Doing feminism through Chinese online fiction fandom (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Information Society, 2007
Fandom, fan fiction, and "slash." 1 Some see these as harmless pastimes, others as the democratization of mass-mediated messages, and still others as frivolous-if not dangerously obsessive-behaviour. But regardless of one's opinion, it is impossible to ignore that the intersection of fan culture, fan writing, and Internet technology has produced a new communication phenomenon: the near-instantaneous reception of media texts, organized through virtual interactions that create a set of additional texts, clustered around the main texts and contributing to their impact. These new forums of interaction form rich and textured objects in which many communicative processes can be isolated and observed. Treating such online environments as spaces-as places where things happen-in Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online, Rhiannon Bury explores the politics of space, community, and identity in "female fandoms," with a special focus on the community-forming and-maintaining strategies of two groups of women. 2 This book, a development and extension of Bury's 2000 dissertation "Performing Gender On (the) Line: A Case Study of the Process of Community Making Among Members of a Women-Only Electronic Mailing List," explores these ideas using a participant-observer positioning that allows her access to the dynamics of the communities involved and the subtleties that one could only observe by being that close to the media texts and practices involved. I mention the title of her dissertation because the keywords of "performing gender" and "community making" are significant clues to the content and focus of her work. For this book is, more than anything, about the process of making and maintaining the communities of women's online fan spaces and how issues such as gender, class, and sexuality are articulated within those spaces. Bury draws on a sprawling theoretical literature that spans authors treating cyberculture generally; feminist and poststructuralist engagements with identity, community, space, and texts (including a Foucauldian engagement with the heterotopic); queer engagements with pornography and romance; sociological work on politeness and face-maintenance; and finally scholarship on textual modifica
2008
In Taiwan today, as in many other parts of east Asia from mainland China to South Korea to Japan, tens of thousands of young women are passionately engaged in consuming, producing, trading, talking about and even re-enacting comic-book narratives of love and sex between boys and yo ung men. These homoerotic manga comics are known among their Taiwanese fans as 'BL,' for ' boys' love' (Figures 11 .1-11.4). This chapter proposes that in teraction with BL texts enables women fans to engage actively with questions of gender and sexuali ty which are central to their own everyday experience as young female-bodied social subjects, and which can be negotiated 'at one remove' through the BL stories of male ho moerotic romance.
Yaoi/BL Fandom Survey (only takes 10 mins to complete): https://leeds.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/blfandomsurvey Our aim is to provide robust information on the demographic in Mainland China and Hong Kong who engage with female-oriented male-male erotica (a.k.a., danmei or Boys’ Love [BL]). We ask three novel research questions: Are there differences between (a) ‘casual’ and ‘avid’ danmei fans? (b) danmei fans by social outlook in the sexual sphere (‘Traditional’, ‘Progressive’)?, and (c) danmei fans from Mainland China and from Hong Kong? Questions were selected from our 43-question online BL fandom survey in Chinese and the largest data set of its kind (N=1498). Statistical comparisons provide evidence: of consistency between self-reported fan behaviour and fandom intensity: that avid fans are more likely to report nonhegemonic sexual orientations and to be more ‘Progressive’ than causal fans; the ‘Progressive’ report greater concern with copyright and legal issues while engaging with a wider range of sexual materials than do the ‘Traditional’; and fans from Hong Kong are more likely to report nonhegemonic sexual orientations and to be ‘Progressive’ than those from Mainland China. In conclusion, although materials often perpetuate a heteronormative ideology, avid fans demonstrate a relatively progressive social outlook and engagement in socially-challenging danmei-related activities and we speculate that even casual engagement with danmei may encouraged young people to think critically about the complexities of human sexuality.
Women Negotiating Feminism and Science Fiction Fandom
Springer eBooks, 2022
It considers the different ways in which fan studies exists at the intersection of media (old and new), cultural studies, and reception studies and as a result, rethinks the production of the fields of literature, art, philosophy, theater and performance, film and television, and beyond. The series welcomes a diverse set of methodological approaches including Marxism, race theory, gender studies, affect theory, the history of print, convergence theory, digital studies, material culture, and participatory culture, as well as geographies, historical periods, and disciplines. The aim of the series is to showcase how fan studies can offer new theoretical frameworks for understanding significant artistic, literary, historical, and cultural movements, and in turn, how these innovative approaches to representing contemporary culture and media theory have expanded the Humanities.
In the last 20 years of ‘women’s literature,’ romances’ content has grown into postmodern stories whose heroines (and male protagonists) are in a wider array than ever before: Asian-American, Latina, multiracial, women who love women, shapeshifters, women with superpowers, and women who explore the boundaries of being sexually submissive or dominant (Ellora’s Cave, 2012; Fitzgerald, 2006; Laws, 2007). When women edit, read, and own Internet-based publishing houses, the electronic format proliferates forms of feminism by producing material that subverts the alpha male domination present in traditional brick-and-mortar romance novels. Furthermore, narratives of female desire and performance are disrupted and legitimated; thus creating powerfully disruptive narratives of gender and gender identity from the social periphery.
BEYOND RESISTANCE: GENDER, PERFORMANCE, AND FANNISH PRACTICE IN DIGITAL CULTURE
Although the web appears to be a welcoming space for women, online spaceslike offline spaces-are rendered female through associations with the personal/private, embodiment, or an emphasis on intimacy. As such, these spaces are marked, marginalized, and often dismissed. Using an explicitly interdisciplinary approach that combines cultural studies models with feminist theory, new media studies, and performance, Beyond Resistance uses fandom as a way to render visible the invisible ways that repressive discourses of gender are woven throughout digital culture. I examine a variety of online fan practices that use popular media to perform individual negotiations of repressive ideologies of sex and gender, such as fan-authored fiction, roleplaying games, and vids and machinima-digital videos created from re-editing television and video game texts. Although many of these negotiations are potentially resistive, I demonstrate how that potential is being limited and redirected in ways that actually reinforce constructions of gender that support the dominant culture.