Panel 35: Gender and Youth in Contemporary Chinese Internet Literature

Chair: Michel Hockx, University of Notre Dame

Panelists

Wanze Ma, Zhejiang University, “Becoming Gendered: The Gender-Divided Market of Chinese Online Fiction”

Chinese online fiction is primarily and explicitly categorized as the female/male channel—a unique practice not seen in other cultural products. Historically, the online literary community started with a predominantly male audience and authorship, leading to a masculinization of the themes and styles of online literature. As the number of female readers grew, they formed their own separate communities, although some gender-neutral communities persisted. However, the commercialization and capitalization of the online literary community solidified this gender-divided classification. The shift towards commissioned production changed the interaction dynamics between writers and
their audiences, enhancing readers’ gendered identification or their ability to see themselves in the stories. Writers, under pressure from their readers and platforms seeking greater profits, increasingly imitated and reinforced gender-specific styles. And the institutional isomorphism led other platforms to mimic similar gendered categorizations and platforms that did not adapt were pushed out of the
market. Over time, gendered categorization became a normalized aspect of the industry. This paper explores how Chinese online fiction became gendered and contributes to theories on how gender is institutionalized into society.

Haosheng Yang, Miami University, “Disguised Identities and Desires: A Feminist Reading of Chinese BL Stories”

Over the past years, danmei (indulging beauty) fiction, or Boys Love – stories featuring the romantic relationship between two male protagonists – has become the most popular genre in China’s Internet literature. Correspondingly, TV dramas, animation, graphic novels, and audio drama series adapted from some of the most read Internet danmei fiction have gained significant market success. What is most interesting, though, are the authorship and readership of these works: they are often written by straight women, and the genre’s top fans are straight women as well.

As a genre, danmei fiction is inspired by Japanese Boys Love originated in 1970’s manga culture, where female artists created homoerotic romance between male characters as a rebellion against a male-dominated industry. Although homosexuality is still a taboo theme in China’s mainstream entertainment and media today, the massive community of female writers and fans of danmei fiction reveals the commonly shared frustration over traditional gender roles among Chinese women.

This paper examines the feminist frustration and awakening behind the popularity of danmei fiction in China’s contemporary cultural scene. Through analyzing the most popular gay romance novels on the Internet, including Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, Faraway Wanderers, Breaking Clouds, and I Like Your Pheromones, it argues that Chinese women, by writing and reading danmei fiction, have attempted to build a utopia to escape the male gaze and reject gender norms, as well as to explore taboo desires in China’s deeply patriarchal society. Despite the state’s strict censorship of homosexual content in cultural products, the continuing development of the genre demonstrates Chinese women’s pursuit of free expression and gender equality in the fictional realm.

Hongfen Shen, Shantou University, “Transformation of Self-Development and Identity in Young Adult Narratives of Growth in China’s Digital Era”

This paper explores the portrayal of self-development among contemporary Chinese youth through a comparative analysis of Bildungsroman and variations of coming-of-age themed fictions, focusing particularly on the escalating speculative fiction over the last decade, examines the emergence of new forms of chronotopes and identity construction among internet generations, and to redefine the norms and values of these online narratives. It highlights how the concept of virtuality, increasingly intertwined with or even replacing reality in these subgenres, reshapes the traditional temporal and spatial frameworks, which have seen the decline of physical time-space constructs and the ascendancy of imagined realms where time is accelerated to a contemporized present or structured into visible escalation systems; concurrently, spatial dimensions transition from “locality” towards a decentralized, dehistoricized, and decontextualized “worldliness,” or are adopted into extensible “cosmoses” embedding game mechanics. The identity of youth within these contexts witnesses a paradoxical tension either as anonymous quitters embodying realistic subjectivity or heroes/heroines representing the subjectivity of desire, navigating or dominating speculative worlds based on specific role-play dynamics. However, this portrayal of self-division reflects Deleuzian “dividuals” flowing across different domains as multifaceted identities that contribute to forming operable aggregative communities. Serving as both products of mass cultural industries and as representatives of youth subcultures, the imagined and fictional self-transformations of contemporary Chinese youth function as textual intermediaries, reshaping the “socially pragmatic Bildung” structured within dominant success-oriented ideologies, rather than merely conforming to or being subordinated by them.