![]() ![]() And this genre of fiction really just fills this sort of need for them to imagine what love can be, pure love can be, if gender is taken out of it. I think that culture hasn’t caught up with their expectations and ideals. ![]() And women actually in China have very high standards, a very high economic status, and they are independent in many respects.īut then at the same time, I think they’re frustrated that sometimes they feel that the culture still sees them, especially in the context of romantic relationships, as child bearers or… But in China, this generation of young women, they grew up mostly as only children. In Japan, it is called yaoi, and it is very popular. This genre is called boys love in other places in Asia. I think that is very appealing to a lot of women.Īlso, specifically in China. So they’re unsatisfied and they think that same-sex romantic stories are more…the relationship between the two protagonists is more of an equal kind of relationship…Well, it’s understandable because when you take gender out of this kind of relationship, then I think women have a lot of freedom to kind of imagine, to fantasize how pure love can be. I think, from conversations that I had with these fans, these readers, most say that because they are unsatisfied with heterosexual romantic stories, romances, because the female characters are not portrayed as full human beings who go about doing things. So they are most likely young women in China who are reading these novels. And they tend to be young women as well, because 84% of these readers are aged 18 to 35. Data from one of the most prominent websites that publishes danmei fiction, Jinjiang Literature City, indicates that 93% of their users are women. I mean, at least in China, they are most popular among women readers. And…īut it’s not necessarily gay men who are the most avid consumers of it, right? It’s a kind of fiction that features a same-sex male romantic relationship. What is danmei? Who writes it and who reads it?ĭanmei is a genre of fiction in China that features male protagonists, who over the course of the story will develop romantic or sexual relationships. You’ve recently written about danmei for The China Project. This is an abridged, edited transcript of our conversation, part of my Invited to Tea interview series. To help us understand what is going on, I spoke to Jin Zhao. But it’s not all heteronormative: The country is, in some ways, surprisingly tolerant of non-binary ideas about gender, and one of the most vibrant and popular genres of Chinese fiction is danmei (耽美 dānměi), stories of gay male romances. China is not a progressive country when it comes to LGBTQ rights and social acceptance. ![]()
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