Gender Values Essay

7429 Words30 Pages
Int. J. Chinese Culture and Management, Vol. 2, No. 3, 2009 235 Rocking gender values: Sammi Cheng’s androgynous persona Anthony Y.H. Fung School of Journalism and Communication, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, NT, Hong Kong E-mail: anthonyfung@cuhk.edu.hk Abstract: This article discusses the cultural effect of a popular Chinese female artist and singer Sammi Cheng and how her persona and stardom might possibly rock the gender values of various Chinese communities. Despite the fact that she openly denies her feminist identity, under the Chinese context, the notion of gender identities is negotiated around her songs and performativity. Culturally unconventional and provoking, Sammi explicitly represents herself as androgynous in the lyrics of her song ‘Non Male Non Female’. Keywords: gender; music; stardom; performativity; blending; Cantopop. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Fung, A.Y.H. (2009) ‘Rocking gender values: Sammi Cheng’s androgynous persona’, Int. J. Chinese Culture and Management, Vol. 2, No. 3, pp.235–247. Biographical notes: Anthony Y.H. Fung is an Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received his PhD from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. His research interests included political economy of popular music and culture, gender and youth identity, cultural studies, and new media technologies. His new books are New Television Globalization and East Asian Cultural Imaginations (co-authored with Keane and Moran, 2007) and Global Capital, Local Culture: Transnational Media Corporations in China (2008). 1 Rocking gender values What woman doesn’t want to find a devoted lover? There is no surprise that when a singer performs ‘Am I Really in Your Heart’, ‘Say You’ll be Mine’ and ‘Valentino’, the lyrics
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