East Asian Journal of Popular Culture - Online First

Originating in Japan in the 1970s, Boys’ Love (BL) has since become a ‘transnational apparatus of love’ for women to explore their sexuality away from societal stigma and sociocultural gender inequality. The genre has garnered both commercial and academic attention, but a common point of contention within existing scholarship is its ability to either challenge or reinforce heteronormative power hierarchies. To that end, much of the previous research has examined the discourses among female fan communities or the portrayal and subversion of masculinity within the works. This article aims to address the oft-ignored representation of femininity and female characters within BL works by focusing on Moxiang Tongxiu’s Tianguan Cifu (Heaven Official’s Blessing), a popular Chinese BL or danmei novel. In examining the roles of five major named female characters in the novel, I argue that the characters fall under the common feminine stereotypes of Mother, Maiden and Monster. While the female characters’ narrative function is affected to some degree by the novel’s focus on a central gay romance, the author nevertheless appears to adhere to the traditional and modern Chinese gender ideologies regarding femininity, restricting any attempts to challenge gendered expectations to male bodies and characters.

Japanese pop idols occupy an ambiguous position in the broader popular music landscape, straddling a line between fiction and non-fiction, simultaneously characterological yet physically instantiated. As idealized representations of the girl or boy next door, idols serve as both ‘image characters’ who can be used to sell a variety of products, as well as ‘quasi companions’ meant to provide fans with a manufactured sense of intimacy. Using a joint quantitative and qualitative approach, this article analyses the lyrics of female idol groups. Specifically, I demonstrate how the combination of first- and second-person pronouns and sentence-final expressions are utilized to construct both female-coded and male-coded gendered personae, revealing that idol lyrics engage in the process of cross-gender performance. As a result, through their performance of these personae, female idol groups explicitly reinforce a binary imagination of normative gender expressions, allowing such idol groups to capitalize on idealized heterosexual adolescence through affective resonance and nostalgia.