Boys’ Love, Queer Affect, China

Abstract

Danmei (耽美), a loanword derived from Japanese kanji (tanbi), describes Chinese popular cultural genres including Japanese BL (boys’ love) manga, cinema, and internet literature that feature love between beautiful young men. My paper examines how a particular type of BL cultural production, namely, boys’ love cinema circulated on such hosting sites as YouTube, iQIYI, and bilibili, can be understood as part and parcel of the neoliberalization of queer lives in contemporary China. I argue that the cultural representations of widening social strata between gay male lovers in BL cinema, its conventional elite and corporate settings, and its obsession with the erotic displays of young male bodies altogether form a dialectical relation to such issues as the rise of China, Chinese urban capitalism, and the increasing corporatization of queer lives in urban China. Alternatively, BL cinema’s affective economy of commodified desire and economic social gap may also draw our attention to BL cinema as a site that manifests all the contradiction internal to being queer in contemporary China. To fully sketch out the stake of my argument, I will briefly discuss the debates on neoliberalism, Marxism, and queer theory within Chinese queer studies and Euro-centric models of queer studies, and then I will analyze two online BL films,《不可抗力之男僕的秘密》Uncontrolled Love (2016), which is about love torn apart by social gap between a young CEO of a corporate firm and his childhood playmate in the past and current employee, and A Round Trip to Love (2016)《雙程》, a queer affective genre of gay revenge and family melodrama. I see both films as illustrative of the entanglement of queer affect with capitalist corporatization. Simultaneously, they also evince possible queer disidentification from these modes of social stratifications.