Lexington Books
Pages: 242
Trim: 6 x 9
978-1-4985-6088-7 • Hardback • October 2018 • $100.00 • (£77.00)
978-1-4985-6089-4 • eBook • October 2018 • $95.00 • (£73.00)
Zhang Mei is assistant professor at the Institute of Japanese Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Introduction
1. Sola in Japan: An “Ordinary” Girl and “Unordinary” Idol
2. Sola as a Weapon of Resistance for Chinese Internet Users
3. Two Chinese Agencies Repositioning Sola
4. A Case of Promotion: Negotiation between Commercial News Portals and the Two Agencies
5. Sola’s Image Transformation: Becoming a Site of Contestation
6. Sola’s Image Transformation and Chinese Youth’s Identity
7. Sola Going Back to Japan as “the Most Famous Japanese in China”
Conclusion
“An entertaining study with serious research methods, this book is a useful reading of ‘the Aoi Sola phenomenon’ as subculture.”
— Junchao Wang, Tsinghua University
“Mei Zhang examines an untrodden field—the consumption of Japanese pornographic icons by Chinese internet users as a ‘safe’ weapon of expressing resistance and as a symbol of aspiration.”
— Takeshi Tanikawa, Waseda University
“This is an interesting study in which the author treats a pornographic celebrity as a cultural product. Mei Zhang examines the constant push and pull among the efforts of different agents to reimagine the celebrity in China, with unpredictable consequences.”
— Robert Guang Tian, Jishou University