A qualitative study of shipping experience and gender perceptions: Comparing the motivations of couple fans

“Shipping culture” describes secondary creation of television works by fans who, recast the love lines of their favorite characters. Based on their desires of pairing a couple of idols, fans recreate the relationship between their favourite characters. Like other sub-cultures, shipping culture are spreading thanks to the wide adoption of the internet which enhances accessibility of fan objects, enbales flexible content creation, and affords fan community building. Fans participate in the consumption and creation of idol couples online, which has become a research topic that has received much scholarly attention.

This study focuses on exploring differences between shippers. Since shipping involves creation and recreation of romantic relationships, fans bring in their perspectives of roman tic relationships in the process of shipping, which provides a fertile ground for understanding young people’s notion of gender, sexuality, and identities.

Semi-structured interviews with shippers are conducted to provide an in-depth understanding of internal differences of shippers, based on their shipping experience and motivations. Through interviewing shippers, we explain and explore the similarity and difference be tween shippers, including attitudes, and effects on perceptions of gender and sexuality, based on their experience and identities. Theoretical insights from participatory culture of fandom and gender stereotypes inform analysis of the data. According to the identity positioning of the couples, we can identify the shippers as character couples’ fans and fans for couples of real persons. From the genders of these couples, shippers can be divided as GL (Girls’ Love) couples’ fans, BL (Boys’ Love) couples’ fans, and BG (Boy/Girl) couples’ fans. Couples also can be divided into official couples and unofficial couples, defined by how the couples have been established. Based on the content of shipping, shippers can be identified as producers and viewers.

Further, we identify different motivations of shippers. A primary motivation is escaping, compensation, and desire for target love. Another most popular motivation of shipping is physical attraction. This is a common motivations for BG (Boy/Girl) couples’ shippers, and they will even put themselves as the female role.

Interestingly, shippers are changing gazing perspective from the objects to subjects, as the third parties, especially for most BL(Boys’ Love) shippers. These shippers think that most works of television, and other forms, are created with male gazing perspectives. However, looking at boys’ love, fans are able to change to the perspective of female gazing. The couples of males are objects, who are gazed at. From this shift of gazes, it reveals that shipping is regarded as a kind of resistance of patriarchal society and heteronormative hegemony, and these shippers think shipping can represents the awakening of female consciousness.

Our study contributes to existing media culture studies by providing an in-depth account of the shipper communities, shedding light on shippers and the shipping culture and nuances in the communities. Therefore, being one of the pioneer studies on BL, slash, fandom, the unique value of this research lies in the community of identities and motivations of shippers, and how they negotiate with gender, and sexuality based on their experience of shipping.