The Art of Failure as Seen in Chinese Women’s Boys’ Love Fantasies

In Chapter 1, I describe the feminine pornographic gaze as restless, craving different types of hard-core and soft-core sex scenes, as well as identifying with different sexual orientations. The “drifting eyeballs” of women announce a search for erotic stimulation and dissatisfaction with existing male-dominated aesthetics in pornography. This chapter extends this claim by looking at feminine pornography in online microfiction and fanzines (called doujinshi in Japanese, or tongrenzhi [同人志 in Chinese) based on the Japanese manga genre of Boys’ Love (in Chinese, called danmei, 耽美, “801,” or simply “BL”). This genre refers to female-authored narratives about homosexual love affairs that involve emotional hardship and include hard-core sex. These kinds of emotive sex scenes are currently highly popular in Hong Kong and mainland China. The stories comprise many different genres, but all depict heightened love affairs between a male “dominant” (优, seme) character and a male “bottom” (受, uke) character.