Performing “Realness” in a Transnational Ethnic Imaginary

This research examines the rising and televisual mediation of Xinjiang ethnic minority female celebrities within Han-centric China’s heteropatriarchal, nationalistic cultural imaginaries in the post-2010 years. Specifically, my analysis focuses on one of the most popular Uyghur female TV celebrities in China, Dilraba Dilmurat. By identifying a popular cultural discourse of “transnational ethnic imaginary” surrounding her celebrity images, I explore the ways in which her geo-cultural-ethnic-gender identity has been capitalized on by the Chinese TV industry and subjectively performed by herself within official and popular fantasies about a global, harmonious China. Ultimately, I argue that her success as a TV star in the post-2010 years exposes the artificiality and contingency of the self-imagined dimorphism of the dominant Han Chinese and ethnic minorities within the party-state’s interethnic, transnational, heteropatriarchal-structured fantasies about a global China and a homogenous Chineseness

Aesthetics · Art · Artificiality · China · Ethnic group · Identity (music · Political science · Sociology · The Imaginary · Anthropology · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · China's Ethnic Minorities and Relations · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Psychology · Gender Studies · Law

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