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The rise of Cantopop can be attributed to the huge growth in local audiences in Hong Kong in the 1970s, when local Cantonese cultural industries became profitable business. The radical transformation of the socio-political background and the swift development of local mass media in the 1970s provided a historical juncture in which a local Hong Kong consciousness came into being at long last. While Cantonese television and cinema became central to the colony’s cultural industries, Cantopop industry also provided a new source of stars. Thanks to its thriving vitality, the changing mediascape, and the developing economy, Cantopop had grown into a highly profitable business with a quickly expanding market by the end of the 1970s.

Throughout the 1980s, superstars such as Leslie Cheung, Alan Tam, and Anita Mui surpassed their predecessors by developing Cantopop into a multi-media business that also straddled the borders of neighbouring regions. These superstars staged hundreds of concerts in the newly built Hong Kong Coliseum, with a seating capacity of more than 10,000; concerts thus became a highly profitable business. Cantopop successfully helped Hong Kong establish its leading role in the multi-billion dollar idol business of popular culture. Whilst Cantopop was orchestrating a spectacle of consumerism, it was not hopelessly standardised; although it was unabashedly commercial it was also vigorously hybridised. Not unlike Hong Kong, which assimilates different cultures, Cantopop’s renditions of Euro-American, Japanese, Mandarin, and even Korean songs made it a vibrant hybrid of different music cultures.

Since the 1990s, there has been dense traffic of pop culture routinely crossing the national and cultural boundaries of East Asian countries of Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. The unequal traffic is predominantly from Japan and Korea into ethnic-Chinese dominant locations, which has a historically long and well established production, distribution and exhibition network; Japan and Korea are primarily production-exporting nations, while China and Singapore as primarily importing-consumption ones, with Taiwan emerging as the production centre in Mandarin pop music and Hong Kong remaining as the primary production location of Chinese languages cinemas. Japanese and Korean pop culture are translated, dubbed or subtitled into a Chinese language in one of the ethnic-Chinese importing locations and then re-exported and circulated within the entire Chinese ‘diaspora’. The structures and processes that engender this transnational flow are the foundational to the emergence of an East Asian regional media cultural economy that increasingly see co-production of films and television dramas.

This chapter explores the entanglement between queer desires and struggles with normativities in fandoms through the case study of Denise Ho (a.k.a. HOCC) in Hong Kong. HOCC is one of the few celebrities in the Chinese-language entertainment industry to have come out as a lesbian. Data is drawn from participant observation and semi-structured interviews with 29 fans between 2009 and 2014. By analyzing the interplay between Hong Kong sexual cultures, fans’ everyday lives, and fans’ interactions with global media, it is found that fans struggled with negotiating HOCC’s gender and sexuality and their own before HOCC’s coming-out, leading to the paradoxical celebration and self-policing of queer reading at the same time. HOCC’s coming out in 2012 has significantly reshaped her queer fandom. It is observed that fans have turned their attention to the negotiation of HOCC’s “proper” lesbian embodiment as the “correct” representation of the LGBT/tongzhi movement. By revealing the complex relations between heteronormativity and homonormativity, this chapter concludes that HOCC fans in Hong Kong, who are situated within macrostructural and micropolitical forces, desire to be queer by transgressing normal and paradoxically desire to be normal by tactically negotiating the limits of queer.