The Uptake of Women’s New Writing: Mapping Chinese Online Boys’ Love Fiction

Abstract: As a sub-genre of women’s writing, Boys’ Love (BL) fiction involves stories about the romance between men. Since the 21st century, it has begun to flourish on the Chinese Internet. The stories are different from standard gay fiction, however, in that their authors and readers are almost exclusively women. Since these works deeply reflect women’s emotional appeals, they are appropriate for studying Chinese women’s interaction with society. Based on Jinjiang Literature City (http://www.jjwxc.net), the largest online BL fiction platform in China, this research creatively utilized machine learning methods—the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model, word vector technology, and Baidu’s sentiment analysis, to present the panorama of 79,668 original BL fiction from synchronic and diachronic dimensions. The findings reveal that concepts of misogyny and feminism coexisted within the sub-genre. Although women broke through sexual repression and were empowered through these works, the existing patriarchy restricted their awakening.

Keywords: BL fiction, Chinese women, Women’s writing, Content analysis, Machine learning

Author Details

Wen Ma (First author, Corresponding Author) School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Nanjing University, Jiangsu Province, 210023, China [email protected]

Zhuo Chen (Second Author) School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Nanjing University, Jiangsu Province, 210023, China [email protected]

Yunsong Chen (Third Author, Corresponding Author) School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Nanjing University, Jiangsu Province, 210023, China [email protected]

1. Introduction Boys’ Love (BL) stories are fictional texts depicting homoerotic relationships between males, typically created by and for heterosexual women. Thus, it can be properly categorized as women’s writing. BL is published across disparate media, such as manga, anime, and written text. Originating in Japan, it is known under various names, such as , tanbi, and june. In China, BL and tanbi (the Mandarin reading of tanbi is 耽美) are the most common terms. Tanbi means “to indulge in beauty,” mainly expressing women’s imagined male–male romance and is distinct from standard gay romance. BL in Japan originates from literary aestheticism, which was introduced to Japan from Europe and influenced many Japanese writers, such as Junichiro Tanizaki and Yasunari Kawabata.1 Broadly speaking, BL’s literary progenitor is the story A Lovers’ Forest (1961) written by Mori Mari, a woman writer of the aestheticism school. Thus, literary works have played an essential role in BL from the start.2 During the 1990s, Japanese BL fiction and manga became known in mainland China through Taiwanese translations. Influenced by these works, Chinese women writers began to create original BL works on the Internet. The wide reach of the Internet facilitated an increase in such stories and the creation of several influential communities and websites devoted to BL fiction. The best known of these is Jinjiang Literature City,3 which was established in 2003. The emergence of websites such as Jinjiang has expanded Chinese BL fiction. As of December 2020, Jinjiang had more than 43.98 million registered users, with woman users accounting for 91%,4 which, as an article in The New York Times put it, makes BL too large to be considered a subculture.5 Today, through publishing, animation, and live-action TV dramatization, the influence of Chinese BL has gone beyond the women community and even national boundaries. For example, The Untamed (2019), adapted

1 See https://futekiya.com/what-is-danmei/. 2 Kurihara & Kakinuma 1993, 325–335. 3 http://www.jjwxc.net. 4 See http://www.jjwxc.net/aboutus/. 5 Tatlow 2014. from a BL story on Jinjiang, has become one of the year’s most popular TV dramas and been widely viewed overseas. 6 , 7 BL fiction has become part of China’s cultural industry and, in this sense, is closely related to society’s status quo. Although Chinese BL fiction originated in Japan and shares similar features to slash fiction8 in English, it is very much a genre peculiar to China. The boom in Chinese online BL fiction coincides with the country’s rapid development, reflecting Chinese women’s changing worldview. Moreover, in contrast to Japanese authors who embrace Western scenes and characters,9 Chinese creators usually have ancient China as the setting, invoking various unique classical features. Owing to the Chinese government’s ban on pornography, no sexual scenarios appear on legal websites such as Jinjiang. This unique and implicit depiction of love is like “slow-burn heat,”10 which plays a significant role in promoting BL to the mainstream. Since its inception, BL fiction has been written from women’s perspectives. Although there are some male authors and readers, the data show that BL’s authors and audiences have always been mainly heterosexual women.11 This phenomenon gives rise to a contradiction: BL’s fiction market belongs to women, but the fiction’s main protagonists are not women. Women break away from the “male gaze” of objectifying women and construct the “ gaze” through consuming male erotica, hence expressing women’s growing sense of power. However, as stories about male love, the absence of women reveals a tendency toward misogyny. In this case, analyzing the paradoxical attitudes may help in understanding how BL fiction has changed traditional roles and created a unique sociopolitical space for women. To carry out this study, research about BL fiction was categorized and then unsupervised machine learning methods were utilized to analyze the titles and

6 See https://m.weibo.cn/status/4559979988390428. 7 See https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-untamed-becomes-top1-twitter-trending-topic-gaining- global-attention-300884408.html. 8 also focus on fictional male–male romantic or sexual relationships but are mostly fan fictions based on existing literary or film works, whereas the BL fiction we studied are original and standalone stories unrelated to any existing work. 9 Mizoguchi 2015, 26. 10 Luskey 2019. 11 Pagliassotti 2008. introductions of 79,668 Jinjiang’s original BL fiction pieces from 2003 to 2019. Unlike the standard case study, the text analysis method was able to scan huge amounts of text macroscopically, finding objective and universal patterns. 12 Previous studies have utilized topic models, 13 word embedding technology, 14 or sentiment analysis techniques,15 and this study is the first to combine these paradigms to analyze online novels. The Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model was applied to classify the fiction topics, processed word vector technology to analyze the context of keywords (specifically, words related to gender and same- love), along with Baidu’s sentiment analysis model to evaluate attitudes in texts. These analyses included synchronic and diachronic approaches, delineating the panorama of Chinese online BL fiction and women’s thoughts and attitudes.

2. Background Previous studies have mostly focused on BL readers, examining their reading motivation and identity formation. 16 With respect to the former, scholars such as Pagliassotti found that the “pure love” gender-absent dimension in the stories, which avoided one-dimensional female characters and heterosexual “boring narratives,” was the main attraction for the audience.17 Zsila et al., using an online survey, found that sexual titillation, visual imagery, and aesthetics strongly explained readers’ motivation for liking BL.18 In terms of the close connection between women and BL fiction, Takemiya, a Japanese BL manga artist, believes that BL works negated the subservient gender role imposed on women, helped women liberate themselves from the oppression of male power, and enabled them to cleave closer to feminism.19 The Chinese scholar Zheng

12 Grimmer and Stewart 2013. 13 Marshall 2013; Shah 2019; Eads et al. 2020. 14 Cui 2018; Nelson 2021. 15 Feldman 2013; Kumar, Vadlamani, and Ravi 2015. 16 Yi 2012; Nagaike and Suganuma 2013. 17 Ibid. 18 Zsila et al. 2018. 19 Takemiya 1993. went further, invoking Michel Foucault’s constructivism to argue that women created a heterotopia through BL to compete for political space and resist male domination.20 These studies confirmed the positive significance of BL fiction for women. There is also some literature concerning the anti-feminist features of BL. For example, Zhou et al. studied the heterosexual romantic ideal in fiction, finding that, even in the love relationship between men, a power differential still existed.21 Gays in these stories did not escape the traditional heterosexual framework. Moreover, Han points out that BL authors had men act like heterosexual women, which added misogyny to the existing gender stereotypes.22 Although there are controversies about feminism, it is undeniable that BL has become a unique woman-centered culture over China’s decades of development. As a significant entertainment and leisure field, BL fiction provides a unique online space for women to participate, affect, and change social life. Women project their desire onto the two male protagonists, and the erotic pleasure they achieve is closely associated with power. In Foucault’s expression, the two seek out, overlap, and reinforce each other.23 Thus, the flourishing of BL works reflects an improvement in women’s sense of power. However, the difference between the male–male relationship described in BL fiction and reality does exist, especially the fixed mode of seme (攻め, the attacker, referring to the penetrator in sex) and uke (受け, the receiver, referring to the penetrated in sex),24 which invokes the typical male–woman relationship.25 Given these patterns, women’s attitudes in specific texts must be explored to see how they express their awakening while clinging to the unequal power framework. There is extensive literature exploring Chinese society’s relationship with BL. Lin researched BL fiction’s role in promoting LGBTQ movements in contemporary

20 Zheng 2016. 21 Zhou, Paul and Sherman 2018. 22 Han 2020. 23 Foucault 1979, 48. 24 Zhou, Paul and Sherman 2018. 25 Although men’s physiological characteristics determine that there must be distinct roles in the sexual behavior, different from the real situation, the roles of seme and uke in BL fiction are relatively fixed, and they rarely exchange roles with each other, thus producing unequal power. China.26 Xu and Yang focused on a particular branch of Chinese BL, father–son incest, which they believed reflected young people’s resistance to authoritarian China.27 In general, discussions about BL in China have always been about politics. As The New York Times puts it, the Chinese government might not be aware of the social and cultural implications of BL.28 Is this the case, though? Although the government cracked down on pornographic content, BL works are not banned. The flourishing of Jinjiang is a good example. Through a series of BL-adapted TV dramas, China successfully exported its culture, with government approval. Thus, it is misleading to understand BL fiction solely from the perspective of politics. Compared with their rule of just a few decades, the patriarchy in Chinese history has had a more significant influence for thousands of years. Under male domination, women are subjected to sexual objectification to this day.29 According to traditional beliefs, women have more romantic than men, and love even constitutes a woman’s entire existence.30 Hence, their imaginations about gays are also far more acceptable than men’s fantasies about lesbians, which create an advantage for the dissemination of BL stories. Besides, the patriarchy’s emphasis on women’s loyalty makes their sexual behavior much more costly than men’s, so they write pornography to compensate. Since BL fiction does not contain any sexual exploitation of women, this genre becomes the first choice. Patriarchy not only gives birth to BL works but also limits their positive feminist significance. This idea is further examined below. Most of the extant literature on BL adopted qualitative methods, such as interviews, to study the audience and content analysis to track the stories’ elements. Qualitative research mainly relies on researchers’ subjective understandings. With such a large number of fiction pieces, it is difficult to draw a comprehensive and objective conclusion. In this case, machine learning offers a novel approach to analyze texts,

26 Lin 2020. 27 Xu and Yang 2013. 28 Tatlow 2014. 29 Szymanski 2011. 30 Baruch 1991, 3. allowing a holistic view of all works through big data, identifying BL fiction’s common features, hence informing the discussion of the women’s issues cited above.

3. Sources and Methods 3.1 Data Source Jinjiang Literature City was selected as the data source. As the largest women’s literature website in China, even in the world, Jinjiang is quite representative of BL fiction. The website is also quite interactive. Readers on Jinjiang form online communities that, like sponsors, provide emotional and financial incentives for writers through voting, commenting, and rewarding.31 Readers contribute to the creation of fiction; hence studying them can provide insights into community preferences. Many studies have used cases and data from Jinjiang. Some focused on the site’s communication mechanism and profit model,32 whereas others examined the feminist implications for women’s literature.33 Most of the studies only looked at isolated cases, with none attempting a comprehensive examination of Jinjiang. This study trawled titles and introductions of all 79,668 BL fiction pieces published since Jinjiang was founded in 2003. Considered the impact of existing works, fan fiction was excluded, so only original and stand-alone stories were entered into the database. Jinjiang original BL fiction by year was counted, as shown in Figure 1.

31 Tian and Adorjan 2016. 32 Jiang and Kuang 2016; Liu 2020. 33 Feng 2009; Zhou 2018.

Figure 1 Numbers of BL Fiction from Jinjiang by Year

The number rose every year, save for a slight decrease between 2014 and 2016. This drop was caused by the Chinese government’s extensive anti-pornography campaign started in 2014,34 during which many fiction pieces containing pornographic texts were deleted. Since then, all sexual scenarios in Jinjiang have disappeared. After 2016, however, numbers soared. In that year, the BL TV drama Addiction became very popular—a35 first for a TV drama adapted from a BL story, which might account for the spike. Rather than surveying all full texts, this study only surveyed titles and introductions to explore specific content. The introduction, written by the author, has two parts: a blurb and a synopsis. According to the French literary critic Gerard Genette, the title and the introduction are the work’s paratexts. They are like a vestibule, providing the reader and the public with the choice of either stepping inside or turning back from the text. 36 Nowadays, online fiction tends to be mass-produced and formulaic. When readers look for fiction to read, they pay attention to works that are ranked on lists and also look for a specific topic. In quick scanning and picking, titles

34 For more information about this campaign, see http://www.shdf.gov.cn/shdf/channels/4482.html. 35 See https://time.com/4236864/china-gay-drama-homosexuality/. 36 Genette 1997, 1–2. and introductions play a more critical role in attracting readers than texts do. The story’s content can be inferred from the plot synopsis to glean the highlights directly from the blurb, which is crucial for constructing story clusters by topic.

3.2 Methods Women’s views on BL fiction are complex. To understand their perspective, the quantitative analysis in this study has focused on three aspects. These were gender consciousness and positive and negative sentiments. Since the fiction titles and introductions are unstructured text data, text mining methods were used to conduct the research.

3.2.1 LDA Topic Model The topics of BL fiction may reflect the author’s preferences on a macroscopic level. Topic choices reveal to what extent these stories are relevant to reality and what aspirations the women authors project onto the male protagonists. An LDA topic model was applied to cluster the topics using fiction titles and introductions. LDA is a three-level hierarchical Bayesian model for document topic generation with unsupervised learning techniques.37 The application of LDA is based on three nested concepts: the text set to be modeled (the “corpus”), an item in the corpus (a “document”), and a word in the document (a “term”). Thus, documents are nested in the corpus, and terms are nested in the document. This model assumes that there are several topics in the corpus. Each topic is defined as the probability distribution of fixed words, whereas each document selects a topic with a certain probability, and a certain word is selected from this topic with a particular probability. A corpus is described as a probability distribution of potential topics, whereas each topic is a probability distribution of terms. Data analysis is performed by using the joint distribution to calculate the conditional distribution (a posteriori distribution) of the hidden variable (subject structure) under a given observed variable (word in the document). The

37 Blei, Ng, and Jordan 2003. formula is expressed as follows:

�(�:, �:, �:, �:) = �(�) �(�) �(�,|�)�(�,|�:, �,)

In this formula, �: is all topics and � represents the distribution of the words for the Kth topic. �: represents all documents, θd is the proportion of the topic in the dth document, and θd,k reflects the proportion of the Kth topic in the dth document. All the topics of the dth document are zd, and zd,n is the topic of the nth word in the dth document. All the words in the dth document constitute wd, and wd,n is the nth word in the dth document. Compared with a simple co-occurrence analysis, the LDA topic model shows the underlying semantic relationships between words, even if the words never appear together in a document. Compared with other topic cluster models, the LDA topic model embodies a particular mixed-membership approach—i.e., a document can have various topics, ensuring the accuracy of the analysis.

3.2.2 Word Embedding Technology The Word2Vec model of word embedding techniques was used to predict specific keyword contexts in BL fiction titles and introductions. The keywords were related to gender and same-sex love. Word2Vec is Google’s open-source algorithm toolkit, which can turn unstructured text data into high-dimensional vector data. Calculating the distance between high- dimensional vectors measures the similarity between words and predicts the context.38 The Skip-gram algorithm in the Word2Vec model was selected for this study. The cosine similarity between the input vector of the input word (the current word) and the output vector of the target word (the context of the current word) was calculated and normalized. Then the Python Gensim library was used to train the model. After word segmentation, stemming, and stop words removal, each word was transformed into a 128-dimensional vector through Skip-gram. On this basis, the keywords were taken as central words, and the cosine distance was calculated between other words and central

38 Yao et al. 2017. words to measure contexts. Figure 2 shows the Skip-gram algorithm.

Figure 2 The Skip-gram Algorithm of Word2Vec

3.2.3 Sentiment Analysis Model The sentiment analysis model was adopted for calculating the BL fiction general sentiment score and the trend from 2003 and 2019 mapped. This analysis uses sentiments to measure subjective texts. The sentiment trend can help track the development of these works and the social changes they reflect. To prevent the author’s blurb from impacting the text’s overall tone, only the title and the plot synopsis in the introduction were selected. The model on Baidu’s natural language processing platform allows users to run sentiment analysis via its application programming interface (API). It is one of the most convenient tools when conducting sentiment analysis of Chinese texts. After the input of text information, the model can “judge” the text’s overall tone, using a score between 0 (negative) and 1 (positive) to reveal the sentiment tendency. The closer the score is to 0, the more negative people’s feelings are; the closer the score comes to 1, the more positive. A neutral score is represented by 0.5.

4. Topics of Chinese Online BL Fiction 4.1 The Synchronic Analysis of Topics Collating the story topics can reveal connections between fiction and reality. The LDA topic model was applied for unsupervised clustering analysis of story titles and introductions. Since the number of topics is a significant parameter for the model, an even number of topics from 6 to 50 was trained. After a comprehensive evaluation of each topic’s connotation and extension, the differentiation degree between topics, and the study purpose, a 10-topic model was selected for subsequent analysis.

Table 1 LDA Topic Analysis of BL Fiction

Table 1 shows the ten topics and words with the highest frequency under each topic analyzed by the LDA topic model. Function words without substantive semantic were eliminated. Since authors’ introductions had other content besides the synopsis, the ten topics were not entirely about plots. Topic 10 contained story tags, through which authors marked their works so that readers could find them easily. Like hashtags on Twitter, they help categorizations. Some tags are also related to stories’ endings. It is a convention for online authors to annotate ending types in the introduction to help readers choose a story. For instance, the appearance of “bei ju” (tragedy) indicates readers’ preference for tragic stories of a certain period. Among topics about plots, Topic 1 and Topic 2 were young people’s happy love. Topic 1 was a campus topic. The words “xiao yuan” (campus), “lao shi” (teacher), and “da xue” (university) pointed directly to campus as the story setting. Most campus romances happen in adolescence. Because of the simple environment, love at this age was more idealized than adult love. For example, words such as “an lian” (crush), “zhu ma” (childhood sweetheart), and “wen rou” (softness) were the concrete expressions of such love. Similar features apply to Topic 2. Topic 2 described fairy tales. Words such as “wang zi” (prince) appeared as the Westerner’s appellation, showing that this topic had little relevance to Chinese people’s actual lives. Instead, the narrative was likely to take place in the West. It also applied “shao nian” (young boy), “wei xiao” (smile), “mei gui” (rose), “bai se” (white), and “tian kong” (sky) to show the dreamy and pure scenes, just like a fairy tale, filled with peace and tranquility. Whereas the first two topics were unrealistically romantic but still rooted in reality, Topic 3 was pure . It told stories about reincarnation, a concept derived from Buddhism, representing the repeating birth, life, and death. The words of “qian shi” (previous life), “jin sheng” (present life), “xiang shou” (to be together), and “qian nian” (one thousand years) indicate that the protagonist’s soul incarnated into another person after death, who would fall in love with his former lover again. This topic combined the taboo love between men to create a “fated forever” love myth. The protagonists would only love each other and not be attracted to any other man or woman, so they were not gays in the usual sense at all. In Mizoguchi’s view, this story premise allowed women writers to liberate themselves without violating the social norms of heterosexuality, creating the purest and most passionate love stories.39 The reincarnation topic typically has scenes from ancient times. Topic 4 was

39 Mizoguchi 2015, 67. similarly about narratives set in ancient China. As the unique topic of Chinese BL fiction, this is based on the feudal dynasties, narrating the fight for the throne and the defense of the frontier. Words such as “jiang jun” (general), “huang di” (emperor), “tian xia” (land under heaven), and “jiang shan” (state power) demonstrate this point. Besides the influence of China’s long history, it appears that women writers’ preference for this topic is rooted in their desire to participate in fields dominated by men, such as war and leadership. Since the modern power struggle is a sensitive issue in China, the writers selected ancient China for their setting. Women disliked being constrained by their gender role, but it was unrealistic to describe their power participation under patriarchal rule. A queen, for example, rarely occurred in China’s actual history. In this case, women skillfully projected their power ideal onto the men in BL fiction without breaking the existing gender division of labor. As a result, they harvested both career and love at a minimal cost. Like the reincarnation topic, Topic 5 also included the “fate” concept. It represented pure love, having words such as “ai qing” (love), “xing fu” (happiness), “yong yuan” (forever), and “yi sheng” (all one’s life), implying that the stories must have happy endings. This topic was more like a supplement to the fairy tale and reincarnation, again emphasizing the surreal nature of such love: sadness did not exist. This topic embodies women writers’ supreme love ideals, having nothing to do with gays in reality. Topic 6 returned to the real world, but with a certain amount of turmoil, hence the term “dramatic love.” These stories had characters in the city, involving “nan ren” (man), “zong cai” (CEO), and “nv ren” (woman). Meanwhile, other words represented melodramatic love, such as “gou xue” (dramatic), “zha gong” (unfaithful seme), and “ti shen” (substitute). The money disputes hinted at by the CEO, the messy same-sex and heterosexual relationships indicated by man and woman, and the disloyalty represented by the unfaithful seme all led to conflict. These exciting plots whetted the audience’s appetite, which was especially effective for serialized stories. Topic 7 took place in the entertainment industry. “Lao ban” (boss), “ming xing” (celebrity), “dian ying” (film), “fen si” (fans), and “yan yuan” (actor) referred to love between stars, showing BL authors’ yearning for celebrity. Money, pretty faces, and fame were the fundamental concepts in this topic, with an emphasis on sensory stimulation for readers. It may be that, in the authors’ eyes, only a life far beyond that of ordinary people could have unconventional and sensational romances. Two other topics were even more surreal, not only emphasizing destiny in relationships but also creating the otherworld. Topic 8, which was a special topic about games, involved words such as “you xi” (game), “wang you” (online game), “mo wang” (dark lord), and “si wang” (death). The protagonists must survive in killing games, solve puzzles, and sometimes defeat the dark lord. Such plots had many ups and downs, with elements of horror and adventure. Although love was not the focus of these stories, the protagonists’ love would naturally emerge as they fought together. This topic also encompassed the classical mode of powerful seme and mighty uke, whose power would be exerted to the same extent, consistent with women’s ideal of equal love. Topic 9 applied more imaginative power to the construction of the otherworld. Thus, “fantasy” was considered the appropriate label. Words such as “wei lai” (future), “di qiu” (the earth), and “ji qi ren” (robot) portrayed the future world. “Chuan shuo” (legend), “jing ling” (elf), and “yao guai” (monster) depicted mysterious and fantastical creatures. When becoming protagonists, these creatures revealed more powerful or purer features than humans and formed emotional connections with the audience. This sense of being “different” could add to stories’ interest.

4.2 The Diachronic Analysis of Topics After each topic was analyzed, the ratios of BL fiction under specific topics in the total number by year were tabulated, as shown in Figure 3. To see how the plots changed over time, the story tag topic was excluded. The figure shows that fairy tales, pure love, and fantasy topics had a downward trend, whereas campus, reincarnation, dramatic love, entertainment, and game topics rose from 2003 to 2019. The proportion of ancient China’s topic remained roughly the same. Figure 3 Proportions of BL Fiction under Specific Topics by Year

Both fairy tale and pure love topics, representing romantic and surreal love stories, declined in the first ten years. The pure love topic was most highly represented, accounting for more than 40% of the topics in 2003. Despite being on a downward trend since then, pure love still represented nearly 20% of all topics in 2019. That decline was relative to the rise of other topics, showing that BL fiction topics became increasingly various during the 16-year period. Compared with pure love, the fairy tale topic accounted for just 10% of all topics in 2003. After a decline of about 4%, its proportion began to rise in 2016 but was still under 10% in 2019. The fantasy topic also declined from about 15% to 7%. Both fairy tale and fantasy topics contained Western elements, such as princes and elves, so their loss in popularity suggests that authors’ preference for Western background and highly surreal stories had changed. Today, BL writers more often turn to topics rooted in reality but retain an imaginative approach to reinforce readers’ identification with the stories, such as campus and entertainment topics. Among the six rising topics, the campus topic had the biggest increase going up from 10% to nearly 20%, suggesting that “young love” was a favored topic for BL authors. On the basis of dreamy, romantic, and fated sentiments, campus romance described adolescent feelings that many people would have experienced in real life, hence evoking readers’ empathy. Besides, the ratios for game, dramatic love, reincarnation, and entertainment topics all rose from around 2% to approximately 10%. These fitted BL readers’ desire for exciting plots, expanding over the 16 years and becoming new trends. The ancient China topic had retained a ratio of over 8% between 2005 and 2019. As a unique topic with Chinese elements, it had great vitality and was always a preferred topic for TV dramatization and animation. This storyline’s share confirmed the ongoing popularity of China’s native topics. Perhaps early Chinese BL authors wrote many classical stories in the Western context, as did Japanese writers. Nowadays, these have thrown off other countries’ influence and embarked on a road of their own. Among Chinese BL fiction, the surreal topics constitute the majority, including reincarnation, ancient China, game, and fantasy topics. Even the seemingly realistic topics, such as campus and entertainment topics, still have bizarre turns and a dream- like atmosphere, showing that dramatic stories are more attractive to readers. The fantasy world in the past or future could also eliminate the obstacles, creating a paradise of love and freedom for gay people. Moreover, both women authors and readers preferred “supreme love” myths. While hoping to achieve self-actualization in BL stories, they remain staunch advocates of monogamy. In Marxist feminist theory, monogamy is the product of patriarchy.40 These women wanted to break out of gender roles, but the patriarchy ultimately restricted them.

5. Keywords in Paratexts of Chinese Online BL Fiction 5.1 The Synchronic Analysis of Keywords Following the macro-analysis of fiction topics, specific contexts were examined through word vector technology. Using the Skip-gram algorithm of Word2Vec, a 128- dimensional word vector model was trained to study 79,668 fiction pieces, totaling 39,619 discrete words. The word vector model helps find the words with the shortest cosine distance and the highest similarities to keywords. These words constitute the context for keywords, reflecting how related concepts are described. Words related to

40 Ueno 2005. gender and same-sex love were selected. In Tables 2–4, function words that lack semantic significance have been removed and hanzi, pinyin, and English translations are listed. The words directly related to gender are women and men. In Chinese, there is a distinction between “nv ren” (the common term for women) and “nv xing” (the biological or cultural term for women), with a matching distinction for men between “nan ren” and “nan xing.”

Table 2 Distance of Words to Two Keywords

Table 2 shows words similar to women-related keywords. In the entry of “nv ren” (woman), “tong qi” (homo-wife) ranked the first. These terms represented gay men’s wives, who were weak because of rumors and their husbands’ unloving eyes. In the world of gays, in particular, their only function was reproduction. Women writers included this group in their stories, showing that they were aware of these women’s suffering. Still, they had the option of sacrificing women to make gay men’s lives easier since BL fiction is about gay men’s love. This word reflects the contradiction between BL authors’ attention to vulnerable women’s situations and their neglect of women’s other roles. In the depiction of women, almost all terms were stereotypical. “Mu ai” (mother love) bound women to the role of mother. “Hao ren jia” (good family) indicated the expectation for women to marry into a worthy family and have a successful marriage. “Chu ye” (the night that loses virginity) reflected the importance of chastity to women. “Chuan zong jie dai” (continuity of a clan) and “sheng xiao hai” (to give birth to a child) highlights women’s instrumental reproductive function in BL fiction. Although the word “wai yu” (affair) indicates the desire of Chinese women to escape from the marriage system under the patriarchy, women’s escape from marriage in BL fiction was for the sole purpose of making the gay men’s love a reasonable response. Hence, words similar to “nv ren” (woman) conveyed more of a negative take than of a positive feminist principle. In contrast, words close to “nv xing” (woman) were more neutral, such as “qun ti” (group), “ren Zhong” (race), “xing xiang” (sexual orientation), and “ren wu xing xiang” ( image). Nonetheless, the words “yi duan” (heresy) and “qi shi” (discrimination) still reflect negative attitudes toward women. Furthermore, the word “sheng yu” (reproduction) corresponded to “sheng xiao hai” (to give birth to a child) in the entry of “nv ren,” both of which referred to women’s specific physiological functions.

Table 3 Distance of Words to Two Keywords

Among the words similar to “nan ren” (man) in Table 3, some are also present in the entry of “nv ren” (women), such as “tong qi” (homo-wife), “gong huan nan” (through thick and thin), “da guang gun” (stay single), and “shan bian” (capricious), showing a high degree of correlation between women and men. Besides, “fei ni bu ke” (it had to be you) was a promise, meaning that love counted more in the entry of “nan ren” (man) than of “nv ren” (woman). Together with “cai se” (color) and “xun yi cao” (lavender), this created a love atmosphere similar to the campus and fairy tale topics. In the entry of “nan xing” (man), a curious phenomenon occurred: “nan xing,” the biological concept of men, was associated with words that were supposed to belong to women, such as “sheng yu” (reproduction), “sheng yu neng li” (reproductive ability), and “shou yun” (to get pregnant). Although women had “sheng xiao hai” (to give birth to a child) and “sheng yu” in their entry, “sheng yu neng li” and “shou yun” appeared for the first time. The word “shou yun” specifically refers to the development of a fetus inside women, but a review of the raw data indicated that the term was used in BL fiction to refer to men, letting males have bodies. As a disease, intersex is described as a disorder of sex development (DSD), with a prevalence of 1 in 1500,41 so it is impossible to have as many patients in real life as in stories. In fact, BL fiction displayed imaginatively bold details with words such as “yi duan” (heresy), “luan sheng” (oviparity), and “yao wu” (drug), making the impossible male or bisexual pregnancy feasible. In this case, the uke was the embodiment of woman, and the male–male relationship was the projection of heterosexuality in stories, having nothing to do with real gays. Apart from thousands of years’ tradition of carrying the family line in China, women authors write like that, possibly, to defy patriarchal rules. They could conceivably have written heterosexual love stories, but only heterosexuality in a gay shell frees them from patriarchal constraints. When women endow their physiological features to men, they can include reproductive ability and other features without being oppressed by patriarchy and can escape objectification by assuming the male identity. This can be the first step toward feminism, as one scholar put it, “for a female subject to re-encounter femininity from within a male body is clearly to experience it under different terms—to live it no longer as disenfranchisement and subordination, but rather as phallic divestiture, as a way of saying ‘no’ to power.”42 Though transferring women’s characteristics on men freed women writers and readers, it resulted in women’s absence. “Shi heng” (imbalance) implied that, in these stories, there were many more men than women; hence, women became more dispensable after the reproductive function was no longer exclusive to them. This explains the paucity of women in BL fiction. The patriarchal society oppressed women deeply, making them hate their nature to the extent of being willing to give up their

41 Wherrett 2015. 42 Silverman 1992, 389. primal capacity.

Table 4 Distance of Words to One Keyword

As for same-sex love, the Chinese expression “tong xing lian” was selected as a representation. Table 4 shows that the words related to “tong xing lian” include many references to marriage, such as “jie guo hun” (ever been married), “hun yin sheng huo” (married life), and “hun yin guan xi” (marital relations). Same-sex marriage has always been an important public concern. Although mainland China does not recognize same- sex marriage in law, Taiwan has legalized it in 2019, which causes major controversies. The Chinese government took some measures to protect the LGBTQ group

, such as the adult-appointed guardianship system that allows adults to choose their own guardians in case they become incapacitated since 2017. Therefore, there were many related legal terms in this entry, involving “he fa hua” (legalization), “fa ding” (legal), and “hun yin fa” (marriage law). Also practiced is “xing hun” (marriage of convenience), through which Chinese gays can have a child and satisfy their parents. “Dai yun” (surrogacy) also reflects a social phenomenon that has become increasingly controversial on China’s social networks. The Chinese government considers surrogacy illegal, and most Chinese women believe that it objectifies women.43 However, when fictional stories transferred surrogacy to a man with an intersex body, its exploitative nature was reduced. “Dai yun” was mainly about the intersex uke as the surrogate mother, allowing women writers to cast off the moral burden. Although women writers care about LGBTQ issues, such concern still contained the idealized feminist elements. For example, in contrast to reality, women in BL fiction would not be surrogates. Women’s abandonment of their physiological functions was not totally negative. Instead, this let them avoid self- exploitation.

5.2 The Diachronic Analysis of Words Close to Keywords After the words close to each keyword were analyzed, six typical words were selected from them to track frequencies from 2003 to 2019. We focused on the words that pointed to women, men, or gays with respect to identity, status, and physiological characteristics. In reality, “tong qi” (homo-wives) connected women and the gay community. Because of their reproductive ability, they were exploited by the gay group. Similar to “tong qi,” “chu ye” (the night that loses virginity) and “chuan zong jie dai” (continuity of a clan) meant exploitation, reflecting the traditional ethics based on women’s physiological characteristics. As for men, “sheng yu neng li” (reproductive ability) and “shuang xing ren” (intersex) added women’s features and identity to men.

43 About the surrogacy controversy in China, see https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/22/china/china-celebrity- surrogacy-scandal-dst-intl-hnk/index.html. This anomaly deserves attention. “He fa hua” (legalization) meant that the identity and marriage of gays were recognized in the law, revealing the attitude of Chinese society toward same-sex love and marriage. The six words could reveal the diachronic change of gender consciousness in BL fiction. The word frequency of one term in a certain year was divided by the total word frequency of the year to get a specific value, as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4 Word Frequencies by Year

The top half of Figure 4 reveals the frequencies of three words, namely, “tong qi” (homo-wife), “chu ye” (the night that loses virginity), and “chuan zong jie dai” (continuity of a clan), all linked to the keyword “nv ren” (woman). Figure 4 shows that “tong qi” occurs only after 2010, which means that awareness started during that year and women’s consciousness improved in recent times. The word frequencies of “chu ye” and “chuan zong jie dai” declined, indicating that the stereotyped ideas of women were less prevalent. Although women writers once emphasized women’s virginity and their childbearing function, in recent years, this phenomenon has gradually vanished as Chinese women’s education level, social status, and awareness of gender equality have improved. The lower part of Figure 4 shows the frequencies of “sheng yu neng li” (reproductive ability), “shuang xing ren” (intersex), and “he fa hua” (legalization). “Sheng yu neng li” did not appear in the women’s entry, so it was categorized as a term to describe men. It appeared in 2009 and increased rapidly after 2013. “Shuang xing ren” also fell under the men’s entry. Its trend from 2012 to 2018 was very similar to “Sheng yu neng li,” implying that the two terms were closely related and the intersex group in BL stores did have the ability to reproduce. Furthermore, “he fa hua” was close to same-sex love, whose curve rose after 2013, perhaps because LGBTQ group’s rights were attracting more attention. After the Taiwan judiciary announced the current civil law did not make gay marriage unconstitutional and mainland China adopted the adult- appointed guardianship system in 2017, the discussion on legalizing same-sex marriage reached its peak, indicating the relevance of BL fiction to reality. Women writers’ contradictions were displayed in words close to gender and same- sex love. Because of the oppression of traditional ethics, authors deliberately ignored women who were bound, which signaled a misogynistic tendency. Such “misogyny” was also a tool for women to protect themselves from patriarchal exploitation. After women’s absence, they let the uke have the reproductive ability and make the seme and uke pattern similar to man and woman to realize their egalitarian heterosexual ideal. In today’s BL fiction, gender stereotypes are rare. Women further examined female physiological features through the intersex group, hoping to shatter the traditional gender ideologies.

6. Sentiments of Chinese Online BL Fiction Baidu’s natural language processing platform was adopted to conduct sentiment analysis. To eliminate interference, only titles and plot synopses were analyzed to infer the text’s overall tone. Sentiment analysis can reflect tones from positive and negative perspectives with scores ranging from 0 (negative) to 1 (positive).

Figure 5 Sentiment Scores of BL Fiction by Year

Figure 5 shows the sentiment analysis results. Between 2003 and 2019, the BL fiction sentiment score remained above 0.5, showing that the overall tone was pleasant and positive. Except for a slight decline from 2003 to 2005, 2007 to 2008, and 2011 to 2012, the score rose in all other periods. Between 2018 and 2019, the uptick was particularly rapid. The Chinese government’s crackdown on pornography might have caused early declines since the campaign resulted in the deletion of a large number of works. The BL fiction low sentiment score at the beginning might be related to the popularity of tragic endings in early works. Since the first BL fiction A Lovers’ Forest (1961), the tragic ending had always been de rigueur for Japanese BL works. The early BL stories, as a kind of minority literature, pursued supreme beauty and sensory pleasure.44 The love between men was beset with taboos that the public could not understand, whereas the tragedy (e.g., A Lovers’ Forest ended with the protagonist’s death) could magnify this aesthetic feeling, letting the whole story become a work of art indulging in beauty and evil. Under this influence, Chinese BL fiction also experienced a similar period of negative sentiments. In the later period, BL fiction’s sentiment score kept soaring, showing that this exotic tragic mode was no longer popular. The cultural industry weakened BL fiction’s marginal features. Like soap operas, these stories were increasingly becoming acceptable pastimes for the public. In recent years, China’s economy has trended downward under the impact of industrial transformation, trade war, and COVID-19.45 When facing great economic and social pressures, young Chinese people need relaxing entertainment that can help them escape reality. BL fiction with positive sentiments and romantic eros meets young people’s emotional needs. Since the BL narratives do not have significant women characters, this lets women forget their gender roles, ease marriage stress and sexual repression, and achieve spiritual liberation.

7. Discussion and Conclusion Many conclusions have been made through the LDA topic model, word vector technology, and Baidu’s sentiment analysis in this study. From 2003 to 2019, the number of Chinese online BL fiction pieces increased rapidly. They had a variety of topics, had positive ideals, were richly imaginative, and transformed from niche entertainment to popular culture. As a type of women’s writing, BL stories showed both women’s sense of power and awareness of misogyny. BL fiction expressed women authors’ desire for self-actualization, which they

44 Mizoguchi 2015, 26–27. 45 See https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-gdp-instantview-idUSKBN1ZG092 projected to the male characters hoping to gain egalitarian love and realize their own value. They even transferred the reproductive ability to men to free themselves. However, there was no woman presence in gay men’s love. The only female group that associated with gay men in reality, homo-wives, were even ignored by early authors. BL writers solidified the seme and uke pattern by depicting the intersex group and even indicated their adherence to norms of reproduction and monogamy. Chinese online BL fiction has always been in a state of contradiction. The writers created male–male romances but were distant from gays in real life, lacked female roles but reflected feminism in depth, revealed women’s awakening but were fettered by the realities of patriarchy. Superficially, the description of male–male love without women originates from penis envy and women’s self-loathing, but what women actually loathe is their role under patriarchy. A BL story is a unique narrative created by women in the field of popular culture. Women use this as a device to fight against men’s cultural hegemony, break the gender stereotype, and awaken self-awareness. However, this awakening is less than complete. Women are conscious of their situation but dare not overthrow the existing patriarchy. Thus, they can only project their fantasies onto the man, hoping that he can fulfill their wishes. Women define their economic status through consumption, but what they consume is subordinate to the patriarchal discourse. Nowadays, authors are trying to change women’s marginalized roles in BL fiction. For example, Jinjiang’s most popular BL work Heaven Official’s Blessing (2018) had a powerful goddess supporting role. She took charge of wisdom and culture, subverting the traditional gender role of women in China. Although such discussion on women was not the story’s core, it still represented gratifying progress. Sexuality as a product of culture and history, rather than an instinct, is one of the core ideas in Foucault’s The History of Sexuality.46 Similarly, the desire for sexuality in BL fiction only occurs in a specific social and historical context. After thousands of years’ sexual repression, Chinese women’s self-awareness has awakened, but patriarchy

46 Foucault 1979. is like an invisible net, limiting their efforts to change the status quo. In this case, BL fiction becomes women’s virtual utopia. In today’s Chinese society, with the market expansion of BL-adapted TV drama and animation works, Chinese BL fiction represents a trend of further development, reflected in the preference for dramatic plots and the egalitarian mode of seme and uke. BL fiction will become a larger cultural industry. Before that happens, as BL becomes mainstream, various questions will arise, such as the impact of pornographic elements on children and the hindrance of misogyny to real feminism. The world of male–male romance is a utopia where women can enjoy consuming men, but it is only transitory. When women return to reality, they will one day find that this brief awakening means deeper bondage since they have eliminated their own living space. This study used machine learning technology to study Jinjiang, the largest online BL fiction platform, comprehensively. With big data, the panorama of BL stories from synchronic and diachronic dimensions was presented, analyzing the gender thoughts embodied by women authors to put forward new perspectives closely related to China’s society. However, because of the limited technology and space, not all texts of BL fiction and other related texts such as fan fiction and Girls’ Love (GL) fiction of lesbians could be included. These issues will be explored in future research.

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