Fran Martin
Since the late 1980s, forms of queer pop culture have become significant examples of, as well as vehicles for, cultural transnationalization in this region. Non-straight expressions of both gender and sexuality have deep roots in the histories of many East Asian societies, but the 1990s and beyond have seen a proliferation and acceleration of transnational queer cultural flows on a scale not seen before. As a regional microcosm of the wider processes of cultural globalization, this is linked to the twin forces of the transnationalization of sexual imaginaries and identities, and the transnationalization of media, due largely to the spread of Internet connectivity (Appadurai 1996).
In the context of East Asia, the phrase “queer pop culture” could refer to a multitude of different things. These include both mainstream-popular and minoritarian-subcultural media forms, as well as examples that, as I will argue, are in some ways the most interesting: those that trouble a rigid politics of sexual identity by blurring distinctions between both straight versus queer sexuality and mainstream versus subcultural media. In the latter part of this chapter, I offer brief case studies of two common queer narratives in East Asian popular media today that produce such boundary-blurring effects: the narrative of schoolgirl romance, and the narrative of boys’ love. But first, I will elaborate briefly on some other formations of East Asian queer pop culture that have drawn the attention of scholars working in the rapidly expanding field of Asian queer cultural and media studies.
A number of scholars have tuned in to queer resonances in various genres of East Asian commercial media produced between the mid-twentieth century and the present. Such resonances manifest across the spectrum from the deeply subtextual to the flamingly overt, and have often caught the eye of queer audiences. For example, See Kam Tan and Annette Aw draw out the rich queer significances of the massively popular 1960s cross-dressing folk opera film The Love Eterne; Yau Ching performs a queer subtextual analysis of fengyue-style soft porn films produced in mid-twentieth century Hong Kong; and Helen Hok-Sze Leung explores the potential for transgender representation in some Cantonese action films of the 1990s (Tan and Aw 2003; Yau 2010; Leung 2008, 65–84; see also Leung 2012). Another category of queer(ed) pop culture is found in the sexually ambiguous “star texts” of certain singers, actors, and other celebrities, which generate queer significance for audiences on the right wavelength while simultaneously maintaining broad mainstream appeal (Tang 2012). An obvious example is the late Hong Kong superstar and queer icon Leslie Cheung (Leung 2008, 85–105; Chan 2010); another is Taiwanese singer-songwriter Sandee Chan, whose poetic, feminist lyrics have made her a favorite with young, middle-class lesbian audiences in Taiwan and beyond (Martin 2003a); and a third is mainland Chinese singer Li Yuchun (Chris Lee), the androgynous young pop star who rocketed to fame when she won China’s Super Girl TV talent quest in 2005. In some East Asian media cultures, queer and trans elements are an integral part of some of the most popular commercial media forms. This is seen, for example, in the role of theatrically “queeny” MtF (Male-to-Female) transgender hosts on Japanese variety and lifestyle television (Maree 2013), and in a spate of mainstream TV dramas focusing on FtM (Female-to-Male) transgender experience in Japan since the late 1990s (Yuen 2011). Analyzing regular exposés of celebrities’ lesbian relationships in widely circulated gossip magazines in Hong Kong, Denise Tse-Shang Tang argues that these reports at once sensationalize and normalize such relationships, and can in some instances be seen as subversive cultural interventions by queer media workers (2012, 608–610). In Taiwan, meanwhile, “tomboys” or “T”s—that is, stylistically masculine, same-sex attracted adult women—appear as sympathetic protagonists in what I have elsewhere dubbed the “tomboy melodrama” narrative, which manifests in mainstream pop cultural forms including pulp fiction, soap opera, and teenpics (Martin 2010, 93–117).
Somewhat distinct from these queer(ed) elements in mainstream commercial media, since the 1990s there has also emerged from East Asia a growing genre of media that intentionally targets queer and queer-friendly audiences. This media centers on non-straight protagonists and points of view and is sometimes made by openly lesbian or gay artists and producers. The appearance of what Tang calls “the inter-Asian flows of queer media production” follows the consolidation of new sexual publics in several East Asian societies in this period (Tang 2012, 599). Reflecting, in part, the impact of cultural globalization in the field of minority sexualities, many East Asian countries in the late-twentieth century saw the rise of LGBTIQ political activism, the emergence of above-ground gay and lesbian commercial cultures, and increasingly widespread identification with forms of individual identity in which non-normative sexuality and/or gender are positioned as a defining element of social personhood (Martin et al. 2008). In the ethnically Chinese societies of East Asia that are this chapter’s main focus, the emergence of the term tongzhi—literally meaning “same will”; conventionally a translation of “comrade” in a political sense; and more recently appropriated to designate a Chinese version of something like LGBTIQ—provides a case in point. First used in a queer sense in the late 1980s in Hong Kong, where it appeared in Edward Lam’s Chinese title for a queer film festival (D. K-m. Wong 2011, 157), the term then traveled from Hong Kong to Taiwan. There, it was taken up as a sexual-minor ity identity category by a generation of young gay and lesbian activists and cultural workers who were elaborating a new queer public culture in context of the cultural thaw that occurred in Taiwan following the abrogation of martial law in 1987 (Martin 2003b). From there, the tongzhi identity and concept traveled on to mainland China and out into the regional Chinese diaspora. While it is by no means the only Chinese-language term for queer sexualities in circulation today, tongzhi has become the most common term used in ways comparable to the English LGBTIQ, and arguably constitutes “the most extensive non-English language medium of queer imaginaries in Asia today” (Martin et al. 2008, 14).1 Along with the emergence of tongzhi as a queer social identity across the Chinese societies of East Asia, there has appeared a raft of popular-cultural products drawn together under the tongzhi title, from tongzhi fiction (Martin 2003b; Leng 2013) and tongzhi film and film festivals (Lim 2006), to tongzhi travel agencies, tongzhi fashion retailers, and tongzhi Internet cultures. All of these pop-cultural forms, in turn, tend to consolidate new queer publics across the multiple communities in which they circulate.
This chapter focuses on queer pop culture in the Chinese-speaking societies of East Asia: communities across Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, parts of the Chinese mainland, and the Chinese diaspora that are connected by media in Chinese languages. Shu-mei Shih has characterized such dispersed and “peripheral” forms of Chinese culture—with the arguable inclusion of socially marginal populations, such as sexual minorities, on the Chinese mainland (Chiang and Heinrich 2014; Martin 2014)—as constituting a “Sinophone” cultural sphere (Shih 2007); while Chua Beng Huat refers to the network of media flows that connect these dispersed communities as “pop culture China” (Chua 2012). Chua proposes that pop culture China is structurally central to the wider East Asian pop culture economy. Observing that transnational flows of popular media to ethnically Chinese communities across Asia have been in motion for nearly a century, he reminds us that since the 1930s, the Chinese-language commercial cinema industry, centered in Hong Kong, has been exporting films right across Asia (see also Fu 2003). Since the 1970s, the television and pop music industries of both Hong Kong and Taiwan have been exporting content to ethnically Chinese audiences across the region including, since around 1980, to those in mainland China (Chua 2012, 15, 31–50). Chua’s charting of the Japanese and Korean “Waves” in Asia since the early 1990s highlights how popular media from these non-Sinophone countries were able to slot into the existing distribution networks of this transnational pop culture China:
Japanese and Korean products [are] exported to areas which have a predominantly ethnic Chinese population—China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. [...] This transnational ethnic Chinese population constitutes the largest consumer market for Japanese and Korean pop culture exports; without it they would likely have remained local industries.
(Chua 2012, 30)
Such a mapping underlines the fact that today, the transnational Sinophone mediasphere is intrinsically interlinked with other forms of media and pop culture within the East Asian region, especially those of Japan and Korea. In this chapter, then, while my central focus is on queer Sinophone media and pop culture, it will quickly become apparent that it is impossible to consider this in isolation from its interactions with Japanese and Korean forms.2
A decisive turning point in the transnationalization of the popular mediasphere in East Asia, including the queer pop culture that is this chapter’s focus, has been the increasing accessibility of online communication technologies since the mid-1990s. In the relatively developed capitalist “tiger economies” of Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore (as well as in Japan, whose entrance into the global industrial capitalist economy occurred a decade or so earlier), young urban queer people were actively using Internet platforms like BBS boards to meet each other and organize as early as 1994–1995 (Berry, Martin, and Yue 2003). Internet technology became widely available later in mainland China, with its massive geographic territory, less developed capitalist economy, and wider gap between rich and poor (Martin 2009). Today, however, online communication is undoubtedly a—if not the—major channel used by sexual minorities across Sinophone East Asia to meet each other, organize politically, and create and exchange various forms of queer pop culture (see also Yue 2012).
Indeed, the prevalence of online communication for the “digital natives” who comprise the current generation of younger LGBTIQ people in urban Sinophone East Asia has spawned whole new forms of queer pop culture. These include the massively popular e-novel form as a branch of popular queer fiction in Chinese (Feng 2013; Leng 2013). The best-known example here is the mainland Chinese e-novel, Beijing Comrades by Bei Tong, first serialized in 1998 and later adapted into a film directed by Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan, Lan Yu (Bei and Myers 2011). As Scott Myers observes, this—mainland China’s first known e-novel—“is [also] among mainland China’s first, best known, and most influential modern gay novels [… and] is a central text of what has come to be known as tongzhi wenxue, queer literature, from the PRC” (Bei and Myers 2011, 76). In her Honors thesis analyzing the abundance of online tongzhi fiction in mainland China since the 1990s, Rachel Leng reaches the fascinating conclusion that this form of popular literature cannot be understood simply as the expression of a minority sexual subculture. Rather, the use of the new media platform, in fact, makes a significant qualitative difference to online tongzhi fiction’s social function, so that it is able to produce a far wider sympathetic reading public for works on same-sex desire (Leng 2013). More recently, online tongzhi cultures are also taking a range of new forms, including in gay- and lesbian-specific geo-locative social media like mainland Chinese apps Blue’d, ZANK and Laven, whose use is currently being researched by both John Wei and Keren Yi; and in the production and online circulation of queer digital micro-films (wei dianying, being researched by Wei).3
In the remainder of this chapter, I will focus on two influential narratives that manifest across a wide range of popular media in Sinophone East Asia, and whose reach and popularity, like that of many other queer pop cultural forms, has been amplified significantly over the past two decades by online communication systems. My case studies, both of which can be seen as examples of queer(ed) girls’ and women’s pop culture, are the narrative of schoolgirl romance, and the narrative of boys’ love (“BL”). Each of these examples bears a distinct relation to the above delineation of mainstream-popular versus minoritarian-subcultural queer pop culture, and in different ways, each also complicates that distinction. The schoolgirl romance narrative has been present in Chinese literature since the early twentieth century, and constructs youthful same-sex love as a universal potential for gender-normative women. Today, we find this narrative embedded in a variety of fairly mainstream texts across the Sinophone mediasphere; these include film, TV drama, manga comics, and both popular and literary fiction. However, some contemporary instances of the Chinese schoolgirl romance narrative also connect with the energies of tongzhi cultural, social, and artistic movements to cross over into more minoritizing and identitarian forms of sexual politics. Meanwhile, since the late twentieth century, narratives of “boys’ love”— stories of love and sex between beautiful male youths, whose biggest fan base is found among straight-identified women—have been a more subcultural form sustained by a fan-based economy, with BL writers and artists manufacturing queer(ed) pleasures from the textual resources of mainstream pop culture. However, as we will see, the quasi-subcultural BL phenomenon is also crossing over to have a noticeable impact on quite mainstream forms of commercial media.
The same-sex schoolgirl romance is a literary and pop-cultural narrative that has circulated, at different times, across China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan since the establishment of girls’ educational institutions in China in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century (Leung 2008, 40–64; Sang 2003, 99–160; Martin 2010). Initially appearing in stories written in the 1920s and 1930s by modernist women writers in China, including Lu Yin and Ling Shuhua, the classic form of this narrative centers on a young female protagonist’s romantic (and sometimes sexual) relationship with a classmate of the same sex. The relationship is ultimately terminated as a result of external pressures—often from parents or school authorities—leaving the heartbroken protagonist to return mournfully to the memory of her lost same-sex love throughout her heterosexual adult life (Martin 2010). In fiction, film, and television drama produced and consumed across East Asia’s Chinese societies, we find many contemporary interpretations of this narrative. These include, among many others, mainland Chinese author Liu Suola’s novella, “Blue Sky Green Sea” (1985); Hong Kong author Wong Bikwan’s story “She’s A Young Woman and So Am I” (1994); two made-for-TV films from Taiwan, Tsao Jui-yuan’s The Maidens’ Dance (based on Cao Lijuan’s 1991 short story) and Lisa Chen Xiuyu’s Voice of Waves (both 2002); Yan Yan Mak’s film Butterfly (Hong Kong, 2004); and Zero Chou’s film Spider Lilies (Taiwan, 2007).4
In the context of this chapter, it is interesting to observe the trans-Asian genealogy of this popular narrative of schoolgirl romance. As Tze-lan D. Sang has shown, the concept of tongxing’ai (同性愛: homosexuality) first entered modern Chinese in the 1920s via the Japanese translation of a European sexological term, doseiai (Sang 2003, 102–103). The coinage of the Japanese doseiai in the opening decades of the twentieth century was strongly linked with contemporaneous attempts to describe romantic friendships between female students in modern educational institutions (Pflugfelder 2008). The Chinese schoolgirl romance stories of the 1920s and 1930s show that this conceptual association between the two novel concepts of shōjo (少女: girls) and doseiai in the Japanese transculturation of European sexology was in turn translated into the Chinese context (Sang 2003, 127–160; Martin 2010, 29–48).5
The schoolgirl romance narrative’s contemporary manifestations, too, are marked by transnational resonances. A parallel preoccupation with black and white school uniforms, campus settings, and girlish homoeroticism is found, for example, in a spate of Japanese and Korean girls’-school horror movies that have circulated across East Asia’s Sinophone societies as part of the Japanese and Korean pop culture waves. Notable examples include the Eko eko azarak films from Japan (Wizard of Darkness, 1995, and Birth of the Wizard, 1996, both dir. Shimako Sato), and the Yeogo goedam trilogy from Korea (Whispering Corridors, 1998, dir. Ki-hyung Park; Memento Mori, 1999, dir. Tae-yong Kim and Kyu-dong Min; The Wishing Stairs, 2003, dir. Jae-yeon Yun). The shadow of the Chinese-style schoolgirl romance narrative is clearly apparent in the cover text of the DVD release of the Korean film, Memento Mori, by Hong Kong’s Mei Ah Entertainment Group. The DVD cover features images of two schoolgirls, uniformed in the familiar Japanese-style white shirts and black skirts, against a deep blue, underwater background. The Chinese text at the cover’s left hand side stitches the Korean film firmly into the Chinese-language discourse of memorialized schoolgirl love: “In the past, you and I were so very close— today, surely you’ll remember me?” Leaving aside the question of how Memento Mori’s memorial narrative of schoolgirl love may relate to Korean discourses on same-sex sexuality—a question beyond the scope of this chapter—it is clear from the Hong Kong framing of the film for regional Chinese audiences that this Korean film was readily fitted into the pre-existent discursive framework on adolescence, memory, and love between schoolgirls.
Although the classic form of the Chinese literary schoolgirl romance constructs same-sex love as a universal feminine potential rather than just a minority identity, the figure of the same-sex attracted school-age girl has now also found her way into more subcultural-identitarian texts that appeal explicitly to queer audiences. The films Butterfly and Spider Lilies, cited above, fall into this category. As Helen Hok-Sze Leung observes:
Ambivalent depictions of same-sex intimacy and desire without an attendant narrative of sexual identity became almost unimaginable in an era when the tongzhi movement had already gained significant visibility in the social and political spheres.
(2008, 42)
Illustrating Leung’s point, tongzhi-style schoolgirl romance also appears, for example, in a wave of lesbian popular fiction that has arisen since the late 1990s, often appearing initially online before being published in book form by dedicated gay-and-lesbian (tongzhi) publishing houses in Taiwan and Hong Kong. A major genre of these popular stories is the high school campus romance, featuring an open and queer-affirmative celebration of same-sex love (Martin 2010, 23–24). Taiwanese artist Fanny Shen’s two-volume manga series, Yi Beizi Shouzhe Ni (I’ll Be Your Paradise, 1997–1998) similarly articulates the schoolgirl romance narrative with a deliberate and self-conscious inclusion of lesbian identity and cultural politics. And further, in this case, it does so through hybridization with the Japanese-style girls’ manga genre (shōjo manga)—on which more below.
Thus, while the classic schoolgirl romance narrative implied a theory of women’s universal homosexual potential, and queer memory as a defining feature of adult heterosexual femininity—subsequently figuring a certain queerness as internal rather than external to normative womanhood—in contemporary tongzhi interpretations, revised versions of schoolgirl romance are used to reinforce more minoritizing accounts of lesbian identity. Manifesting initially in modernist women’s fiction, the schoolgirl romance took on new pop-cultural life in late twentieth- century mainstream media, while also crossing over into subcultural tongzhi texts. In these ways, the career of the schoolgirl romance reveals the dynamic interplay, rather than the rigid demarcation, of normative and non-normative sexualities, as well as mainstream and minority cultural production. As we have seen, in recent years the transnational geographic reach of this narrative has also become notable; this is a feature that is even more marked in my next example.
Among the many forms of transnationally mobile popular media and culture that engage audiences across Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and China, the phenomenon of BL (“boys’ love”) stands out as a particularly rich site for analysis (Levi, McHarry, and Pagliassotti 2008; Martin 2012). In each of the above countries, and across the Chinese diaspora, 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 young men. The BL phenomenon stems originally from Japanese homoerotic manga, known in Japanese as shonen ai, bishonen or yaoi manga, produced by a generation of women manga artists in the 1970s (Fujimoto 1991; McLelland 2000; Orbaugh 2003). A spate of new BL magazines was launched in Japan in the 1990s, and today in Japan, about 150 BL manga comics and novels and 30 BL manga magazines are published every month, with BL publications grossing some 120 million yen annually (Pagliassotti, Nagaike and McHarry 2013, 1).
More than two decades after the appearance of the original Japanese works, which became available in parts of Sinophone East Asia in pirated editions soon after their Japanese releases (Martin 2012), today’s regional BL culture encompasses a very wide range of texts, sites and practices. Regional BL scenes now include not just fandom of commercially produced manga, but also of animations, games, and fans’ DIY production of amateur spin-offs, in comic, popular novel, and video form (Pagliassotti, Nagaike and McHarry 2013). They include a flourishing fan culture known in Mandarin as tongrenzhi that holds regular conventions and swap meets, and intersects with the broader Cosplay (costume-play) youth culture, in which fans dress up en masse in elaborate homemade costumes representing favorite characters. In recent years, the Internet has become the primary means by which fans circulate and access BL materials, enabling women in Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, China, and beyond, to chat and swap comics, artwork, fan videos, and stories, and even interact with character bots: cyber-characters programmed to post lines from manga characters on Twitter (Nishimura 2013).6 Indeed, in mainland China and South Korea, the rise of BL fandoms in the 1990s coincides fairly exactly with the spread of Internet connectivity, meaning that the fandoms have been online since the beginning of the genre’s popularity (Noh 1998; Li 2009, 9; Feng 2013, 53–83; Yi 2013).7
While the BL scenes that are produced through such activities are doubtless constrained to a degree along quasi-national lines by linguistic and perhaps cultural barriers, it’s worth pointing out that the BL phenomenon also results in a whole new realm of pop-cultural translingual practice. Originally Japanese terms, in both kanji (Chinese character) and English letter forms, have become subcultural argot for Sinophone BL fans across Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China, and the regional Chinese diaspora. These include, for example, 同人誌 (tongrenzhi/ dojinsha: BL fan-produced works), 腐女 (funü/fujoshi: rotten or decadent woman, i.e., female BL fan); 萌 (meng/moe: an expression of readerly delight in a BL scenario or image); 攻 - 受 (gong—shou/seme—uke: sexual top—bottom), 眈美 (danmei/tanbi: a BL subgenre, derived from a Japanese literary term for “aesthetic” or sensual fiction), BL, H (meaning hentai or “hard”—i.e. sexually explicit—BL, sometimes pronounced Japanese-style as ecchi), as well as many more.
Scholarly interpretations of the BL phenomenon have often focused on the potential that BL narratives may offer in enabling (mainly) young, (mainly) straight-identified women to elaborate an indirect critique of the dominant, patriarchal, and (hetero)sexist cultural systems to which they are subject (for summaries of key works see McLelland 2006; Nagaike and Suganuma 2013). For example, engaging with narratives of love and sex between two male characters is sometimes thought to enable female BL fans to imagine an egalitarianism between partners that is less imaginable in cross-sex relations (McLelland 2006); to “sublimate negative notions concerning femaleness and femininity by imaginatively disguising themselves as boys/men” (Nagaike and Suganuma 2013); or to express their dissatisfaction with the sexism of standard boy–girl romance narratives (Martin 2012). Patrick W. Galbraith’s ethnographic research, meanwhile, shows how the intense social bonds created among female BL fans in Japan enable them to experience forms of same-sex intimacy that are cordoned off from ordinary social life and arguably bear a certain transgressive potential (Galbraith 2011, 216).
In my own study of BL fans in Taiwan, I have proposed the concept of “worlding” to describe the kinds of imaginative and material practices in which BL fans engage:
Worlding refers, on the one hand, to the ways in which Taiwanese readers use the BL texts to imagine a geocultural world and their relation to it—that is, to create an imaginati ve geography of a “Japan” that is characterized by sex-gender ambiguity/ fluidity/non-conformity, where beautiful boys enact romance narratives and enjoy passionate sex with each other. On the other hand, worlding describes the ways in which BL facilitates young Taiwanese women linking up with each other into a social sub-world at a local level, as a community of readers, fans, and creators of BL narratives.
(Martin 2012, 377–378)
In my analysis, the point of underlining BL’s worlding function is not to claim that BL worlds are necessarily progressive or subversive in the ideas they circulate about gender and sexuality. Rather, the worlding concept underlines the important social function of BL scenes’ existence as arenas where complex debates about gender and sexuality can be played out, including all their internal contradictions (between homophobia and homophilia; between radical feminism and gender conservatism, etc.). BL worlds can thus be seen as participatory spaces that are generati ve of great pleasure as well as intense social, intellectual, and emotional engagement for female fans.
In itself, BL as a fan subculture troubles the presumptive distinction between queer and straight forms of popular culture in at least two ways. On one hand, BL fans appropriate characters from mainstream commercial media and queer them by imagining them engaged in same-sex relationships (the practice of imaginative pairing—pei dui in Mandarin—is comparable to the practice of shipping in Euro–American slash fandoms). On the other hand, such impassioned engagement with scenarios of male–male love, sex, and romance on the part of ostensibly straight women arguably necessitates a revised understanding of sexual straightness: if the imagination of male same-sex sexual behaviors is a primary nexus of erotic investment for some such women—as it certainly seems to be—then the category and concept of the “straight woman” has already been significantly redefined (resonating, in some ways, with my analysis of the implications of the schoolgirl romance narrative, above).
There is a third way, too, in which the BL phenomenon blurs distinctions between the queer versus the straight and the subcultural versus the mainstream. In recent years, several media scholars have observed that BL’s massive popularity with female audiences across East Asia is having a noticeable effect on the content and marketing of commercial mass media. Chris Berry, for example, analyzes references both to the family-ethics film genre and to BL in Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee’s global hit Brokeback Mountain, revealing a certain Chineseness within this apparently very American gay-themed Western:
Brokeback Mountain does seem to […] borrow from yaoi and tongrennü [female BL fan] culture in its efforts to produce a text about a male-to-male sexual and romantic relationship that will appeal to the most important audience for it: women. In this it is following a well-established pattern in East and Southeast Asia. As yaoi and tongrennü culture has proliferated, it has begun to impact upon more mainstream materials, ranging from literature to television and film. The appearance and growth of gay male texts from East Asia correlates not only to the appearance and growth of gay culture in the region, but also to yaoi and tongrennü culture.
(Berry 2007, 35–36)
Berry’s point, that the wide popularization of BL/yaoi in East Asia from the 1990s onwards coincides historically with the public emergence of gay cultures in the region, is a telling one. It suggests that even media products that might at first glance appear straightforwardly “gay” (or tongzhi) in a minoritarian-subcultural sense—Berry cites, for example, the Taiwanese film Formula 17 (dir. Chen Yin-jung, 2004)—may also be appealing to a significant audience of “straight” women. Hong-Chi Shiau observes that an apparent obsession with gay-themed films on the part of Taiwanese directors in recent years indeed relates, in part, to their attempts to capture a young female audience using BL-esque representations (Shiau 2008). Using the case study of the homoerotic coming-of-age film Eternal Summer (dir. Leste Chen, Taiwan, 2006), Shiau tracks the director’s and producer’s shifting conceptualizations of the film’s target audience. Initially, their concept was to attract a gay male audience; when this failed, marketing efforts shifted towards targeting high-school girls, with publicity materials playing up the film’s BL qualities (Shiau 2008). Moreover, writing on BL in mainland China, Erika Junhui Yi observes that although the overall tone of mass media reporting on BL is one of moral panic and stigmatization, in recent times, more and more mainstream productions—including 2013’s CCTV Spring Festival Gala, one of China’s highest rating annual TV events—are lightheartedly encouraging viewers to imagine same-sex relationships between male stars, in order to cater to fan girls’ interests (Yi 2013).
Such examples amplify a tendency that was already emerging, in nascent form, over a decade ago. For example, as Romit Dasgupta observes, Yonfan’s film Bishonen (Hong Kong, 1998) can be interpreted as a “gay” film (it was screened, for example, at various lesbian and gay film festivals) that also appealed to straight female audiences in East Asia through generic reference to yaoi narratives and characterization (Dasgupta 2006). Dasgupta’s analysis of that film also underlines the transnational dimension of its hybrid BL/gay narrative, in that Bishonen is a Hong Kong film that targets a Sinophone audience by adapting narrative and aesthetic conventions of Japanese shonen ai manga. Taken together, the analyses made by Berry, Shiau, and Yi show that more recent examples of Sinophone media further amplify both Bishonen’s use of BL elements to appeal to female audiences and its East Asian transnationalism. Screen media producers in many nations across East Asia are now using BL-esque representations as a kind of pop-cultural lingua franca specifically deployed to attract “ordinary” women viewers.
Throughout this chapter I have emphasized the acceleration of transborder queer media flows, enabled in large part by online communication systems. It is worth underlining in closing that of course such flows are always partial, uneven, and attended by resistance and blockages, as well as spurts of low-friction mobility. Linguistic barriers remain significant—not only across the different national languages in East Asia, but also within the multi-dialect Chinese linguistic universe itself—as does uneven access to networked communication resources, and efforts by some states (especially China and, obviously, North Korea) to restrict available media through censorship, Internet filtering, and the stringent regulation of mass media production. However, to observe the acceleration of transnational queer pop cultural flows in this region is not necessarily to argue that such flows are ubiquitous, seamless, or totally unfettered, and it is indisputable that trans-border media vectors are an important defining feature of queer pop culture in East Asia today.
The popular media and the scholarly research briefly surveyed in this chapter implicitly describe a certain historical trajectory. In the mid-twentieth century, the absence of dedicated queer media meant that queer audience pleasures were to be generated mainly from the rich subtextual resources of other popular genres, while the late century saw the emergence of LGBTIQ media niche-markets. In the present day, queer meanings circulate both subtextually and overtly, while distinctions between majority versus minority media and audiences, and between queer versus normative sexual narratives and identities, are increasingly blurred as the result of dynamic, unpredictable interplays between multiple competing formations of media, audience, and sexual epistemology. Through my two case studies, I have suggested that, in different ways and at different times, both schoolgirl romance and boys’ love narratives reveal forms of queer eroticism and sociality not only in a minority population of avowedly homosexual individuals, but also at the very heart of common and even normative experiences of femininity. In other words, the wide reach and significant popularity of these homoerotic narratives about and/or among young women suggests that, from the vantage point of contemporary Sinophone pop culture, “straight girls” may be queerer than we think.
1 For a more detailed discussion of some of the significant complexities and ongoing debates surrounding the meaning of the tongzhi identity, see Martin 2014.
2 In East Asia, the transnational mobility of sexual categories and concepts has deep historical roots: see Vera Mackie and Mark McLelland’s discussion of the translingual mobility of sexual terms in modern East Asian languages with Sinic roots (including Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese). Mackie and McLelland 2014, 3–6.
3 Yi and Wei are doctoral candidates at the University of Melbourne at the time of writing; their research will be forthcoming in future publications.
4 For further examples, see Leung 2008, 40–64, and Martin 2010.
5 On shōjo culture, see also Choi Jinhee’s chapter, this volume.
6 Some material in this section is adapted from Martin 2008.
7 The need for online dissemination in China is compounded by censorship restrictions on printed BL materials: see Li 2009 and Yi 2013.
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