NONNORMATIVE MASCULINITY IN DANMEI LITERATURE: ‘MAIDEN SEME’ AND SAJIAO

Masculinity in contemporary China can be embodied by myriads of works featuring male-male same-sex intimacy and eroticism, which fall into a genre dubbed as danmei ‘addicted to beauty; indulgence beauty’, aka Boys Love (BL). As marginalised yet increasingly visible subculture, writing has attracted legions female producers/consumers, who are (self-)referred ‘rotten girls’. The female-oriented fiction is overwhelmingly marked conspicuous dichotomy differentiating seme (top) from uke (bottom) roles, prodigious amount narratives concern feminisation characters, motivated the prevailing ‘soft masculinity’. Nonetheless, readers also delight subcategory featured shaonü gong ‘maiden/adolescent-girl seme’ manifesting epicene demeanour conducting sajiao denotes playing cute/winsome/petulant or performing pettishness/coquettish. acts semes indicate authorial personae ‘cuteness’ youth culture, especially ‘paradoxical cuteness’ integrating masculinity femininity well cross-dressing cross-gender performance. Furthermore, characterisation entailing enfeebled virility enables challenge heteropatriarchal heteronormative zeitgeist, it mitigates women’s dread anxiety concerning sexual violence, exploitation oppression real-world contexts.