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Start Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
The Untamed (Mandarin title: Chen Qing Ling) is a 2019 Chinese drama popular with both domestic and international audiences, particularly English-language slash fans. As many Anglophone fans were new to Chinese danmei content, The Untamed’s English-language fandom has proven to be a “transnational contact zone” (Morimoto and Chin 2017) where differences in cultural expectations around queer representation in media become visible and clash.
Due to Chinese state censorship, The Untamed must obscure the overt queer representation and explicit sexual content of its danmei (Chinese Boy’s Love webnovels) source by coding its main relationship as homosocial and brotherly. This shift, I argue, renders the text more legible to Anglophone slash fans, and may account for its previously unprecedented popularity in these circles. Many fans follow The Untamed to fan translations of the source novel, but some find the difference between familiar “intimatopic” tropes and structures (Woledge 2006) and danmei conventions objectionable. These fans are not only critical of the novel’s queer representation, but also insist that The Untamed’s coding is actually “good” queer representation in its own right.
This presentation examines changes made in the adaptation process and analyzes threads of online discourse to show how these changes (often attributed to censorship) make The Untamed legible to Anglophone slash fandom, and how unfamiliarity with the danmei genre and tropes plays into some fans’ negative valuation of the original novel. Ultimately, I argue that asserting the superiority of The Untamed’s queer representation over the novel’s privileges ambiguous, queer-coded narratives and Anglophone slash interpretive structures, validating repressive Chinese censorship and suppressing the queer potential of Sinophone danmei. Further, this phenomenon troubles the common understanding of queer Anglophone fandom as a progressive space that desires more overt queer representation, showing that some fans actively value the pleasures of textual “poaching” (Jenkins 1992) from coded narratives over more overt depictions of queer characters and relationships.
Hierarchies of Queer Representation in The Untamed's Transcultural Fandom
The Untamed (Mandarin title: Chen Qing Ling) is a 2019 Chinese drama popular with both domestic and international audiences, particularly English-language slash fans. As many Anglophone fans were new to Chinese danmei content, The Untamed’s English-language fandom has proven to be a “transnational contact zone” (Morimoto and Chin 2017) where differences in cultural expectations around queer representation in media become visible and clash.
Due to Chinese state censorship, The Untamed must obscure the overt queer representation and explicit sexual content of its danmei (Chinese Boy’s Love webnovels) source by coding its main relationship as homosocial and brotherly. This shift, I argue, renders the text more legible to Anglophone slash fans, and may account for its previously unprecedented popularity in these circles. Many fans follow The Untamed to fan translations of the source novel, but some find the difference between familiar “intimatopic” tropes and structures (Woledge 2006) and danmei conventions objectionable. These fans are not only critical of the novel’s queer representation, but also insist that The Untamed’s coding is actually “good” queer representation in its own right.
This presentation examines changes made in the adaptation process and analyzes threads of online discourse to show how these changes (often attributed to censorship) make The Untamed legible to Anglophone slash fandom, and how unfamiliarity with the danmei genre and tropes plays into some fans’ negative valuation of the original novel. Ultimately, I argue that asserting the superiority of The Untamed’s queer representation over the novel’s privileges ambiguous, queer-coded narratives and Anglophone slash interpretive structures, validating repressive Chinese censorship and suppressing the queer potential of Sinophone danmei. Further, this phenomenon troubles the common understanding of queer Anglophone fandom as a progressive space that desires more overt queer representation, showing that some fans actively value the pleasures of textual “poaching” (Jenkins 1992) from coded narratives over more overt depictions of queer characters and relationships.
Bio
Laurel is a PhD student in the Radio-Television-Film Department at the University of Texas at Austin. She in interested in the intersections of fandom and nostalgia, particularly the sites where fans, creators, and industry collide. Her other research interests include reboot culture, online platforms, science fiction, and superheroes.