Fran Martinand 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 uni-
versal homosexual potential, and queer memory as a defining feature of adult heterosexual
femininity—subsequently figuring a certain queerness as internal rather than external to nor-
mative womanhood—in contemporary tongzhi interpretations, revised versions of schoolgirl
romance are used to reinforce more minoritizing accounts of lesbian identity. Manifesting ini-
tially 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 minor-
ity 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.
Boys’ love
Among the many forms of transnationally mobile popular media and culture that engage audi-
ences 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, pop-
ular novel, and video form (Pagliassotti, Nagaike and McHarry 2013). They include a flour-
ishing 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