virility. Based on analysis of the series, this essay argues that the televisual representations of his working-class masculinity reproduce rather than critique state discourse on neoliberal inequalities. |
| Keywords | Working-class masculinities |
| Chinese masculinity | |
| Chinese television | |
| Postsocialism | |
| Toxic masculinity | |
| Gender inequality | |
| Neoliberalism | |
| Book title | Border Masculinities in Literary and Visual Cultures |
| Year | 2024 |
| Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan |
| Springer Nature | |
| Publication dates | |
| Published | 08 Oct 2024 |
| Place of publication | London |
| ISBN | 9783031680502 |
| Digital Object Identifier (DOI) | https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-68050-2 |
| Web address (URL) | https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-68050-2 |