Born pink? Born queer! The convergence of global TV formats and K-pop girl group idol cultures in contemporary China

Local adaptations of ‘global TV formats’ often serve as gendered and gendering venues that can reconfigure heteropatriarchal elements transnationally. This study steps further to consider how China’s appropriation of inter-Asian flows of TV format and music group idol culture, synthesizing with traditional Chinese understandings of gender nonnormativity and homosociality, has enabled a queer-essenced televisual spectacle. I explore one reality TV format that rose in popularity in the late 2010s and was originally from South Korea—music group manufacturing shows. I present a critical analysis of some key sequences from the girl group-manufacturing show Youth with You 2 and the boyband-manufacturing show Youth with You 3, both of which feature the mentor, Lisa, the popular ethnic-Thai female K-pop star from Blackpink. I contextualize the shows in the most recent misogynistic, nationalistic sentiments of the post-COVID-19 Chinese entertainment industry and public space. My examination unravels how global formats and group idol cultures converge to crop and legitimize certain forms of queer visibility and subjectivity in largely heteronormative-structured Asian societies. This convergence enlarges the queer ambience of the TV programs and allow emerging queer images to disrupt official governing and policing of social minorities, though often in extremely ambivalent, fetishistic ways.