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This chapter focuses on celebrity mechanisms in China's public health realm. It first examines the emergence of celebrity activism on health issues in the international arena and within the controversial and problematic state management of HIV/AIDS in China. It then turns to the rise of “HIV/AIDS Heroes” in the People's Republic of China (PRC) where the co-production and consumption of what Lisa Ann Richey and Stefano Ponte (2008: 711–29) call “aid celebrities” now occurs. It focuses on one of China's “AIDS heroes”, the actor Pu Cunxin, who has been actively enlisted in the CCP's policy goal of halting the spread of HIV/AIDS through appearances in educational movies and commercial TV series.

This chapter focuses on celebrities and their place in the neoliberal framework and dispensation of care. A long history of celebrity involvement in politics and humanitarian efforts has contributed to the production of celebrity activism as an influential media phenomenon that now permeates popular culture. Celebrity activism is framed within a media space that privileges neoliberal ideologies of individualism and accentuates discourses about the agency of powerful Western women traveling to “save” women of the Global South. In the spectaclization of the strong celebrity heroine that follows, local women of the area are either marginalized or overlooked in the mediasphere. Thus, the chapter focuses on Angelina Jolie's celebrity activism as promoting a style of engagement in a politics marked as noncontroversial and as capitalizing on the pervasive power and transnational appeal of Western celebrity culture.

This chapter analyses Hollywood tourist romances Eat Pray Love and Under the Tuscan Sun as examples of texts in which the burdened white woman transcends her melancholic state as a result of travelling beyond US borders. The female protagonists in both films are creative writers who feel stifled by their urban environments and discover that the value systems they encounter outside the US allow them to feel creatively reinvigorated as well as liberated from societal dictates that declare true happiness to reside in marriage, upward mobility, and bodily discipline. In these films, the tourist zone must appear to exist independently of the globalising forces of neoliberal capitalism, with the heroines’ belief that they are divinely guided on a spiritual journey of self-discovery constituting a shift away from the secular ideologies of neoliberalism and postfeminism, while also operating as a form of white exceptionalism within the foreign space.

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.

The conclusion discusses the recent changes that have occurred in Hollywood as a result of backlash over a lack of industry diversity, both onscreen and behind the camera. It points to the recent successes of films with predominantly African American casts at the Academy Awards, and hypothesises as to how the reception of such films by both industry professionals and audiences may have changed in the Trump era. In addition, the concluding chapter explores how the book’s arguments may resonate beyond the US context.