SIGNATURE WORK
CONFERENCE & EXHIBITION 2024

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. Despite the rich scholarly debate on the feminist resistance and patriarchal backlash presented by Boys Love (BL) works, consumers’ interpretation of gender representations in BL have remained largely unexplored. Based on 20 in-depth 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. Conversely, a minority of readers directly criticize heteronormativity for limiting the imagination of gender roles in BL. This study sheds light on the complex gender narrative of contemporary Chinese young women, both misogynistic and feminist. Also, it argues that to comprehensively understand the influences of BL works on feminist discourse, readers’ voices should be placed in an equally important position as creators’ motivations and scholars’ content-based analysis.