Positioning gender in time-travel: time-travel TV dramas as dialogic resources for constructing and re-imagining identity among Mainland Chinese postgraduates in Hong Kong

Time-travel television dramas have recently gained tremendous popularity worldwide. Defying stereotypes of romance TV dramas as women’s genres, time-travel romance TV drama genres seem to have attracted young men and women of different walks of life. Informed by positioning theory and Bakhtin’s heteroglossic dialogism, this study investigates a group of bilingual Mainland Chinese, heterosexual postgraduate students’ consumption of a Chinese time-travel TV drama, <i>Scarlet Heart</i>. It is found that well-educated Mainland Chinese women and men are still confronted with dilemmas of gender role boundaries and pressure to subscribe to traditional gender values. However, the time-travel TV drama has enabled the interviewees to negotiate new gender relations when they assign different positions to the female protagonist and themselves in the discussion. It is therefore proposed that time-travel TV dramas can be appropriated as dialogic resources for ideological becoming and critical literacy activities for facilitating construction of alternative subject positions and identities.