History of Fandom

Yaoi/BL Fandom Survey (only takes 10 mins to complete): https://leeds.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/blfandomsurvey

This article addresses the research question: How do Chinese Yaoi fans read Yaoi stories? Yaoi is a female-oriented genre of Japanese popular culture which describes romantic and erotic relationships between men. We interviewed twenty Chinese nationals who are self-defined fans of Yaoi (mean age=23.5 years). Although men were not excluded, none volunteered. A Yaoi fandom survey was created in Chinese and in English with five sections: demographics, Yaoi materials, feelings about Yaoi, social relationships, and other erotic materials (Chinese N=1085; Anglophone N=1615). Thematic Analysis of the interviews produced five themes suggesting the existence of a heteronormative frame: social and family approval, everlasting romantic relationship, heteronormative couple, dislike reversible relationship, and gay relationships in reality. We then selected questions from the survey for statistical analysis on the rationale that these items might inform this frame and help us interpret and contextualise the qualitative analysis. Our survey results support our thematic analysis that Chinese Yaoi fans tend to read Yaoi through a heteronormative frame and, importantly, that in comparison with Anglophone fans, this is differential to Chinese culture.

Yaoi/BL Fandom Survey (only takes 10 mins to complete): https://leeds.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/blfandomsurvey

Yaoi or BL (Boys' Love) is a genre of Japanese subculture presenting in comics, videogames, novels and fan arts which describe the fantasy erotic and romantic relationships between males. This is a female-oriented subculture which originated in the early 1970s spread globally, especially during the 1990s. In contemporary China there is a huge population of Yaoi consumers and producers with an inestimable number of Yaoi novels serialized online and many other kinds of Yaoi material uploaded to the internet. However, Yaoi culture and fans face much prejudice in China, even compared to Yaoi as it has been received and produced in the West. An aim of our study of Yaoi culture in China, was to determine the demographics of the Chinese fan-base and to compare this to the demographics of the Anglophone fan-base. Hence, this presentation will report the comparisons of demographic information from our BL Fandom survey data of Sinophone and Anglophone Yaoi fans. We collected 1527 Chinese and 1700 Anglophone survey responses from almost identical surveys in Chinese and in English over a 3 year period from 2014-2017. Demographic data included gender (male, female, other), age, sexual orientation, occupation, strength of fandom identification, acceptance of male/male and female/female relationships in real life, and consumption of non-BL pornographic materials. Results suggested that compared to Anglophone fans, Chinese fans identified less strongly as a BL fan, were less accepting of non-heterosexual relationships in real life, and consumed less non-BL pornography. These finding are commensurate with the relative social conservativism of Chinse culture, including the greater regulation and criticism of Yaoi culture and self-uploaded on-line material. We are still exploring our data and expect to report additional findings during the presentation.

This essay discusses the German fans of author Karl May's Westerns against the backdrop of a broader community of German hobbyists devoted to the American West, as this community developed after 1912 – examining the impact of political repression, war, and the division of Germany after 1945 on these fan communities and their interpretations of the American West. German fans of the 'Old West' (both 'Indian' re-enactment hobbyists and fans of Karl May's more fictionalized story world) created their own bodies of knowledge and celebratory performances over the last century, reinterpreting and exploring the world of May's novels. The historical American West is part of the 'Primary World,' as defined by Mark Wolf, but this essay argues that the diverse versions of the West created by German fans can be understood as partly or entirely secondary, since neither May, nor many of the first generations of German fans, ever visited the American West. Both May's stories and fans' interpretations of the West were partly based on fiction, even as many tried to recreate an 'authentic' world that they had never seen. The story world created by May, and the broader fictionalized world of the American West created by German fans, was also transmedial before media convergence, tentatively before 1945 and increasingly so after 1960. But the German versions of Karl May's stories and the American West that extended across varied media during the twentieth century were often inconsistent, created by a variety of producers as a result of political regime turnover in twentieth century Germany, the expiration of copyright over May's novels, and the growing consumer culture of West Germany after 1945. The lack of any centralized editorial control over transmedia versions of both Karl May's story world and the fictionalized American West helped German fans to make the American West their own, creating their own versions of the 'Western' stories, characters, and cultures suited to the politics and culture of each decade, and circulating these interpretations among other fans.