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This article examines the multimodal construction of ideal manhood in male participants’ self-introduction videos in a Chinese reality dating show. A framework is developed to model identity as evaluative attributes and to explicate how they are constructed through linguistic and visual resources. Analysis of 91 videos shows two versions of idealized Chinese masculinity, namely, modern masculinity (mainly embodied by participants who have won a date), and traditional masculinity (mainly embodied by participants who have not won a date). Modern masculinity highlights career-oriented qualities, socio-economic status, and luxurious lifestyles, while traditional masculinity highlights family values, skills in Chinese cultural heritage, and class mobility. The findings provide new understandings of the complexity of Chinese masculinity in the dating show context, which reflects the influence of capitalist globalization on the one hand, and the government’s attempt to govern public conduct and morality on the other.

We approach Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement, also known as Occupy Central, encountered in two days in November 2014 as an exemplar of literacy as placemaking. As a contemporary city-based resistance movement, the creation and subsequent resemiotization of literacy artefacts was an important element of spatialized practice in asserting a new and dynamic sense of citizenship. In their collaborative design, shared commitment to certain values and expressions of political resistance these occupation sites may be read as an instantiation of Goodsell's (2003) concept of public space. The initial research site of engagement gave rise to a dataset of photographs that the authors examined together as discourses in place (Scollon & Scollon, 2003), informed by cultural knowledge of Hong Kong. Selecting two photographs, we broaden out beyond the linguistic features of texts to consider processes of creative semiotic remediation. We suggest that in such placemaking activities the Umbrella Movement activists embodied Giroux's (1992) concept of literacy as emancipatory practice. Finally we make suggestions as to how this study might be connected to a critical pedagogy of place (Mills & Comber, 2013)