1College of Mass Communications, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, USA.
2School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA.
3School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA.
Super Girl, the Chinese version of American Idol or Britain's Pop Idol, is the most successful program in Chinese television history. Although modeled after them, Super Girl is not, however, an iteration of the Freemantle Media-owned Idol format. This paper situates Super Girl within the larger discussion of global participatory television formats and their relationships with issues of globality and locality. This study seeks to problematize the sometimes emancipatory conclusions drawn by scholars emphasizing “democratic” consumption and its potential for empowerment. This study concludes that Super Girl offers an opportunity to analyze the mobilization of the concept of hybridity for the very purposes of maintaining its opposite. In other words, we would propose as an emerging discourse, especially in the Chinese context, an expediency of hybridity.
