My research focuses on performance traditions, media technologies, and what happens when they intersect. I did the fieldwork for my Ph.D. dissertation (University of Chicago, Anthropology, 1998) with actresses and fans of Taiwanese Opera. The dissertation focused on Taiwanese Opera’s tradition of cross-gender performance, how actresses and their female fans thought about the relationship between onstage and offstage gender roles, and how this changed as koa-a-hi moved from temple festival performance to commercial theaters to film and television. For my next projects, I worked with the producers and fans of the Pili International Multimedia Company’s video puppetry series, and then with designers and collectors of different types of anthropomorphic figurines, including those for worship, puppets, and media tie-in products.
My book, Puppets, Gods, and Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan, forthcoming from the University of Hawai`i Press, is based on these projects, as well as some fieldwork with fans of Japanese manga and anime. In the book, I develop an anthropological concept of animation as a complement to the concept of performance: if performance is the creation of social selves through embodiment and psychic introjection, animation is the creation of social others through the projection of agency into the material world. I then look at practices of animation across different fields within Taiwanese society: entertainment, folk religion, economic enterprise, and the construction of national identity.
My current research project looks at the expansion of the art toy and local comics scenes throughout East and Southeast Asia. These scenes lie at the intersection of subculture and the creative industry, and I focus on how work and play, local aesthetics and global market logics, and class, gender, and national identities, are being constructed and combined in new ways.