Tabloid female sex confessions and everyday pro-sex feminism: the case of the Apple Daily Taiwan
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
3:00 pm to 4:30 pm
- Venue
- SOAS Main Building
- Room
- KLT
- Event type
- Seminar
About this event
The Centre of Taiwan Studies is delighted to welcome Dr Yow-Jiun Wang to give a talk as part of this year’s Centre of Taiwan Studies Summer School on female sexual confession, tabloid culture, and the everyday formation of sex-positive feminism in Taiwan.
This talk construes the reader-contributed female sex confessions of a Taiwanese tabloid newspaper as contingent cultural instruments, looking into how these confessions are implicated in the formulation of sex-positive feminism. The confessional discourse is interpreted as autobiographical acts with dialogic overtones.
The talk will point out that the highly commercial and communal form of the tabloid confessions fortuitously facilitates positive discourse of female sexuality in a society in transition. It is demonstrated that part of the pro-sex feminism promoted by cultural elites, especially post-feminist discourse of entitlement, is echoed in the confessions. However, dealing with life situations of ordinary people, the community-based tabloid feminism differs from the model discourses in its pragmatism. Although female sexual desires are fully justified, they are balanced in consideration of other necessities, such as security, stability, or romantic love.
Image credit: Lona via Unsplash.
About the speaker
Yow-Jiun Wang is Associate Professor in the Department of Taiwanese Literature at National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, specialising in media and cultural studies. She publishes in Chinese and English, with research interests including identity theory, discourse analysis, gender studies, memory studies, migration and social media. She holds a PhD in Media Studies from the University of Stirling and an MA in Cultural Studies from the University of Leeds. Her interdisciplinary research explores online collective identities, gender performance, feminist discourse, mediated self-narratives, social media memory, minority media and transnational migration.
