Heteronormativity in Korean Boys Love Comics: A Study of Chinese Women’s Gender Discourse

This study aims to investigate the gender discourse of young Chinese women through their engagement in Korean Boys Love comics (KBLCs), a popular genre in East Asia that depicts idealized gay relationships, primarily by women and for women. Despite the rich scholarly debate on the feminist resistance and patriarchal backlash presented by Boys Love (BL) works, the genre of KBLCs and consumers’ interpretation of gender representations in BL have remained largely unexplored. Based on digital ethnography and 20 in-depth one-on-one interviews with Chinese KBLC readers, this study reveals that readers often perceive KBLCs as embodying heteronormativity through fantasized body images, sexualized personalities, and reinforced traditional heterosexual roles of the comic characters. Furthermore, though readers generally criticize those gendered representations, their rationales vary. The majority of readers replicate binary gender ideas in their interpretation. They critique the feminine boy characters as deviant masculine symbols in need of correction. I argue that this perception is a projection of women readers’ internalized misogyny reflected in their spectatorship of fictional gay groups. Conversely, a minority of readers directly criticize heteronormativity for limiting the imagination of gender roles in BL. They advocate for KBLCs to break out of the dualistic gender framework. This study sheds light on the complex gender narrative of contemporary Chinese young women, both misogynistic and feminist. Also, it adds to the missing perspective of BL readers’ reception in existing research. It argues that to comprehensively understand the influences of BL works on shaping feminist discourse, readers’ voices should be placed in an equally important position as creators’ motivations and scholars’ content-based analysis.