Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

‘A TANGLE OF PEOPLE MESSING AROUND TOGETHER’

2013; Routledge; Volume: 27; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502386.2012.738637

1466-4348

Fran Martin,

Asian Culture and Media Studies

Abstract This paper explores how Taiwanese women's variety television shows mediate social expectations about women's work, both waged and unwaged. In particular, I argue that the 2011 women's variety programme Shounü Buman Zu 《熟女不 滿族》, lit. unsatisfied mature-women tribe) negotiates both the feminization of everyday domestic risk and expectations surrounding the embodied practices of women's affective labour. I propose that the programme's mediation of these issues takes place at three levels: thematic, performed and formal. First, offering 'expert' advice on managing the opportunities and risks associated with women's everyday lives in late-modern consumer culture, the discussion themes on Unsatisfied Shounü readily lend themselves to analysis in terms of the feminization of risk and risk management. Second, the embodied performances of the programme's presenters – including their speech, movement and on-screen interactions – model hegemonic formations of feminine habitus, especially the emotional work it involves. Third, the formal properties of this genre, especially the use of post-production effects, instantiate an amplification of the bodily-affective work of normative feminine social interaction. In representing the labours of femininity on these three levels, these programmes make readily visible some of the defining features of available formations of feminine subjecthood in Taiwan today, while highlighting commercial television's role in the socialization of women's affective capacities. Keywords: Taiwangendervariety TVTV genresrisk societyaffective labour Acknowledgements This study was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Projects grant (DP1094355). Thanks to Gin Chee Tong, Peihua Lu and Phyllis Yu-ting Huang for their assistance with aspects of the research, and to Tania Lewis for her helpful comments on an earlier draft. Notes 1. I refer in the second part of this claim to Skeggs and Wood's study (2008 Skeggs , B. & Wood , H. 2008 The labour of transformation and circuits of value "around" reality television , in TV Transformations: Revealing the Makeover Show , T. Lewis , London and New York , Routledge , 119 – 132 . [Google Scholar]), which makes a similar claim about Anglo-American reality TV. While comparable in this very general sense, as should become obvious, the Taiwanese examples are extremely different in other respects from Anglo-American and reality television. 2. Consider, for example, JET cable channel's Nüren yao you qian ('Women want to be wealthy'), a talk show advising middle-aged women on how to save and invest money in order to reach the 'dream' of personal wealth; or free-to-air CTS's WOMAN ai lüxing ('Women love to travel'), a travel show targeting middle-class, solo female travellers. 3. Information on Queen is from the author's interview with Mimi Wang, former Deputy Director of Programming at TVBS, 7 March 2011, Taipei. 4. This information is from the author's series of interviews with eight TV industry workers at various Taiwan channels and production houses in 2010–2011. For further detail, see Lewis et al. (2012 Lewis , T. , Martin , F. & Sun , W. 2012 ' Lifestyling Asia? Shaping modernity and selfhood on life advice programming ', International Journal of Cultural Studies , 15 , 6 , 537 – 566 . doi: 10.1177/1367877912451693 [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 5. Yang (2011 Yang, F.-C. I. 2011. "Constructing shou-nyus" identity and desire: the politics of translation in Taiwanese sex and the city. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 14(3): 235–249. doi:10.1177/1367877910391863[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) points out that the term originated as a descriptor for women who were fans of, and identified with the lead characters in, the US series Sex and the City. 6. Eighty six percent of women between 18 and 21 were enrolled in tertiary education in 2008; 49.6 percent of women over 15 participated in paid labour in 2009 (compared with 66.4 percent of men), up from 46 percent in 1999. The female–male earnings ratio was 79.8 percent in 2007 (Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics 2010 Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics . 2010 Women and Men in R.O.C. (Taiwan): Facts and Figures 2010 , Executive Yuan , Taiwan , , Republic of China . [Google Scholar]). 7. A significant increase was noted in unmarried women between 35 and 44 years of age between 1998 and 2008 – from 8.4 to 15.8 percent. (Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics 2010 Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics . 2010 Women and Men in R.O.C. (Taiwan): Facts and Figures 2010 , Executive Yuan , Taiwan , , Republic of China . [Google Scholar], pp. 6–7). 8. This and all other Chinese–English translations are by the author. 9. Plasticizers are volatile elements in plastic that enable it to retain its bendiness, but gradually disperse into the atmosphere over time and/or with heat. 10. This is a pseudonym. 11. Thanks to Grace Chiu and Ka Weibo for their discussions with me on this intriguing phrase. 12. This discussion might seem to echo Lewis's discussion of the ways in which Anglo-American forms of life advice TV are trending towards a spectacularization of the intimate 'ordinary' spaces of the privatized self, such that private selfhood and citizenship become conflated (2008 Lewis , T. 2008 Smart Living: Lifestyle Media and Popular Expertise , New York , Peter Lang . [Google Scholar], pp. 136–138). I think this Taiwanese example is related but different. Unsatisfied Shounü marks itself unashamedly as women's TV: the publicization of domesticity is associated with a highly feminized mode of address, rather than generalized as in the case of, say, Jamie Oliver or even Nigella Lawson, in the UK; and thematization of good citizenship in Unsatisfied Shounü is extremely slight if present at all. In short, this sort of programme does not represent a de-gendering of formerly feminine forms of television or a generalizing of private, domestic concerns; this is women's television, and its thematization of the private spaces of family and home is consistent with that gendered mode of address. If it projects a public (which I believe it does), then it is specifically a feminine one. 13. This view is supported by Holden and Ergül's interviews with variety show producers in Japan: they note that audiences are now thoroughly acclimatized to these effects and would be turned off by their absence (2006, pp. 120–121). 14. Cf. Smith's (2003 Smith , G. M. 2003 Film Structure and the Emotion System , Cambridge University Press , Cambridge .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) discussion of 'emotion markers' in classical Hollywood cinema: these are 'configurations of highly visible textual cues for the primary purpose of eliciting brief moments of emotion' (p. 44), for example musical stingers, brief facial close-ups and startling interpolated shots as used in suspense sequences (Smith 2003 Smith , G. M. 2003 Film Structure and the Emotion System , Cambridge University Press , Cambridge .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], pp. 44–48). 15. This is modelled very strongly by Lan Xinmei, the host of Queen, discussed above.