The Death and Rebirth of Anna May Wong: Strategic Re-Narrativization and De-Reification Through Social Media
Arts
Film & Digital Media
How does cinephilia express itself online? What media (or media formats) and tools are available to internet “prosumers” to refunction and re-narrativize celebrity and performance? What are the radical potentialities of the GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) image? How are those radical potentialities mediated by their prosumers? In this paper, I theorize about the radical potentiality of the GIF as a tool of de-reification in online social media spaces, specifically Tumblr and Twitter. To do this, I examine GIFs of film actress and icon Anna May Wong, one of the first Chinese-American actresses of early Hollywood. I analyze how these GIFs are mobilized by online “prosumers” (internet users, predominantly youth, who both produce and consume online visual content) towards a strategic refunctioning and re-narrativizing of Wong’s legacy as both an icon and a historical figure. I engage with theories around star studies, digital media, critical race studies, postcolonial studies, and Peter X. Feng’s theory of strategic re-narrativization to articulate my arguments. I discuss the affective and performative qualities of the GIF as well. This essay teases out the dialogic nature of identity-based social media spaces by using Wong as a case study, showing how the creation and employment of GIFs of Wong’s performances are part of a larger discourse of cinephilia, but also one that takes unwitting advantage of the GIF’s radical political potentialities towards de-reifying identity categorization and essentialization.
