Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 10, 2025

The HoneyComb Paradigm for Research on Collective Human Behavior
Published on: January 19, 2019
Chinese Homosexuals in a Utopianised World: Active Involvement, Strategic Interactions, and Contingent Engagement
Zeyang Wang1, Thomas William Whyke1
1School of International Communications, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Nottingham Ningbo China, Ningbo, China.
Abstract:
Boys' Love (BL), known as Danmei () in China, is a popular female-oriented male-male intimacy genre celebrated by today's Chinese younger generation. From 2000 to 2020, BL fiction rapidly developed, becoming a major expression of male homosexuality and homoeroticism in China. This research detects the dynamics between BL fiction's utopianized space and gay readers-a community simultaneously being the major subject of BL representation and the minority of BL fans. Conducting semi-structured interviews with three Chinese BL gay readers from high school, college, and workplace, this research delineates a representative picture of Chinese gay readers' intentions, experiences, and opinions of involving a utopianized BL world. Using Ruth Levitas' utopian thinking framework, this research investigates how the utopianized representations of idealized homosexual romance, arousing homoerotic behaviors, and the normalized gay everydayness in Chinese BL fiction from 2000 to 2020 can impact gay readers' engagement with practical lives. The study argues that Chinese BL gay readers' active involvement and strategic interactions enable them to contingently engage with their lived reality, demonstrating their subjective role as active audiences with agency. This result adds to contemporary BL studies and provides an enriched utopian thinking framework, calling for subsequent minority research to value individuals and individuality.
Related Concept Videos
Horney's Sociocultural Approach
Relationship Formation
In- and Out-Groups
Robbers Cave
Stereotype Content Model
Ethnic Identity within a Larger Culture

