Permeable frames: intersections of the performance, the everyday, and the ethical in Chinese street singing

Abstract

Amateur performances of pop classics take place daily in various public spots in Wuhan, China. Audience members reward singers with cash tips; these practices are bound up in personal relationships established as the two parties socialise at and away from the events. Building on Goffmanian notions of frame shifting, I explore how performance, everyday, and ethical realms of experience intersect during these occasions. Boundaries between performance and everyday frames are indistinct in a physical sense and in how participants relate to each other. This in turn feeds into the integration of the performances in participants' ethical lives. Rather than a shifting between these three frames, I see mutual permeability as the basis for the sociality here.

Popular Song Afterlives

“…She has been busy fraternizing on the fringes of the audience and lost track of her place in the rota as she is 2 Names have been changed in this article. Perhaps on account of the typically low status of street performing in China (Jeffreys and Wang 2012), many participants I encountered preferred to keep their participation in the shows separate from their wider lives (Horlor 2019a). called.…”