Youngchi Chang

"Global Intertextuality: An Analysis of the Intertextuality of Sex and the City in East Asia"

As a distinguished scholar, John Fiske has taught and studied various aspects of popular culture and media. Understanding television (and other media) as a cultural agent, Fiske famously argues that the meaning of media texts does not come from the structures of text itself but result from the social experience of the reader. In so doing, Fiske calls for our attention to intertextuality. By examining how a text is recognized in other texts, Fiske believes, we could explore how meanings are provoked and circulated in a given society. Intertextuality has been an important and influential concept in media and cultural studies. Not only has it been theoretically significant, but intertextuality has also provided a concrete methodological framework for those studies that look at television as a cultural text. Despite the great influence of his theory, however, many studies only look at how a western TV program is circulated in a western society. This is, I believe, a limited usage of Fiske’s scholarship on television studies in the sense that television programs now internationally flow. As growing numbers of scholars have delved into the question of the cultural signification of global media productions, it is our task to ask how meanings of a certain television text are produced in other societies by utilizing Fiske’s notion of intertextuality.

I examine this by looking at how the US TV series Sex and the City is intertextually circulated in Asia. As Fiske specifies, intertextuality has two dimensions – the horizontal (between primary texts) and the vertical (between a primary text and other texts of a different type that refer to it). This paper consists of these two dimensions of the intertextuality of Sex and the City in the region. It seeks to what meanings the American media text produce in this cultural region, and explores the implications of the meanings produced. Observing how frequently Sex and the City is retextualized in Asian societies across diverse media programs, this paper argues: The characters in Sex and the City are often configured to symbolize sexual freedom and feminine independence and their relationship is interpreted as female solidity. The reference of Sex and the City in the institutionally produced texts or in the texts that audiences produced (or, tertiary texts in Fiske’s term) in Asia indicates the global dimension of intertextuality.

      Eventually, based on this examination, I propose the following three things. First, Fiske’s notion of intertextuality is helpful to find meanings of a certain media text not only in the domestic sphere but also in the international context. Second, this study suggests that studying a text’s intertextual relations in transnational flows is valuable in the aspect that it could provide us with possibly different meanings of a certain media text. Television’s polysemy should be examined in broader geo-cultural contexts as we now live in a global era. Last, this case study reinforces Fiske’s view on audiences as social subjects.