Reimagining Leslie Cheung through Hanyuan Bookstore
The posthumous personalities of the queer Hong Kong celebrity
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5675268 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ana Howe Bukowski (University of Southern California, corresponding author), Junyi Lv (0000-0002-4824-4368, University of Southern California) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 595-612 |
| Publication date | 2022-10-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Celebrity Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1939-2397 • E-ISSN: 1939-2400 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/19392397.2022.2135086 |
| OpenAlex | W4306360623 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 38 |
This paper considers the posthumous celebrity of Hong Kong singer and actor Leslie Cheung, taking into account his amplified profile among fan communities following his 2003 suicide. Through a site analysis of the now-closed Hanyuan Bookstore in Shanghai, a major site of pilgrimage for his fans, our work is structured through an analysis of the bookshop space as well as a reading of the compendium of handwritten fan letters left behind and addressed to Cheung beyond the grave. To this end, we argue for the necessary queerness of Cheung’s status as celebrity. This queerness is not only the product of his sexual identity and his relationship with Daffy Tong, but due to the spatio-temporal orientation of Hanyuan. With Cheung maintaining a posthumous presence in the space, Hanyuan embodies and instantiates multiple spatio-temporal registers and offers a space for affective re-orientation in face of the everyday, creating a commensurate site of proximity between living fan and deceased star. With Hanyuan standing as a unique site of pilgrimage linking past and future and enhancing already-held parasocial relations, this paper equally considers the geographic particularities of Cheung’s posthumous celebrity status within a more complex field of contemporary Chinese-speaking popular culture
Aesthetics · Art · Media studies · Pilgrimage · Queer · Sociology · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Gender Studies · History · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics · Japanese History and Culture · Philosophy
Marxism and literature
Signs of War and Peace
Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols
Death, The Dead and Popular Culture
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Queer as Catachresis
Fandom
A Star is Dead
Fan tourism and pilgrimage
As Normal as Possible
Asian Tourism
Contents Tourism and Pop Culture Fandom
The corpse in contemporary culture
Creating the sacred places of pop culture in the age of mobility
Loving Boys Twice as Much
American Pilgrimage Landscapes
Fan Cultures
Translational and transnational queer fandom in China
Fan activism sustained and challenged
It has never been “normal
Of local and global fame
Why Does Queer Theory Need China
Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World
Queer, yet never lesbian
Forever Gor Gor, changing fans
The Stars Look Very Different Today
In a Queer Time and Place
Sex in Public
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |