The politics of pleasure: Danmei and the quiet gender revolution of Chinese women

This dissertation traces the changing paradigms through which an ideal model of the
gender subject and gendered power relations is depicted in Danmei narratives. It
explores how women’s shifting understandings and expectations of their gender
identities and roles are rendered intelligible through representations of the gender
performance and power structure in the romantic relationship between male
homosexual couples. It is interested in seeing how Danmei storytelling responds to and
interacts with formations and transformations of the gender subject of Chinese women.
By reading three Danmei fictions – Phoenix in the Sky (凤于九天), The Sword of
Galaxy（银河帝国之刃）, and Silent Reading（默读）– in close relationship to their
respective social-cultural contexts, as well as analyzing the vast discourse collected
from Chinese social media regarding “feminist” and “feminism”, the dissertation will
attempt to show how Chinese women deal with the conflicting identity scenarios and
gender regulations they face in their lives in the imaginative universe of Danmei. In
other words, I want to observe how Chinese women answer two propositions central to
their current existential situation: 1) What does it mean to be a woman today? 2) How
can they hold up that “half of the sky” that belongs to them? I hope to demonstrate how
Danmei can be seen as an experimental site for Chinese women to investigate possible
female subject and gender roles which can at times be quite enlightening and
empowering, but which can also entail dilemmas, problems and confusions that remain
unresolved.
Furthermore, changes in dominant Danmei textual paradigms are supposed to be
responses to the overriding ideological, cultural, and institutional fluctuations
surrounding gender issues at different stages and in various aspects of modern Chinese
history. Specifically, the shifts in social expectations for women, the transformations of
family planning policy, the rise of commercialization and consumerism, as symptoms
of the overall reform, have in various aspects affected the settings, constructions, and
values of Danmei narratives. In short, by tracing the shifting dominant discourses of
love stories in Danmei texts, I would like to unearth and map the formation and
transformation of the female subject in China.
Besides, as a senior fan of Danmei as well as a female researcher with traditional
academic training, or in Jenkins’s words, an “aca-fan”, I have a unique perspective from
which to do research on Danmei, as well as the ability and responsibility to build a
bridge between the vernacular theories of elite fans and the academic theories of
researchers. I hope this research might also help to open the communication channels
between sub-cultural circles and traditional academe.