Danmei, Xianqing, and the making of a queer online public sphere in China

Danmei is the Chinese term for boys’ love, a genre of male–male romance created by and for women and sexual minorities. This commentary focuses on Xianqing, a well-known danmei forum established under the aegis of a women-oriented literature website in 2003. Although mainly dedicated to popular media consumption, Xianqing has over the years become both a part of the larger online public sphere in China and a unique queer public sphere that defies any simple classification, offering pleasures, meanings, and identities to numerous diehard danmei fans residing in and out of China, despite recurrent technical problems, managerial failures, and increasing censorship. Through revealing some of the paradoxes and ambiguities of this alternative public sphere, we seek to highlight the understudied gendered dimension of the online public sphere in China and question the rigid distinction between politics and entertainment in academic discourse.