An intersectional analysis of queer men in social-issue-driven fashion films

Abstract

Fashion film is now a popular approach for both the fashion industry and individual creators to present “creative and informative audio-visual images of and about fashion” (Rees-Roberts, 2018, p.13). While fashion films primarily play a role in promotion and commerce, some of them have been engaging with social issues, and this research considers them as a specific fashion film genre – social-issuedriven fashion film. This thesis will examine how contemporary social-issue-driven fashion films represent gender, sexuality and ethnicity with a specific focus on East Asian gay men. Fashion film brings more possibilities to the way fashion could be presented and this has been investigated from a corporate perspective in existing studies. However there is no research that has considered fashion films that engage with social issues as a particular genre and discussed how representations of gender, sexuality and particular ethnicity are formed in response to social issues related to gender fluidity, equality of sexual and ethnic minority. By using textual analysis to examine how gender boundaries are challenged and how queer men and East Asian queer men, in particular, are constructed in fashion films, this thesis argues that the representation of queer men and East Asian queer men along with the negotiation of gender codes has presented a great ambivalence between social issues and the way that subjects are presented. Interestingly, it is found that the representation of redefining gender is highly dependent on the very gender binary system. Although it deliberately creates confusion, such as styling men with garments conventionally regarded as womenswear, it also reinforces and reminds audiences of the gendered convention of dressing because these looks are unconventional. These fashion films are found to be dominated by one particular group – young, slender gay men with androgynous appearance, which is worrying because the community is somehow simplified to an exclusive group. Lastly, East Asian gay characters are in general made to assimilate into the Western gender and sexuality system while the fashion industry is dominated by fashion businesses from the west. The thesis opens a new topic to discuss social-issue-driven fashion films as a new genre and identifies both positives and negatives from representations within social-issue-driven fashion films.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Elio D. Hao: orcid.org/0009-0004-8604-2670

ORCID for Valentina Cardo: orcid.org/0000-0002-1993-6058

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