This research examines how the popular music industry has fostered queer female stardom in the greater China area since the 1980s. Compared with other forms of media, music seems easier as a platform to normalize, or even promote open, alternative sexual expressions with its highly affective qualities. With special references to mechanisms of regional singing contests, emphasis is placed primarily on three Chinese female champion-singers: Ho Denise Wan See (HOCC) from Hong Kong, Li Chris Yuchun from mainland China, and Zhang Yun-jing from Taiwan. The project argues that these singing contests contribute to the construction of contemporary transnational stardom, and are especially empowering and to the vocal privilege of emerging female singers. Consumption and reception of their music and sexually indeterminate public imaging will also be discussed as reinforcement of queer stardom and popularity throughout their performance careers. Since the public images and music videos of Ho, Li, and Zhang have constantly involved androgynous outfits and homoerotic imagery, and their subsequent songs loaded with sexually ambivalent or suggestive lyrics, the paper attempts to demonstrate that both their personal life and social responsibilities, both their sexuality and music weigh equally on their career. The star-texts are also important sites for signification and identification to spectators, so issues of fandom will be examined. As the candidate-stars actually grow with their fans in the “player-kill (PK)” context; they serve a mutual projection and monitory entity to mirror one another’s personal conduct and maturation. / published_or_final_version / Comparative Literature / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Clinical Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

John Gay's poetry offers a variety of subject, theme, and genre that challenges both student and scholar. Using G. C. Faber's edition --The Poetical Works of John Gay--as a chief textual source, I have analyzed Gay's nondramatic poetry to show his use of structure-specifically, his use of denomination, or paragraph length--and the manner by which that use of structure heightens and sustains his thematic concerns.The variety of theme obscures the artist in Gay. But although in the five stages of his craftsmanship he subordinately stressed the themes of variety and violence, of the transformation of willful woman and the absurdity of proud woman, he consistently expressed both his principle that art, more particularly his poetry, should instruct and correct man, and his theme that life demands an alert, perceptive, rational, self-controlled, and charitable man who is tolerant of people but intolerant of their crimes of passion. However, about 1720, Gay's dominant theme was altered by his awareness that art cannot effect right reason in those who are ruled by passion. Hence, direct art must give way to direct satire, and direct satire, to art which ostensibly appears to amuse the reader. Thus in his thematic content, Gay strove for a moral design; for him, art essentially was a means-whether direct or indirect--of establishing in man the final natural and right order of the universe.With his use of poetic structure to heighten theme, Gay more surely determined his status as a major poet of design. In his manipulation of predominantly even denomination, he achieved rhythm or contour. Although incorporated shorter contours of from three to five paragraphs are used primarily for rhythm, the longer contours of from four to twelve or more paragraphs are concomitant with segments or subsegments which are structural units having discrete correlation with thematic content. The larger denomination is used to stress that thematic content. Gay then further developed, balanced, or counterpointed that stress with a particular moderate denomination-the verse paragraph of fourteen lines, which I have called the congeneric sonnet. For the congeneric sonnet Gay drew upon the unity and function of the prose paragraph and the pattern and intensity of the traditional sonnet to create a particular form in verse. That form had its own internal integrity and, more important for Gay, it functioned structurally and thematically as part of the entire poem.Gay's greatest achievement of his nondramatic career was his instituting of counterpoint with the two cantos of the 1720 version of Rural Sports. With a highly complex but discrete interspersion of large denomination and congeneric sonnet, Gay created some four structural rhythms and counterpointed the theme of aggressive and artful conduct in experiencing the variety of nature with the theme of the recognition and acceptance of divine order and personal responsibility.After achieving through the major revision of Rural Sports the grand statement of the longer poem, Gay withdrew. With a loss of confidence in man's ability to behave as a Good Augustan, Gay expected less of the reader. That is, as he turned in the Fables to ostensibly diverting his reader in order to implant moral principle, or at least to suspend irrational behavior, he turned to a lesser design and a faster tempo. Even in his partial retraction in his faith in humanistic rationalism, however, Gay remained the consummate poet of design who consciously directed his craft through fused theme and structure to fulfill its purpose of conveying with varied order and rational intensity his perspective of the ordered variety of nature and the calm intensity of a rational universe.

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Thesis (MPsych(Clin))--University of South Australia, 1999

Dissertation (Ph.D.) -- The Institute for Clinical Social Work, 1989. / A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the Institute of Clinical Social Work in partial fulfillment for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Thesis (M.Ed.)--University of Melbourne, 1999. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 150-162).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Melbourne, Dept. of Education Policy and Management, 2003. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 337-363).

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2007. Graduate Programme in Social Anthropology. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 170-173). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:MR29267

Thesis (Ph.D.). / Written for the Dept. of Sociology. Title from title page of PDF (viewed 2008/07/28). Includes bibliographical references.