Supervisors: Dr Sarah Thomas; Dr Katherine Whitehurst
Contacts: yixuan.feng@liverpool.ac.uk
Research topic:
My thesis examines the Chinese female star Jing Tian who, while having a high-profile career in the Chinese film industry (2011-2014) and Hollywood (2015-2017), was surrounded by the ‘failure’ narrative in Chinese reception. It problematises this failure framing and redefines her as a star caught between success and failure. It recognises the contradictions in her stardom – where the successful production of a highly consistent persona in Huallywood and Hollywood contexts poses a stark contrast to her poor reception by a Chinese audience – and takes it as a productive site to explore the Sino-Hollywood relationship in the 2010s. It rejects an individualistic perspective which blames the failures entirely on the star alone and positions her persona, image, and career in the wider cultural and industrial contexts. It centrally argues that her failures have been shaped collectively by the ongoing tensions and negotiations between the star, the Chinese film industry and Hollywood. It meticulously examines her intersected identity performances as a star, an actor, a celebrity, and a worker in Huallywood and Hollywood cinema, and on social media Weibo; it explores how the interplay of gender, race, and transnationalism shapes her persona and career, and how she as an agentic subject negotiates with these wider institutional forces through film acting and self-presentation on Weibo. In doing so, my thesis demonstrates the value of Jing’s stardom in revealing the competitive and concessional transnationalisms (Lim 2019: 2-4) practised by China and Hollywood, the Sino-Hollywood (de)coupling in the 2010s, and the landscape of transnational Chinese female stardom during this time.
Research areas:
Transnational stardom; Chinese stardom; stardom and performance; stardom and gender; screen industries
Academic achievements:
[in review] Y. Feng, Sinicising girl power: transnational Chinese female stardom in the wake of Sino-Hollywood negotiations in the 2010s Situating Jing Tian in The Great Wall (2016), Celebrity Studies.
[in review] Y. Feng, Chinese Femininity in Huallywood: a transnational branding of Jing Tian as the feisty heroine, in K. Fairclough, L. Gotto, and I. Dixon eds, Starring Asian Femininities, Bloomsbury.
My research is funded by the School of the Arts, the University of Liverpool.
Teaching experience:
COMM303 Stardom and Media Celebrity