Women’s Affect and Queer Fandom in China : Living as Rotten Girls

This book investigates how “rotten girls”—female fans of male-male romance—navigate the affective terrain of queer fandom in post-socialist China. Focusing on the everyday experiences of these fans, it traces their engagements with queer representations of masculinity across state-sanctioned, commercial, and fan-produced media.

This book investigates how “rotten girls”—female fans of male-male romance—navigate the affective terrain of queer fandom in post-socialist China. Focusing on the everyday experiences of these fans, it traces their engagements with queer representations of masculinity across state-sanctioned, commercial, and fan-produced media. Through the lens of affect, the book highlights how these women negotiate identity, desire, and agency within an environment marked by censorship, market forces, and patriarchal norms. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and close analysis of danmu (real-time comment) fan videos and online discussions, the study introduces the concept of a “post-socialist structure of feeling” to capture the intuitive, often ambivalent ways fans inhabit Chinese queer fandom. It explores how this cultural space serves as an affective heterotopia—a contradictory, emotionally charged zone where fans consume, produce, and contest representations of soft masculinity. The book also examines how these women emerge as “killjoys”: feminists-in-the-making who challenge, endure, and reimagine the limits of China’s heteronormative social order. Offering original insights into Chinese queer fandom, this book is a valuable resource for scholars and students in media and cultural studies, gender studies, queer theory, and Asian studies. It contributes to growing conversations in transcultural fan studies by foregrounding affect as both a methodological and conceptual tool for understanding how digital fandom mediates identity, emotion, and power in contemporary China.