Editor's Introduction

24:2 May 2016 beyond biopolitical governance paradigms: accept Tarde's society of capacious concatenation, he argues, and embrace the parasitical fertility, the irritating peskiness, the sociality of the impoverished, and the scholarship they can incite in us, as they grab what they want to see and want to hear. Doubtless, Fran Martin was not thinking about instrumentalizing the South when she composed " `From Sparrow to Phoenix': Imagining Gender Transformation through Taiwanese Women's Variety TV." She does, however, go at the established tradition of feminist scholarship on Sinophone media cultures and media subjectivities and gives it a poke even, a cosmetic surgery one could say. Working her way through the terms for gender categories that have emerged in the popular Taiwan TV talk show Queen, she situates the program and her own evaluation in a localized end-product of transnational media vectors. This useful formula allows her to go directly into the conditions of thinking about female life cycles and major sociological shifts that have displaced and restructured the Taiwan Chinese family. In the process, Martin, like Sarkar, simply steps over prepackaged protocols of media critique. Rather than accepting the old theory about "the global spread of . . . neoliberal (and `postfeminist') ideology that figures (feminine) self-making as an `empowering' entrepreneurial project," Martin shows, using viewer responses, how people consider Queen to be an imaginative project of transnational consumption in which the consumer pushes her way into a renewed sense of social belonging. So, too, Benjamin Tausig's "A Division of Listening: Insurgent Sympathy and the Sonic Broadcasts of the Thai Military" creates a term he calls "sonic culture of protest" or "sonic campaign of crowd control." Simply put, rather than placing the broadcast into the politics of Red Shirt protests against the Thai...