Living as rotten girls: women’s affects and queer fandom in China
Creators: name: Yang, Xiaofei
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 440501
subject: Feminist and queer theory
classificationCode: 470202
subject: Asian cultural studies

description: This thesis explores the affective life of “rotten girls,” female fans of queer masculinity and male homosocial eroticism in post-socialist Chinese patriarchy. It studies interactions among three major stakeholders in the Chinese cultural realm: the fans, the state, and commercial media enterprises. I address these interactions from the perspective of the fans, a community in which I am also a participant. This research is necessary for two reasons. First, queer fandom has become extremely popular in China and requires more scholarly scrutiny than it has received to date. Queer fan culture is increasingly commercialised, but it is also more controversial under state censorship. I explore these power dynamics by examining women’s production and consumption of queer masculinity and of male homosociality in fan videos and other media texts. Second, there is a lack of nuanced understanding of fans of queer fan culture in both media and academic discourses. Female fans of queer media texts are marginalised and pathologised in Chinese mass media while in existing scholarship, they are represented in a moral dualism of compliance/resistance. This research goes beyond these essentialised assessments of the fans’ initiatives, capturing the subtle twists and turns in the fans’ everyday (fannish) life in ways that highlight their agency.

Under an umbrella agenda of research into women’s affective lives, this thesis asks two linked sub-questions:
1) How do the women fans engage with queer representations of men in new media?
2) How do these engagements shape their identities as fans and as women in post-socialist China?

This study addresses these research questions through a transcultural affective framework, facilitated by thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with fans, and textual analysis of multiple media materials including fan videos, mass media reports, and social media discussions in and around queer fan culture. Four dimensions of the fans’ lives stand out, namely 1) how they perceive the mainstreaming of queer fandom and debates surrounding queerbaiting; 2) how they produce and consume queer representations of men in fan videos on the Bilibili platform; 3) how they negotiate senses of identity in their everyday fan activities; and 4) how they live through multiple patriarchal norms in their new media usage.

By detailing the dynamics of these issues, this research makes several major contributions. First, this thesis puts forward the original concept of “post-socialist structure of feeling” to trace the fans’ shared, often intuitive patterns of engagement in a mainstreamed queer fandom in post-socialist China. Second, it positions Chinese queer fandom as an affective heterotopia, a place that is located simultaneously in China’s socio-cultural norms and constantly bypasses the confinements of those normative discourses. Third, it parses the features of and power relations around “soft masculinity” widely consumed in contemporary Chinese pop culture. It closely examines the particular genre of danmu (laid-over comments) fan videos, as well as the characteristics and significance of rotten girls as killjoys in China’s post-socialist patriarchal system. Together, this research presents an affective, hence dynamic scene of women’s life in Chinese queer fandom, contributing to global fan studies and queer China studies.