Remixing hegemonic masculinity in Chinese hip-hop music : rebellion, morality and authenticity = 中国嘻哈音樂中的霸權男性氣質混製 : 叛逆、道德與本真性

Abstract

Producing and reproducing hegemonic male modes of subjectivity and sociality is a hybridization process of constant cultural construction, of which the exploration in China is not yet well satisfactory. My MPhil. thesis seeks to offer an updated understanding of making Chinese masculinities by interpreting the current cultural trend of Hip-Hop music and the debate over it since 2017 from the perspective of modernity. The key questions that I try to answer are as follows: What does masculine rebellion in Chinese Hip-Hop music imply, with particular attention to its embrace of cultural nationalism? How is Hip-Hop as a form of masculine cultural image and imaginary subject to moral criticism and accusation? How does the conventional ideology of authenticity participate in the Chinese subculturalist’s resistance and defense? By answering these questions, I seek to highlight the identify the key elements that constitute hegemonic masculinity and illuminate its implication for social power. Concerned with addressing popular culture is an endless symbolic circulation, my study interrogates the hegemony of Chinese masculinity by analyzing the images of Chinese men separately as fundamental cultural structures encoded in textual fantasies but as discursive formations of social normativity. By scrutinizing a number of hit singles, performances, media coverage, and online posts, I present several arguments that answer the questions raised above. First of all, Hip-Hop in China basically inheres to romanticism, for it primarily locates male individuality in sentimental and sensory self with optimist rebellion of restoring oneself with phallic power by posing rejection and transgression. In this process Chinese culture of Jianghu reinvents itself so as to expand the scale of male rebel individualism. Non-romanticist forces that constitute the antithetical consent toward the problematic masculinity in Hip-Hop music, include the authoritarian party-state with symbolic power but offering empty calling; cyber-feminism that proposes progressive cultural reformation of Hip-Hop representation of gender; and the familial heteronormativity that subtly adjust the romantic expectations of men. Nevertheless, the romanticist premise notion of self remains hegemonic but also negotiates with hegemonic ideologies of materialism, consumerism, and the desire for a caring breadwinner. Additionally, authenticity’s empowering male individualism in the political sense appears to be very limited in regard to a future of criticism. All in all, individualism under the influence of romanticism pertains its hegemonic status after the challenge from the common denial form of hegemony from state apparatus and communities. This is an innovative study of masculinity in a local subcultural context. It challenges the permeating binary paradigm of cultural resistance in discussing subculture by applying the perspective of masculinity. It also revisits the dynamic and hybrid view of hegemony to develop the framework of hegemonic masculinity so that appropriately assess how social and cultural agencies remake male subjectivities. And the other contribution made by reviewing hegemony theory is addressing the category and dimension of morality, which can help to enrich masculinity research and gender studies in the future.