Queer pop culture in the Sinophone mediasphereshonen 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.
Conclusion
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 differ-
ent 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 differ-
ent 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.
Notes
1 For a more detailed discussion of some of the significant complexities and ongoing debates surround-
ing 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.