This book examines the sensory aspects of the power dynamics between the film industry and its audience, using post-2000 Taiwan queer romance films as a case study. It revisits scholarly distrust of the culture industry to address how and to what extent the power of capitalism has privileged the industry at the expense of the audience's freedom or personality.

Between July 2009 and March 2011, I interviewed filmmakers, film producers, marketers, and spectators, in addition to running a focus group of film viewers. The fieldwork materials unravel the practices of film production, promotion, and consumption in post-2000 Taiwan, where the film industry was booming once again after a decade of decay. From what I have learnt and observed, it is incontrovertible that there has been an imbalance of power between consumers and the culture industry, represented here by the film industry, and I have seen evidence of contestation. Notwithstanding this, my fieldwork material proved inadequate the political-economic analysis of power structures and the cultural studies approach to social resistance. This is because throughout my ethnographic research, I have seen people deal with volatility as part of the film experience. This includes the experience of producing and consuming film products. By volatility, I not only mean that power dynamics shift around or between film producers and consumers; but more importantly, I have perceived power dynamics shifting on the basis that film producers and consumers act in relation to one another when both are engulfed by sensations, feelings, impulses, and inexplicable intuition. In common sense terms, social dynamics have their affective and sensory aspects. Political economy and cultural studies, however, have paid insufficient attention to these aspects when it comes to the interplay between consumers and the culture industry. This insufficiency motivated me to work on this book, in which I approach the relationship between the film industry and the audience as unstable but affectual and therefore biopolitical. Ethnographically informed, I trace and attribute the power dynamics between the audience and the film industry to intervention by physical entities, including organic bodies, inorganic objects, and media technologies. I argue that the opaque intervention by these entities affects the physical bodies of film producers and consumers, diversifies the result of cinematic communication, and as a consequence contributes to the instability of the biopolitical relationship between the audience and the film industry.