Drag melodrama/feminine public sphere/folk television: 'Local opera' and identity in Taiwan

The dissertation is an examination of the relationship between popular entertainment and the articulation of gender, class, and national identities through an intensive study of the production process, performance texts, and fan culture of koa-a-hi, the most popular genre of musical theater performed in the Taiwanese dialect. Koa-a-hi is a bricolage genre in which women play all of the leading roles, and a nearly all-female fan culture centers around the star actresses who play the romantic male leads. It is performed both as an offering at temple festivals and as television serial drama.;The dissertation traces a historical circuit between the subaltern public sphere of koa-a-hi and the dominant public sphere in Taiwan. Popular aesthetics of koa-a-hi function as utopian objective correlatives of experiences which evade any fixing into discourse. As the conditions which structure these experiences change, these aesthetics themselves become reified objects of nostalgia, and can then function as signs with fixed referents in the dominant public sphere. As the aesthetics of dying forms are incorporated into new discourses of Taiwanese identity as tropes, other styles which better condense the audience's more immediate and hard to grasp experiences become popular. The introduction of globalizing audio-visual media, or more accurately of the cultural formations around these media affects the circuit between subaltern and dominant public spheres not so much by introducing new representational content as by changing the terms of verisimilitude and identification. The second part of the dissertation focuses on the negotiation between theatrical and televisual aesthetics in koa-a-hi performance and in the structures of star/fan identification.