Co-Constructing a Gender–State Entanglement in Canonical Three Kingdoms Fandom: A Discourse-Historical Approach

ABSTRACT

Adopting a discourse-historical approach (DHA), we analyse how male influencers and their followers co-construct a gender–state entanglement through social-mediated discussions about a mythologised historical figure, Zhuge Liang, on Bilibili. The analysis discovers that the historical figure is portrayed as a wen–wu masculinity archetype, whose imaginary is modified against current socio-cultural trends and intertextually linked to China’s nation-building project. The masculinist valorisation of the historical figure of Zhuge reiterates the male takeover of nationalist politics as a defining feature of popular cultural production and consumption in post-reform China. The study makes a meaningful contribution to scholarship about Three Kingdoms fandom by showing how past memories and present events converge in Chinese-language social-mediated communication, where heteronormative visions and worldviews are consistently overrepresented.

采用话语–历史分析法研究哔哩哔哩上有关诸葛亮的讨论, 我们探讨了男性意见领袖及其追随者如何通过历史人物共同构建属于中国的性别–国家纠葛。分析发现, 相关讨论中诸葛亮往往被描绘成了一个能文能武的男子汉典范形象。这一历史形象被不断修改, 以适应当前中国社会文化趋势, 并与民族国家建设产生了互文联系。对历史人物的男性主义赞美重申了男性对民族主义政治的掌控, 反映了后改革开放时代中国流行文化生产和消费的主要特征。这项研究对现有的三国演义迷研究做出了有意义的扩展。它揭示了过去的记忆和现在的事件如何汇聚于中文社交媒体, 及此过程中异性恋常态视角被过度代表的问题。

KEYWORDS:

• China
• discourse-historical approach (DHA)
• gender–state entanglement
• masculinity
• Three Kingdoms fandom
• wen–wu (ideal male archetype)
• Zhuge Liang

Acknowledgements

We wish to express our sincere gratitude to two anonymous reviewers and the editors for their highly constructive comments on an earlier version of the article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

We would like to extend our thanks to the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick for its support in funding our research activities.