Jing Xu
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jxjingxu.bsky.social
Jing Xu
@jxjingxu.bsky.social
66 followers 140 following 0 posts
Ph.D. Student at Penn State
Mass communications & Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
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Reposted by Jing Xu
lunarriviera.info
(if you want to know more about the 2024 arrests, the rather brilliant scholar @liangge11.bsky.social, who teaches at UCL, published an article in March in EJCS: "The Haitang Incident 2024 and the ugliness of danmei culture/industry"—it's open access and they are VERY astute) doi.org/10.1177/1367...
The Haitang Incident of 2024 exposed the precariousness of danmei (boys’ love) culture and its creators in China under the dual pressures of state surveillance and platform capitalism. I critically interrogate the Chinese danmei cultural ecology through ugliness – not as a state-imposed stigma but as a critical lens and a generative conceptual tool. Departing from previous scholarship’s binary framings of danmei as either resistance or escapism, ugliness reveals danmei as a site of struggles, where censorship, commercialisation and danmei creators and fans as affective communities entangle in unstable yet persistent ways. I interrogate the precarious position of Haitang Literature City authors, and reveal the ugly convergence of digital governance and economic exploitation. Furthermore, I explore the fragmentation of trust within the danmei community, where fear, survival and mistrust complicate solidarity. Centring ugliness as a productive analytic can move beyond the limitations of binary resistance narratives to better account for danmei culture’s messiness, contradictions and ambivalences.
June 3, 2025 at 7:57 PM
Reposted by Jing Xu
qianhuang.bsky.social
As promised, a reading list about Xiaohongshu is available now with the help of many Chinese social media researchers: qianxeniahuang.super.site/resources/xi.... Special thanks to @carwynmorris.bsky.social for co-editing this. I am only hosting this on my personal website for logistic reasons.
January 15, 2025 at 4:58 PM