Praise you by my gender: affective resistance of Nisu fandom under contemporary China’s gender politics

This paper explores Nisu (泥塑), a boy’s love fandom phenomenon that has recently emerged in Mainland China’s cybersphere. Using the affective economy theoretical frameworks, it investigates the political implications of Nisu as a community bound by affective resistance. In internet fandom, Nisu refers the action of fantasizing about idols or characters in nonbiologically assigned genders, such as imagining a male character as a female. Nisu fans produce creative content to fulfill their homoerotic desires within the participatory community. Notably, this culture undergoes dual oppression from both state censorship and the neoconservative gender discourse for being explicitly erotic and queer, leading to the community actively seeking tactics to resist. Drawing on digital ethnography, this paper elucidates the tension between Nisu fans’ queer gender narratives and the hegemonic understanding of sexuality in contemporary China, as well as the emotions and feelings that are circulated and intensified during these fan practices. It discusses how Nisu fans, as a community of young Chinese women, formulate a networked structure of feelings through which they generate forms of dissent, creative agency, and resistance that potentially weave the community into an “affective public.”