Ambivalent Desires carefully investigates Chinese danmei creators’ and fans’ everyday affective experiences in the dynamic yet ambivalent boys love cultural ecology of China. Emerging in mainland China in the late 1990s and flourishing in the 2010s, danmei, also known as boys love fiction, is a genre that features male-male romances or erotica. This book offers a rich, empirically grounded account of danmei, examining the complex and embodied lived experiences of those producing and consuming male homoeroticism and framing ambivalence as an ongoing queer feminist project.

Proposing a novel theoretical framework of “the grammar of ambivalences,” Liang Ge seeks to understand how desires, affects, and queer feminist politics operate within and against the everyday heteropatriarchal and party-state conditions of postsocialist China. Ambivalent Desires attends simultaneously to the backward-looking normativities infused within danmei culture and the forward-facing transformative potential it generates, refusing the reductive binary of resistance versus escapism that has structured much existing scholarship.

Liang Ge is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester.

Content

List of Figures and Tables    
A Note on Language and Translation    
Acknowledgments
Introduction    
Chapter 1 – Situating the Study: The Danmei Community in Chengdu and Generational Divides in Danmei Cultural Ecology    
Chapter 2 – Ambivalent Desiring Subjects: Young Women, Ambivalent Agency and Post-(Socialist)-Feminist Sensibilities    
Chapter 3 – Affective Circuits in Engagement with Fictional Characters: Qing as Sensual and Sentimental Desires    
Chapter 4 – Affect Aliens, Alien Affects: Queer Feelings and the Transformative Qing    
Chapter 5 – Ambivalent Affective Labour: Qing in the Danmei Cultural Industry    
Conclusion    
Bibliography    
Notes