Queer pop culture in the Sinophone mediasphereWhile 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, mean-
while, 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
imagi native 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 gene rative
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 char-
acters 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 compa-
rable to the practice of shipping in Euro–American slash fandoms). On the other hand, such