Katrien JacobsThe masculine Chinese imaginary seeks out heteronormative types, while the feminine imagery
is eager to imagine queer relations and stories of failure, hardship, and emotional crisis.
We have seen that the pornosphere mediates between netizens and government, even if this
zone cannot arrange a public endorsement of pornography in law and education. There has
not been a Chinese push towards the legalization of sexually explicit media or a government-
endorsed rating system through which sprawling products and more or less extreme genres
could be classified. In Adult Manga, Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society, Sharon
Kinsella (2000) has outlined the Japanese porn wars of the 1990s, provoked by soft-core and
hardcore depictions in animation genres such as Boy Love and Lolicon. In many cases, the move-
ment against raunchy or sadistic scenes in animation was led by various anti-censorship pro-
posals by government as well as citizen groups, such as housewives who were concerned about
harmful and sexist content. Kinsella shows that the targeted genres survived by adopting means
of self-regulation and by initiating a creative movement for freedom of expression. These cam-
paigns for freedom gave manga artists a new potential to gain respectability, to network their
painstaking efforts, and to move their work into a more mainstream type of visibility (Kinsella
2000, 159). Perhaps we have to conclude then that the Chinese pornosphere will maintain atti-
tudes of wild growth and fantasy-projection towards idols until localized Chinese erotica and
porn industries could emerge and be legally protected.
Credits
The research for this chapter was conducted as part of my ongoing research on pornography and
gender in trans-Asian contexts. The information about Boys’ Love fans was compiled as part of a
GRF grant “Trans-Asian Women’s Forum on Erotic/Pornographic Media and Cultural Affect”
(CUHK14404514).
Note
1 These websites 路西弗俱樂部 (Lucifer-club) http://www.lucifer-club.com/login.php, 晉江
(Jinjiang）http://www.jjwxc.net/ and 耽美中文網 (Chinese Fictions Website of Tanbi) http://www.
52blgl.com/. Accessed April 8, 2014.
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