Liang Ge

University College London | UCL · Thomas Coram Research Unit

The male-male romance web series The Untamed reached a height of media interest in the summer of 2019 in China. Numerous Chinese young women were obsessed with the drama centred on the relationship between the two male protagonists, and many fan followers identified themselves as ‘ The Untamed Girls’. Through online observation of young female fans...

Danmei culture, a Chinese literary genre that foregrounds male–male romances and/or erotica, has received significant attention in academia. Studies have investigated how it enables women to resist heteronormativity or forms the escapist route for women to express their desires. Danmei culture has evolved into a transmedia landscape and cultural in...

This article examines the tension between public gender expressions and official regulations in mainland China. Utilizing a critical discourse analysis, we investigate a transition in state-initiated criticism and censorship against the danmei genre and male effeminacy. Focusing on the pandemic period, we use official regulations and state media fe...

Xiaomogu (The Little Mushroom) is a combination of post-apocalyptic sci-fi and male-male romance. In recent years, Chinese-language science fiction has received significant academic attention, while few of them attended to its intersection with romance narration. Simultaneously, literature concerning Chinese online romance fiction, including danmei...

Practices of online censorship around boys' love (danmei) in mainland China have exhibited continuous change, with varying media targets and nominal justifications. This article explores dynamic transformations in the strategies employed by authorities, media platforms, and danmei creators throughout different time periods. Based on the authors' ar...

Ge, L. (2024) (in Chinese) ‘Approaching Fan Culture through Digital Ethnography and Reflexivity’, In X. Zheng (Ed.), Wenxue Renleuxue Yanjiu (Literature & Anthropology), Volume 8, 101-110.

This article focuses on how the heroine Chu Xuanji who used to be an “incomplete” individual since the lack of “hun-po”, grew up to a “complete” subject through a series of adventures in the Chinese web series Liuli in 2020. The subject formation of Xuanji comes as our core concern. First, we employ two strands of theoretical sources from Euro-Amer...

Fans as consumers of cultural products have received a great deal of attention from sociologists and cultural studies academics in recent years, and research on the relationship between fans and state power is gradually gaining traction. Through a 12-month digital ethnography of a large-scale fan conflict surrounding The Untamed, a popular ‘Boys’ L...

The condemnation against fan culture in China is reversing the cause and effect, with fan culture becoming the scapegoat for data colonization.

The literary form of danmei, in which male–male romance and/or erotica is portrayed, is a flourishing genre in China which has received significant attention from academia in recent years. This article focuses on a notorious subgenre of danmei, A/B/O fiction, which introduces three additional sexes, alpha, beta and omega, into mankind, alongside th...