“My Non-Existing Organ”: Transitional Objects, Compensatory Romance, and the Affective Enclaves of Chinese Female Idol Fandom

This article examines how young Chinese female fans of the idol group ONER construct and defend gendered subjectivities through digitally mediated intimate practices across Weibo, Douban, and private WeChat groups. Drawing on 24 months of multi-sited digital ethnography across seven Chinese cities, the study documents two identificatory positions, the girlfriend-fan and the mum-fan, and two material-semiotic practices through which these identifications are enacted: coded language and cyber-penis memes . Building on Radway’s argument that women’s affective fandom constitutes psychic compensation for the unmet needs produced by patriarchal social structures, the study demonstrates that Chinese female fans engage in a comparable compensatory romance in response to the constraints imposed by China’s gender governance regime and state regulation of female fan culture. Ethnographic analysis reveals that girlfriend-fan and mum-fan positions are fluid, strategically negotiated stances through which fans manage the tensions between romantic fantasy, maternal retreat, and moral anxiety. Coded language and cyber-penis memes function as transitional objects in Winnicott’s sense, while Butler’s framework of phallic resignification reveals these memes as collective acts of symbolic resistance. Together, these practices constitute the affective enclave, a collectively defended potential space within China’s surveilled platform ecology in which non-normative female desire is articulated and protected.