Towards a queer affective economy of boys’ love in contemporary Chinese media

Abstract

This article expands the existing research on the boys’ love (BL) cultural phenomenon by analysing two popular BL films, A Round Trip to Love and Uncontrolled Love, and one TV series, Addicted, all streamed online in 2016. Previous research has explored the various aspects of BL such as cultural globalization from below, the online publishing industry and censorship, and the theme of incest and queer sexuality. This article turns a greater attention to the dialectical relationship between affect, queer desire and neoliberalism by unpacking further the affective work that BL performs in contemporary China. BL is both structurally constrained by the economic infrastructure of heteronormative kinship norms in neoliberal China and residual forms of socialism, as well as offering alternative modality of affective tendency that exceeds these structural impediments. Conceptually, this research explicates three forms of affective work in BL in contemporary China, namely affective imprisonment, queer affective reparation and affective overcoming, in order to illuminate the relationship between affect, queer desire and neoliberalism in contemporary China.