Boys' love in girls' hands : the survival of a gendered youth culture in mainland China and Hong Kong

Abstract

Originating in the late-1970s' Japanese comic and fiction culture, boys' love (BL) has become a transnational genre in which young women create, distribute and appreciate stories of male-male relationships in various media, ranging from fiction, comics, music, video films, radio dramas and cosplays (an abbreviation of costume-play), to computer games. Also known as danmei (we indulge in the beautiful) in Chinese, the genre expanded and blossomed in the late-1990s in mainland China and Hong Kong. Grounded in the two relatively unstudied fields, this thesis presents a systematic analysis of a distinctive (and less understood) Chinese BL phenomenon from an ethnographic perspective. Unlike most existing literature which has been focusing on psychoanalysis of BL participation and how followers in different countries accept Japanese BL genre as passive readers, much of this thesis deals with the growing complexity of the production, regulation, representation, consumption, and circulation of local BL practices in mainland China and Hong Kong. It aims to shed lights on how a transnational culture is constructed and indigenised under local social, economic, cultural and political conditions. I argue that young women in mainland China and Hong Kong turn from a passive readership to become active in local BL production through ways such as appreciating and identifying with BL values, participating in creation of the most convenient amateur cultural forms, establishing local BL economies, and using conditional and responding tactics to survive the hostile political and social circumstance. In a weaker status position and a more hostile social circumstance, Chinese participants have to poach resources from the cultural industry and transform their resistance into everyday tactics more actively than their Hong Kong counterparts. Show more