Person: Leng, Rachel
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Leng
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Rachel
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Leng, Rachel
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Publication Circuits of Identities in the Margins: Multicultural Encounters and Hybrid Biopolitics in Sinophone Texts across Greater China and Southeast Asia(2015-05-27) Leng, Rachel; Wang, David Der-WeiThis thesis engages with the praxis of diasporic Sinophone biopolitics across East Asia exploring travelling imaginaries, hybrid material cultures, and articulations of embodied difference striking across geopolitical and temporal boundaries. By considering the interfaces of ethnic Chinese across local cultures in Malaysia, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong inflected by globalizing influences, I question how a cohesive Sinophone identity outside mainland China might be nurtured and managed through a multicultural approach. Through the lens of literary works by Li Yongping (李永平), Kuo Pao Kun (郭寶崑), and Wong Bik-Wan (黃碧雲), this thesis investigates the heterogeneous formation of Sinophone identities calibrated by the time and place specificities of each articulation and lived practice. Each author articulates distinct yet intersecting perspectives towards the Sinophone body as one that is gendered and (de)sexualized and the sociopolitical consequences of linguistic hybridity at the crossroads of international margins and routes. The first chapter takes up Kuo Pao Kun’s Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral 《郑和的 后代》 (1995) to tease out Singapore’s multilingualism, racial hybridity, and the impact of the city-state’s language policies on ethnic Chinese identity. The second chapter will focus on Li Yongping, a Sinophone Malaysian author who emigrated to Taiwan, and the affective images of wandering, ghostly ethnic Chinese women circulating in his work. The third chapter delves into Wong Bik-wan’s short story collection, Tenderness and Violence《温柔与爆裂》 (1994), and her misogynistic perspective on the corporeal manifestations of Sinophone Hong Kong modernity. By attending to the physical and conceptual movements that these texts each represent and enable, close analyses of the figures populating all three works illuminate the power of gendered and subaltern bodies as they intersect with critical frameworks of postcoloniality and Sinophone studies. Taken together, this thesis argues that Sinophone synergies across diverse Sinitic communities create a space for interaction and negotiation to reevaluate the Chinese identity and “Chineseness” vis-à-vis tradition, cultural uniformity, geographical boundaries, geopolitical boundaries, biopolitical manifestations, and transculturation.Publication Eileen Chang’s Feminine Chinese Modernity: Dysfunctional Marriages, Hysterical Women, and the Primordial Eugenic Threat(Overseas Education College of Xiamen University, 2014) Leng, RachelEileen Chang has been described by critics as an unapologetically introspective and sentimental but largely apolitical writer. When most other writers of her time were concentrating on the grand and the abstract in exploring the May Fourth modernist spirit, Eileen Chang’s approach to her writing poignantly laid bare an intense interest in the modern relationships between men and women, between an individual and the collective. Contrary to popular interpretation, this paper argues that there is a strong political and subversive dimension to Chang’s writings that has hitherto been glided over or ignored completely. Specifically, this paper suggests that recurring themes of abortive parent-child relationships, the dilapidated household, and disillusioned sexual unions throughout Chang’s work not only intertwines references to her own private life and love affairs, but reflects a larger sociopolitical history anchored in the rise of a national eugenics movement at the bedrock of Chinese modernity. The parallel narratives of The Golden Cangue (1943) and The Rouge of The North (1967) engage intimately in a social critique of the Chinese state’s propagation of eugenic practices related to reproduction. These stories unveil Eileen Chang at her best in uncovering, even allegorically, the relationship between the feminine and the sociopolitical changes besetting contemporary China. She limns a fictional world where Chinese modernity has engendered its own reflection in the image of the monstrous, embittered woman suffering from psychological and bodily decay and grapples with the corporeal manifestation of the malaise of social and marital relations in modern China.Publication Gender, Sexuality, and Cosplay: A Case Study of Male-to-Female Crossplay(2014-12-09) Leng, RachelIn recent years, cosplay fans gathering at anime conventions and events all over North America have attracted much public attention and media coverage. These fans, who often refer to themselves as otaku, 1 wear elaborate costumes and makeup to embody various anime, manga, and related video game characters (Cooper-Chen, 2010; Eng, 2012a). The essence of cosplay, or costume-play, involves affective labor where fans transform themselves into chosen anime characters by constructing and wearing costumes, learning signature character poses or dialogue, and masquerading at conventions and events (Okabe, 2012). Crossplay is a subset of cosplay; crossplayers similarly participate in costume-play, except they dress up in costumes modeled after characters of the opposite gender. This paper addresses male-to-female (“M2F”) crossplay where, as the name suggests, male cosplayers costume themselves as female anime characters. I contend that M2F crossplay exemplifies the performance of gender and sexuality in cosplay that challenges hegemonic norms, providing insight into an increasingly visible phenomenon in contemporary North American popular culture. When men crossplay as women, they are not merely donning femininity, but hyper-femininity, revealing the socially constructed nature of gender roles yet concomitantly reinforcing them. Yet, despite apparent similarities between crossplay and drag performances, they are fundamentally distinct. Drag Queens in Western culture typically connotes men cross-dressing as an exhibition of self-identity, whereas M2F crossplayers costume as female anime characters to partake in an aesthetic transformation that goes beyond mere self-expression. Thus, this paper aims to provide a preliminary exploration of M2F crossplay through a case study, investigating the motivations behind and process of crossplay performance, its status within the cosplay community, and the implications for broader society in relation to hegemonic gender norms.