"We are snowflakes": Minor transnationalism and the cultural resilience of slash fanfiction community in China

Fan Xiao

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articlepeer-review

Abstract

This article examines the cultural resilience of the Chinese slash fanfiction subculture. Popular among Chinese youth, the writing and reading of slash are subjected to increasingly stringent regulations due to changes in the political environment. Drawing from the theoretical framework of minor transnationalism, the current study situates the development of the Chinese slash community in the context of post-socialist reform and globalization, arguing that slash fanfiction is a form of non-institutional, border-crossing cultural practice that challenges orthodox heteronormativity in nationalistic discourses. Foregrounding the double-edge-sword role of digital platforms, this article dissects the cultural resilience of the Chinese slash community—manifested as various strategies in keeping the viability of their cultural practices, including cultural enclosure, border-crossing platform-switching, and social media activism. This article contributes to the study of subcultures by bringing a transnational perspective that focuses on continuous, resilient cultural practices in negotiations of alternative cultural and political agendas. Methodologically, it also contributes to social media ethnographic research by testing out a comprehensive toolkit that combines close reading with computational text-mining and visual network analysis in the analysis of multimodal social media discourses.

Original languageEnglish
Number of pages26
JournalGlobal Media and China
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 12 Jul 2023

Scopus Subject Areas

  • Cultural Studies
  • Communication

User-Defined Keywords

  • China
  • cultural resilience
  • minor transnationalism
  • multimodal text analysis
  • slash fanfiction
  • social media

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