Gender, Media and Modernity in the Asia-Pacific

This collection includes a wide-ranging set of essays exploring how the media (from art cinema to online social networking sites) both record and help produce images and experiences of modernity in the Asia-Pacific region. Collectively this book argues for the importance of gender to understanding how modernity is produced and experienced.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Cultural Studies.

This collection offers a range of cultural studies perspectives on the ways gender and modernity intersect in media produced in the Asia-Pacific region. It spans different ideas about modernity in the region, different approaches to cultural analysis, and different media forms: from Taiwanese lifestyle television to avant-garde Indian cinema, from the emergence of a Chinese youth culture in online social networks to the alienation of country girls as imagined by Australian soap opera, and from the fantastic politics of migrating bodies in Korean cinema to the masculine mimicry of fighting women in South-East Asian action movies. Together, these essays explore the ways that media both records and helps produce images and experiences of modernity and the integral role gender plays in those processes.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Cultural Studies.