Empowerment through craziness: The German TV series Knallerfrauen and its female viewers in China

Abstract

Based on a critical discourse analysis of the reading practices of 66 female viewers in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou and the relations between such discourse practice and the sociocultural contexts, this article adopts a postfeminist framework to examine the reasons and mechanisms of the popularity of the German TV show Knallerfrauen among Chinese women. This article maintains that by contributing ‘craziness’ as a discursive resource to empower awakening feminist Chinese viewers, the show achieved ‘unexpected’ success in China as a result of the combined forces of the show’s textual qualities, the unique sociocultural contexts of contemporary China and the attempt to turn to Western popular culture for cultural resources by Chinese urban middle-class women driven by their colossal disappointment in the loss of critical and radical local (post)feminist criticism almost extinguished by an oppressive state discourse and seductive consumerism. This article ends by spelling out the value of scholarship on such cross-cultural television texts in the domains of meaning production, communication and consumption in the age of globalization.