Cinema as a Sensory Circuit: Film Production and Consumption in Contemporary Taiwan

TL;DRAbstract

Using post-2000 Taiwan queer romance films as a case study, this thesis examines the relationship between the film industry and its audience. It revisits scholarly distrust of the culture industry to address how, and to what extent, the power of capitalism has privileged the industry at the expense of the audience’s freedom or personality. Ethnographically informed, the thesis deems political economy and cultural studies approaches to the research question to be unsatisfactory. Both neglect the sensory aspects of cinematic communication. Drawing inspiration from actor-network theory and the analysis of late capitalism by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, it approaches the film industry-audience relation as a volatile, affective (dis)connection mediated by physical entities, including media technologies. This (dis)connection reflects an era in which the film industry invests in technoscience, tie-in products, ancillary markets and media convergence in order to seduce the senses of the au

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