Event Details

Dr Eva Li of KCL presents her work on Mainland Chinese fans of banned Hong Kong celebrity Denise Ho

What becomes of fandom when the state renders its object politically 'un-lovable', and what draws some fans to remain, or even join, after a ban? This talk examines how fans of banned celebrities sustain transgressive attachments under authoritarian rule, drawing on in-depth interviews with 32 Chinese mainland fans of Denise Ho (何韻詩, aka HOCC), a Hong Kong queer, pro-democracy singer-activist whose work has been subject to erasure, including platform removals, market compliance, and industry self-censorship in mainland China since late 2014. Extending feminist geographies scholarship on intimate geopolitics and queer Sinophone work on affective geopolitics, I theorise fandom as a site of intimate geopolitics: a terrain where state power intervenes in everyday cultural consumption and fans transform affective attachments into precarious resilience and resistance. A key finding is that most participants became fans after 2014, when HOCC’s Sina Weibo account was removed, an early sign of her informal, platform-driven ban. I conceptualise their sustaining practices as quiet attachment, reorienting the field from an emphasis on visibility and collective performance toward the quiet, emotionally charged persistence through which fans sustain ties to a censored figure under authoritarian constraint. Loss and silence are thus reworked as resources for solidarity, countering surveillance and disappearance with persistence and care.