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 yaoi, tanbi, and june. In China, BL and tanbi (the Mandarin reading of tanbi is danmei 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 “female 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 gender 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 Slash fiction 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-sex 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 fantasies 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 plot 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: