DeBoer, "Co-producing the Asia Pacific: Travels in technology, space, time and gender," 2007

Stephanie DeBoer, Ph.D

Abstract (Summary)

"Co-producing the Asia-Pacific: Travels in Technology, Space, Time and Gender" argues that the stakes for Japanese and Chinese language collaborations emerge at the relationship between gender, technology and an Asia Pacific constructed at the borders--here, among the media capitals of Tokyo and Hong Kong, Taipei or Beijing. It thus addresses film, television and multimedia co-productions from 1961 to 2001 as a lens for uncovering the power dynamics of regional production. To this end, this dissertation interrogates the desires for new technology and gender central to the travel of Japanese media products against a fragmented history of regional cross-border production. As it addresses not only the spatial, but also temporal stakes of these desires, "Co-producing the Asia-Pacific" uncovers the problems of (de)colonization often subsumed in the promise of technological mobility linked to media collaborations in the region, while at the same time reconsidering the spatial turn in recent cultural, media and transnational studies.

Chapters address the entwining desires for decolonizing markets and (then) new technologies of imaging and transport across a series of co-productions among Tokyo, Taipei and Hong Kong in the early 1960s; technological presence, location shooting and displacement for television collaborations between Tokyo and Beijing; the centrality of gender--especially masculinity--as a contact zone for interrogating the technological discourses produced in cross-border action between Japanese and Chinese language contexts of the 1960s and 1990s; and recent omnibus film, video and multimedia practices, as they construct the region against the disjuncture of the media link. This dissertation outlines a series of contexts, terms and methods for interrogating Japanese and Chinese language film and media collaboration against a wider backdrop of regional production.

Advisor: James, David
Committee members: McPherson, Tara,  Jaikumar, Priya,  Lippit, Akira