Thesis Defence: Choreographing Gender

Lanxin Li, supervised by Dr. Laura Meek, will defend their thesis titled “Choreographing Gender: Chinese Lala Performance Through K Pop Dance Cover Videos” in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies – Global Studies theme.

An abstract for Lanxin Li’s thesis is included below.

Defences are open to all members of the campus community as well as the general public. Registration is not required for in-person defences.

Abstract

K-pop has become highly popular in Asian queer communities, especially through its cover dances, which are often performed in queer bars and ballrooms. Previous research has examined how K-pop cover dance empowers queer men to embrace femininity and envision identities outside patriarchal and heterosexual norms, particularly in places like Thailand. However, the exploration of lesbianism through K-pop cover dance, especially among Chinese lala/lesbian K-pop dancers, remains underexplored. In this thesis, I will discuss Chinese lalas’ experience with K-pop cover dance on Xiaohongshu and Douyin, two main social media platforms to post dance cover videos in China. This research aims to investigate how lala-identified video content creators use K-pop cover dance on Chinese social media platforms to negotiate and express gendered subjectivities. Specifically, I divide the analysis into two parts. The first focuses on performing in the dance videos, where I examine the different “lala vibes” expressed through dance performance and what these vibes mean to lalas. The second focuses on posting the videos on social media platforms, where I examine the use of lala-related hashtags such as #le in the circulation and presentation of dance videos. The research involves online participant observations on both Douyin and Xiaohongshu. Following these observations, I conducted semi-structured interviews with Chinese lala K-pop cover dancers on these platforms. In this thesis, I argue that lala K-pop cover dance in China operates as a relational and platformed mode of queer world-making, where embodied dance practices and digital strategies such as hashtagging work together to negotiate gender nonconformity, visibility, safety, and community under conditions shaped by China’s platformized digital landscape. Therefore, this thesis contributes to the understanding of social media dance as a meaningful practice through which self and community are constructed, and K-pop cover dance as a medium through which marginalized groups such as lalas build connections. The research also provides empirical material for future scholarship on decolonizing queer Asia by theorizing shuai and zhongxing as locally situated forms of gender expression in China that move beyond identity-based frameworks.