Global TV Format Queers Post-2010 China

In the past decade, mainland Chinese nonnormative gender and sexual images and celebrity personas have been greatly proliferated in local TV programs and dramas adapted from foreign formats. Existing scholarship has considered local adaptations of global TV formats gendered and gendering venues to circulate and reconfigure various patriarchal elements transnationally. Yet, I propose to conceptualize certain TV formats, such as those featuring intensive same-sex settings or promoting heteropatriarchal familial-marital ideals, are inherently queer-enacting and -scripted. In this presentation, I analyze the formats and key sequences of several popular Chinese entertainment TV shows from the last decade, including the celebrity parenting reality show Where Are We Going, Dad?, the heterosexual match-making show If You Are The One, and the celebrity impersonation show Your Face Sounds Familiar. Ultimately, I demonstrate that global TV formats serve as a nonnormative stage on which the inevitable coexistence and mutual implications of queer and normative cultures in contemporary Chinese society unfold.