[Commlist] New book: The Danmei Culture in Chinese Media and Society

Liang Ge is very pleased to share the publication of a new book that 
Tingting Hu and I have co-authored, **The Danmei Culture in Chinese 
Media and Society: Male-Male Romance, Resistance and Representation** 
(https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003705741), published by Routledge as part 
of its Transmedia series, today.

The book grows out of our long-standing research on Chinese danmei (boys 
love) culture and asks what this cultural formation can tell us about 
gender, sexuality, media industries, fandom, and cultural governance in 
contemporary China and East Asia. Rather than approaching danmei simply 
as a literary genre or asking whether it should be understood as 
inherently feminist, queer, misogynistic, or homophobic, we treat it as 
a historically evolving and internally contradictory cultural ecology. 
We trace its development from the late 1990s onwards, from online 
fiction and reader communities to web dramas, audio dramas, manga and 
animation. Across these different media forms, we are particularly 
interested in the uneven relations among women’s and queer desires, 
commercial adaptation, platform capitalism, fandom practices, and state 
regulation. One of the book’s central arguments is that danmei can be 
understood as 'a vital yet ambivalent counterpublic': a cultural space 
capable of unsettling dominant heteronormative and gendered scripts, 
while remaining vulnerable to commercial incorporation, ideological 
neutralisation, and its own exclusions and contradictions. We also 
develop the idea of a 'fractured transmedia system' to describe what 
happens when queer narratives move across media under conditions of 
censorship: official adaptations frequently erase or displace queer 
intimacy, while fans undertake forms of narrative and affective repair 
across platforms.

Empirically, the book draws on several years of immersive digital 
ethnography, alongside survey research and extensive interviews with 
readers, fans and cultural producers. We write throughout from the 
position of aca-fans, taking seriously both the analytical possibilities 
and reflexive complications of studying a cultural world in which we 
have ourselves participated. Although the book is grounded in the 
Chinese context, we hope it will speak more broadly to conversations in 
media and cultural sociology, gender and sexuality studies, queer 
studies, fan studies, digital culture, and East Asian popular 
culture—especially debates about how intimate and political 
possibilities are made, constrained, commodified and repaired through 
popular media. If this intersects with your teaching or research, we 
would be delighted if you had a look, and of course very happy to 
continue the conversation.
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