Geng Song (NHC Fellow, 2022–23)

Geng Song is interested in transcultural, transdisciplinary, and transhistorical inquiries on gender and identity in Chinese popular culture. He has written extensively on issues such as men and masculinities in Chinese culture and society, Chinese television, and Chinese nationalism. His first book, The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture (2004), is now considered a pioneering work in the field of Chinese masculinity studies. His second book, Men and Masculinities in Contemporary China (coauthored with Derek Hird, 2014), represents a much-applauded attempt to combine, in an interdisciplinary manner, a critical reading of male images in media texts using interviews with and ethnographic examinations of men in the context of everyday life in mainland China. His newest monograph, Televising Chineseness: Gender, Nation, and Subjectivity (2022), explores how television and online dramas imagine the Chinese nation and form postsocialist Chinese gendered subjects.

Song’s publications also include edited volumes on Chinese television and transnational Chinese masculinities and a number of research articles in such journals as Modern China, The China Journal, Asian Studies Review, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, and Nan Nü. He is the recipient of international collaboration grants from the British Academy, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and the Academy of Korean Studies. Song is the coeditor of a book series on “Transnational Asian Masculinities” by Hong Kong University Press. His research has been widely featured by major international media outlets, such as the South China Morning Post, The Guardian, Nikki Asian Review, China Daily, Radio Australia, and The Straits Times, to name just a few.

Selected Publications

• Song, Geng. Televising Chineseness: Gender, Nation, and Subjectivity. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022.
• Song, Geng. “‘Little Fresh Meat’: The Politics of Sissiness and Sissyphobia in Contemporary China.” Men and Masculinities 25, no. 1 (April 2022): 68-86.
• Bai, Ruoyun, and Geng Song, eds. Chinese Television in the Twenty-First Century: Entertaining the Nation. London: Routledge, 2015.
• Song, Geng, and Derek Hird. Men and Masculinities in Contemporary China. Leiden: Brill, 2014.
• Song, Geng. The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004.