From "bad girl" to "daughter of Hong Kong" : Anita Mui and the Phenomenon of Stardom in Hong Kong popular culture

Abstract

This dissertation examines Cantopop Queen Anita Mui’s stardom as a cultural phenomenon and the product of complex processes of cultural production and consumption that extend beyond Mui’s lifetime. By situating Mui in the context of Hong Kong’s local music and popular entertainment scene from the late 1960s to the early 2000s, this study conducts a critical analysis on the star-making process in the local music industry, as well as the multi-layered discursive construction of Mui’s legend that culminated in the “Daughter of Hong Kong” narrative after her death in 2003. Combining archival research with critical analysis of different aspects of Mui’s star-text, including the critical discourse built around Mui’s star image, this study argues that the historical and social significance of Mui’s stardom cannot be fully gauged without a critical mapping of the historical and social landscape of the local music and popular entertainment since the 1960s, and the material processes through which the local music industry was transformed into a corporatized cross-media star-making system in the early 1980s. Drawing upon critical literature on stardom and sociological approaches to art and cultural production, it examines Anita Mui’s stardom as a collective endeavour that took place within a specific set of institutional, social, and industrial conditions, where different cultural agents operated in the star-making process. By revisiting received assumptions in popular and critical discourses about Mui’s life story and star image, the analysis presented in the following chapters offers alternative interpretations of Mui’s star-text to problematize taken-for-granted narratives of “Anita Mui”.