Lele Han

Lele Han’s research focuses on the intersection of theatre historiography, fan studies, and musical theatre. With eight years of personal experience as a musical theatre fan in China and active engagement in fan communities, she brings both scholarly and insider perspectives to her research.

Project Title: From Broadway Matinee Girls to Chinese Musical Fans: Fashioning Female Subjectivities Through Reperformances

Project Description: This essay weaves intercultural networks between young women fans in two eras: contemporary Chinese musical theatre fans and turn-of-the-20th-century Broadway matinee girls. In both cases, fans mobilize their bodies as vehicles to capture ephemeral performances, producing liveness through representation as a means of repeatedly inventing and reinventing modern female subjectivity. Chinese fans reperform musical numbers with idealistic and revolutionary themes, such as “My Shot” from Hamilton (2015), in everyday settings. Meanwhile, bourgeois white women joined weekly dance-learning clubs and re-enacted cakewalk dances from In Dahomey (1903), as documented in matinee girls’ theatrical scrapbooks held at the New York Public Library. These reperformances across racial or gender lines expose the power dynamics between individuals and the external models they draw on for self-fashioning. This essay investigates: Why do fans imitate the external models in their process of subjectification? How are repertoires of fans’ reperformances transmitted through imitation?

Academic Interests: Theatre Historiography, Fan Studies, Musical Theatre, Archive