Fran Martinlater 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 sym-
pathetic 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 exam-
ples 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 embed-
ded 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 econ-
omy, 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.
Schoolgirl romance
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’ edu-
cational 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 heart-
broken 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