QUEERLY INTIMATE:статья из журнала
Аннотация: Abstract This article examines the rise of the Girls' Love (GL) fan fiction community in contemporary China. More specifically, we focus on the 'Pink Super Girl Bar', an online fan fiction community devoted to the pairing of the contestants of the 2006 season of Super Girl, an entertainment program featured on Hunan Satellite TV that enjoys great popularity in the Sinophone world. Through an ethnographic account of the formation, convention and performativity of identities and socialities in this community, we demonstrate how Super Girl GL fans mobilize their emotional capital to create artworks, to have fun and to enrich their everyday lives. We argue that the GL fan fiction community has become a space of female homosociality, intimacy and affect in which a new generation of young Chinese women actively enact friendship and female subjectivity in a way that refuses the normalization of gender, sexuality and social relations. Moreover, by linking fan studies to affect studies and emotional geography, and by paying particular attention to indigenous concepts and cultural practices in mainland China's fan communities, we wish to contribute to fan studies with feminist, queer and transnational perspectives. Keywords: Super Girl fan fictionGirls' Loveemotional geographyaffective communicationfan community Notes 1. We have limited our scope of study to mainland China. Notably, both BL and GL are widely circulated in the Chinese-speaking sphere. Many writers from mainland China often publish their works on websites based in Taiwan or Hong Kong to avoid Internet censorship in mainland China. There has been ongoing debate surrounding the subtle differences between Yuri and GL among Chinese fans, with Yuri often being considered as having less or no sexual content (Chen 2009 Chen , Y. 2009 ' Baihe < Gl < Les: Nünü Qinggan Moshi Xifen Zhi Yiyi Qianxi [Yuri < Gl < Les: An Analysis of Different Modalities of Female Homoeroticism] ', paper presented at the Sex and Social Development: the Second International Conference for Sex and Sexuality in China, June . [Google Scholar]). This understanding of Yuri seems to deviate from the original Japanese usage. According to Sabdha Charlton, the most common distinction between shōjo ai and Yuri made by Japanese fans is that the former 'often refers to romantic love between girls', whereas the latter is 'more closely associated with sexually explicit depictions of such relationships' (Charlton 2005 Charlton , S. 2005 Yuri Fandom on the Internet , [online] Available at: http://www.yuricon.org/essays/yuri_fandom.html (accessed 25 February 2010) . [Google Scholar]). Fans in the Pink Bar, however, tend to use GL rather than Yuri to refer to the genre with which they engage. 2. In Asian popular culture, anime refers to digital animations in films and videos, while manga refers to comic art magazines and books. In fan fiction communities in the West, 'gen' is short for 'general' and refers to any and all stories that are not centred on sexual or romantic relationships: 'het' refers to a story centred on a heterosexual relationship (Hellekson and Busse 2006 Hellekson , K. & Busse , K. ,. 2006 Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays , Jefferson , NC , McFarland & Co . [Google Scholar], p. 10). 3. Tongzhi, literally translated into 'comrade', is the Chinese indigenous term for LGBT people. The word has its own genealogies in modern Chinese revolutionary history and in LGBT history in the Chinese-speaking spheres (Chou 2000 Chou, W.-S. 2000. Tongzhi: Politics of Same-Sex Eroticism in Chinese Societies, New York: Haworth Press. [Google Scholar], Martin 2000 Martin, F. 2000. Surface tensions: reading production of tongzhi in contemporary Taiwan. GLQ, 6(1): 61–86. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], Lim 2006 Lim, S. H. 2006. Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], Lim 2008 Lim, S. H. 2008. "How to Be Queer in Taiwan: Translation, Appropriation, and the Construction of a Queer Identity in Taiwan". In Asiapacifqueer, Edited by: Martin, F., Jackson, P., McLelland, M. and Yue, A. 235–250. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. [Google Scholar], Bao 2011 Bao, H. 2011. Queer Comrades: transnational popular culture, queer sociality and socialist legacy. English Language Notes, 49(1): 131–137. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). It was used in the Maoist era as a common address term for each other. The term was appropriated by Hong Kong queer activists in late 1990s to sinocize LGBT politics and to subvert the communist ideology in mainland China. The new usage soon gained its popularity among Taiwanese, diaspora Chinese and finally mainland Chinese, and is widely used by LGBT people in the Chinese-speaking world. 4. Boys' Love is also known as Yaoi. Yaoi is an abbreviated form of 'yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi' ('no climax, no point, no meaning') in Japanese. 5. See the thread titled 'Honestly, I am Disgusted by Those Dōjinonna Who Advocate BL But Hate Les' at Baidu GL Bar, http://tieba.baidu.com/f?z=505154176&ct=335544320&lm=0&sc=0&rn=30&tn=baiduPostBrowser&word=gl&pn=0, as well as the thread titled 'What's Your View about BL and GL' at Bill Wang Animate and Comics BBS (http://www.billwang.com/t21350/) for fan discussion of the difference between BL readership and GL readership. 6. We are aware of the contested definition of the term 'affect' and the controversial differences between 'feeling', 'emotion' and 'affect' resulted from disciplinary boundaries and philosophical traditions. See, for example, the article by Shouse (2005 Shouse , E. 2005 ' Feeling, enmotion, affect ', M/C Journal , 8 , 6 . [online], Available at: http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php (accessed 25 February 2010) .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). In this article, we use the three terms interchangeably. Following Ahmed (2004 Ahmed, S. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. [Google Scholar]), instead of asking 'what are emotions', we ask 'what do emotions do?' (p. 4). 7. The show was officially named the Mengniu Yoghurt Super Girl Contest, after the company that sponsored the series. Four series have been held so far, in 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2009 respectively. The organizer, a provincial TV station, had to stop the show in 2007 due to the political sensitivity and controversy surrounding the event. Liu Zhongde, a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, accused the programme of being 'poisonous' and corruptive for the youth (Martinsen 2006 Martinsen , J. 2006 Cppcc: Exterminate the Super Girls , [online], Available at: http://www.danwei.org/trends_and_buzz/cppcc_exterminate_the_super_girls.php (accessed 25 February 2010) . [Google Scholar]). The show was relaunched in 2009 under the Chinese name 'Happy Girls' (kuaile nüsheng), although the English name 'Super Girl' remains unchanged. 8. In fact, only the top three winners of the 2005 season and a handful of contestants from the 2006 season have survived after 4–5 years of struggle in the entertainment industry. 9. Fanzine is a nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon for the pleasure of others who share their interest. 10. The hey day of Super Girl fan fiction seems to have passed. The Pink Bar has lost its popularity since 2008. In spite of this, we still consider the rise and fall of the genre to be an important cultural phenomenon that deserves more academic discussion. 11. In the Anglophone fan culture, femslash, also known as 'female slash' or 'f/f slash', is a genre of fan fiction which depicts romantic and/or sexual relationships between female fictional characters. Real Person Slash is a type of fan fiction featuring celebrities or other real people. 12. In this article, we follow the Chinese convention when listing Chinese people's names in the fanfic: surname first, given name second. For instance, Li Yuchun's surname is Li and Yuchun is her given name. 13. YY is one of the most common acronyms on the Internet in Mainland China. Originally standing for 'sexual fantasy' (yiyin), it was later used to refer to various flights of wild imagination. Super Girl GL fans have given this acronym a whole new chain of signification. For them, YY can playfully mean 'friendship' (youyi), 'pleasure' (yuyue), 'music' (yinyue), 'language' (yuyan) and 'repression' (yayi) among others. 14. In Chinese cyberspace, the terms 'bars' (ba) or 'post bars' (tieba) refer to online bulletin boards dedicated to certain topics. The most famous 'postbar' website is tieba.baidu.com, where the Super Girl GL bar in discussion is based. Tieba is a special online product launched by Baidu, the largest Chinese-language search engine in cyberspace. Other companies have different names for similar products. 15. The word wangdao (literally 'the way of the sage king') originates from the Confucian idea of governing the country by virtue rather than by force. Borrowed by the Japanese language, it has since acquired the meaning of 'the most appropriate way of doing things'. This Japanese connotation has now been adopted by mainland Chinese BL and GL fans to refer to a 'shipping' that is appropriate and natural. Chinese fans have also used the word tiandao (literally 'the way of the heaven') to refer to a 'shipping'. Fans see the pairing of Li Yuchun and Zhou Bichang as tiandao. 16. For an in-depth discussion of Chinese martial arts fiction, see Huss and Liu (2007 Huss, A. and Liu, J. 2007. The Jin Yong Phenomenon: Chinese Martial Arts Fiction and Modern Chinese Literary History, Youngstown, NY: Cambria Press. [Google Scholar]). 17. For a detailed discussion of 'corns' (yumi) or Li Yuchun's fans, see L. Yang (2009a Yang, L. 2009a. All for love: the corn fandom, prosumers, and Chinese way of creating a superstar. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 12(5): 527–543. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). 'Corns' ardently defend gender norms in the open forum of post bar for strategic reasons. Li Yuchun is a deeply polarizing star, equally loved and hated by a large number of people. She has been vehemently attacked and parodied for her unconventional androgynism in the past five years. Those who hate Li, mostly young male netizens, refer to her as chun'ge ('Brother Chun') and chun yemen ('true bloke'). In Chinese cyberspace, there are numerous jokes and satires about this 'superman' called chun'ge. Yue and Yu may have underestimated the resilience of gender norms in a country like China. 18. 'Love her, torture her' (aita jiu nüeta) is a slogan in GL communities well known by fans who enjoy reading 'tortured texts' (nüewen). A methodological note is necessary. In this article, we primarily deal with the ethnography of the online fanfic community. There are also places where we point out briefly how some fans integrate fanfic in their everyday lives and how fans communicate with each other in offline settings. In fact, the distinctions between online identities and offline identities and between online lives and 'real' lives are more complicated than this article can cover. We have therefore chosen not to enter this discussion, and focus on fan activities in the online community instead. 19. In Buddhism, Asura is an indefinable and militant creature, somewhere between god, ghost and human. The screen name is probably taken from the title of a Cantonese language song composed and performed by a female pop singer. 20. Xue is the nickname of Li Na, a Super Girl contestant. 21. The 'Moon' is an insider allusion to Shang Wenjie in the GL fan community. 22. CP is an abbreviation for 'coupling'. Jiecao is short for qijie caoshou, meaning 'high moral principle'. The term was used in classical Chinese to refer to the integrity of male literati in premodern China in times of national crisis. GL and BL fans sometimes use the term in parody. For example, wu jiecao (without moral principle) refers to an open attitude towards any types of pairings. 23. In the Yang/Shang coupling, Yang is gong (attacker) and Shang is shou (receiver); in the Shang/Yang coupling, Shang is gong (attacker) and Yang is shou (receiver). Similarly, In the Fei/Xue coupling, Fei is gong (attacker) and Xue is shou (receiver); in the Xue/Fei coupling, Xue gong (attacker) and Fei is shou (receiver). 24. One can view the contents on Baidu Post Bar without age and gender limits. 25. As of 19 February 2009, there were about 220,000 individual post bars at Baidu, most of which were dedicated to fandom. Currently the number is still growing as everyone can set up a bar for free. 26. Most of the finished works in the Pink Bar are later transferred to the Pink Fanfic Library Bar (feise tongrenwenguan ba) for archiving. Readers' replies in the original thread are all deleted for the convenience of reading. 27. While there could be male readers lurking in the Pink Bar, the QQ chat groups solely comprise young women. 28. The pirated copy of The L Word is available in many DVD shops in Chinese cities. They are sold with Chinese subtitles at an affordable price (about ten RMB, that is, 1.5 USD, for each disk). Many other queer films and videos are also accessible to the audience in mainland China through the piracy industry. 29. White Day is a holiday celebrated annually on March 14, one month after Valentine's Day. It originated in Japan in 1978 and later spread to South Korea and Taiwan. On this day, the person who receives a gift on Valentine's Day is expected to return a gift to the sender. 30. Above all, the story testifies to the binding and seductive power of the poetics that has brought the fictional and real 'Mystery' and 'Wine' together According to some commentators, the pairing is 'not right'. The real 'Mystery' does not know much English, so she cannot read English poetry. It is also worth noting that the first poem quoted in the story, 'The Last Rose of Summer', was written by the Irish poet Thomas Moore, while the second poem 'Dream and Poetry' was written by modern Chinese writer named Hu Shi and translated from Chinese into English. The trans-lingual and trans-cultural practice (Liu 1995 Liu, L. H. 1995. Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity–China, 1900–1937, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) in the story mirrors to some extent the hybrid origin of GL and fanfic in Mainland China.
Год издания: 2012
Авторы: Ling Yang, Hongwei Bao
Издательство: Routledge
Источник: Cultural Studies
Ключевые слова: Asian Culture and Media Studies, Gender, Feminism, and Media, Japanese History and Culture
Открытый доступ: closed
Том: 26
Выпуск: 6
Страницы: 842–871