Corporeal Pun: Translations of The Dancing Body in Taiwanese Popular Culture.

Liu, Chih-Chieh. (2011) Corporeal Pun: Translations of The Dancing Body in Taiwanese Popular Culture. Doctoral thesis, University of Surrey (United Kingdom)..

Preview

Text 10073157.pdf Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike. Download (14MB) | Preview

Abstract

With the advance of digital networks, music video has experienced a ‘tremendous explosion’ across national and medial boundaries (Beebe and Middleton, 2007, p. 3). Arising from this newly-emerging phenomenon, this thesis focuses on East Asian mediascapes, with a special attention to Taiwan, on the transference, (re)production and mutation of the dancing body in the music video. Centring on two major modes of production in Mandarin pop - ‘cuteness’ and ‘sexiness’ - I analyse these widely-known, yet little-studied, corporealities in both mass-mediated and vernacular contexts, pivoting on three dance stars, Coco, Cyndi and Jolin. I argue that these seemingly superficial and self-evident bodies are intrinsically ambiguous and complex, constantly being ‘translated’ by different social agents in transnational / intermedial fields, creating a body with various layers of meaning, i.e. a ‘punned’ corporeality. Drawing upon contemporary dance studies, gender theories, semiotics and linguistic theories on the pun, an interdisciplinary framework is formulated to explore a wide range of publicly-available data with special attention to music video analysis. Detailed studies of Coco, Cyndi and Jolin, their ‘fan’ videos and a talent show in between these two events demonstrate the existence of a major cultural force - punning translation - through which the dancing body is displaced in music video, impelling the body into a punned configuration. Reading these bodies as events of translation, I analyse the cultural logics and corporeal mechanisms - the logic of exchange -embedded in these transnational / translational bodily acts to argue for an extra layer of the global cultural landscape, a corporeal scape, whose seemingly contradictory function is a force through which local and regional histories are propelled.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Divisions :	Theses
Authors :	Liu, Chih-Chieh.
Date :	2011
Additional Information :	Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Surrey (United Kingdom), 2011.
Depositing User :	EPrints Services
Date Deposited :	24 Apr 2020 15:27
Last Modified :	24 Apr 2020 15:27
URI:	http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/id/eprint/854785

Actions (login required)

View Item

Downloads