Biography
Liz's research discusses queer intimacies and affect across gender, bodily, media, and virtual boundaries in Chinese women's fandoms under neoliberal consumer culture and political surveillance.
Imaging dating your favorite fictional media character performed cross-gendered by a same-sex fellow fan, virtually and in real life: How do feminized bodies materialize digital romantic fantasies, translating them into affective care labor through liberal consumption of same-sex intimacy in a utopian yet painfully fictitious reimagination of metropolitan feminine agency and gender subjectivity?
Liz’s research looks at the landscape of love in Chinese women media fandoms across spaces and beyond bodies/physicality. She’s interested in affective labor and the precariousness of emotional and embodied work in women’s fandoms and their queer urban performance practices. She looks at popular culture as a significant site for examining the political economy of desires, discussing struggling gendered body images, identities and sexualities, and between commercialized care work/affective labor and authentic love, as rising political tensions and anxieties affect the changing transnational geopolitics of feminist and queer studies.