Pure love and shadow desire: Navigating censorship, queer fantasy and ressentiment in Chinese Boys’ Love (BL) erotica

Recent arrests of the Chinese female writers on the platform Haitang, for creating Boys’ Love (BL) erotica, have exposed a thriving, albeit underground, market for BL pornography. While commercialized and sanitized BL works, often termed ‘pure love纯爱’ works, are popular in China and abroad, state censorship and platform content moderation targeting sexual and queer narratives are growing more stringent. This research explores the complex landscape of Chinese BL erotica, specifically examining how censorship and evolving platform regulations have shaped its content and emotional expression. Through explicit writing, authors construct queer bodies, such as ‘shuangxing双性’ or androgynous bodies, that transcend binary gender norms, noting their recent surge in popularity after the purification of commercial BL content. The research investigates how these imagined bodies reflect the oppressed fantasies and desires of authors and readers, and focuses on their structure of feeling. By conducting textual and discourse analysis, this research introduces the concept of ressentiment within these marginalized narratives to broaden the framework of control-resistance. Through analyzing detailed depictions of bodies, emotions and desire, this study argues that Chinese BL erotica, particularly within the androgynous subgenre, offers profound insights into the anger, struggle and complex negotiations with gendered powerlessness experienced by silenced groups. This challenges simplistic notions of female empowerment and conventional understandings of gender awareness. Furthermore, this study engages with the ‘misogyny of BL’ discussion prevalent in the field, and compares it with popular radical feminist discourse in contemporary China.