Browsing by Subject "Danmei"

Using the Chinese "Harry Potter" danmei tongren fandom as an example, this thesis discusses the specific reading and writing habits of the Chinese danmei tongren fans. "Danmei tongren" is a Chinese umbrella term for fan fiction about male homoerotic romance that uses characters from popular texts. It is a type of popular culture appreciated mainly by young Chinese female netizens. The thesis is divided into two chapters. The first chapter discusses the reasons why danmei has become the mainstream genre/modality of tongren writing in contemporary PRC, by exploring the lineage of Chinese tongren culture and the desire and needs of its major female participants. The second chapter analyzes the specific fannish reading and writing habits fostered by online communities from the perspectives of the relationship between fans and the source texts, the interactions and conflicts between tongren readers and writers, and fans' literary innovation under communal limitations. Based on participant observation of fan practices, textual analysis of fan texts, and qualitative interviews with eight Harry Potter danmei tongren fans, I argue that danmei tongren fans' reading and writing are shaped and mediated by the complex negotiations in the intimate online community built and connected by fans' emotional investments.

The concerns and questions in this paper are predicated on what havehappened during the past three years in the field of Chinese danmei culture. I notice that, on the one hand, the state is cracking down on danmei fans’ erotic writing by punishing creators who produce “yinhui” works and depriving them of or imposing stringent censorship on media platforms where danmei fans share their works; on the other hand, the banned danmei dramas adapted from popular original novels are adjusted into “dan’gai dramas” to reenter the mainstream market and in this tends, several works have received huge commercial success. Juxtaposing these two phenomena, I divided the paper into two chapters to analyze two groups of texts – the danmei erotica which are criminalized or stigmatized by the discourse of “yinhui seqing” and the adapted dan’gai drama and its original novel which are permitted and consumed in the market. By closely reading these texts and examining how they interact with media theory, gender/queer theory, and literary criticism, I indicate the disruptive and subversive potential of danmei culture and unpack multiple contesting forces in this field to show the complexity, possibilities, and predicaments of danmei.