The Untamed: Women who Indulging in Boy’s love as Counterpublics

Abstract: 

The summer of 2019 witnessed the Chinese TV series The Untamed (Mandarin: Chenqingling)'s popularity across China, South Korea and South East Asia. This drama, with the elaborated articulation of two male protagonists' romance, is adapted from an original boys' love fiction published online from 2015 which also received numerous book fans. Boys' love fiction which portrays male same-sex romantic and/erotic relationships emerged in mainland China since the 1990s, and is predominantly produced and consumed by heterosexual women. The power of this community can be detected from this TV series's popularity as the tag views on Weibo (similar to Twitter in China) reached over 30 billion with 36 million comments. Boys' love culture has presented its various potentials and power thought women's production and consumption of male homo-romantic cultural products, including fictions, TV series, audio series, animations. This paper will draw on the cyber-ethnography (Christine Hine 2000) to observe The Untamed's fans' intense interactive communications online as to explore how these female fans are self-organised as counterpublics (Nancy Fraser 1995, Michael Warner 2002) to build a collective identity and generate collective actions. Firstly, they are motivated to challenge the dominant heteronormative discourse, and they consciously reject the romantic relationships between two male protagonists to be incorporated as the homosocial bond (Eve Sedgwick 1985). Drawing on a queer female gaze (with reference to bell hooks' oppositional gaze, 1997), these women consume the male homoerotic culture to satisfy their desires as for recognition of an equal, non-patriarchal and non-heteronormative love relationships. Secondly, since the homoeroticism as a sensitive agenda for the Chinese government, these female fans creatively deploy regulatory rules, and consciously publicise this TV series with reference to the preference of censorship. They collectively draw on protective strategies to masquerade the homo-romantic contents as to avoid being banned from the cultural market. Consequently, these women ecstatically celebrate the consumption of the male homoeroticism online within their self-established and seld-regulated virtual space: discussion under hashtags, chat groups on different social media platforms, personal blogs, et cetera. Also, I will also discuss how these female boys' love fans endeavour to enrol more audiences, which not only broaden the spectatorship, but expanding their influences to generate changes in the dominant normative culture.