Girls who love boys' love: BL as goods to think with in Taiwan (with a revised and updated coda)

Abstract

Based on interviews with 30 female readers of BL (“boys’ love”) manga conducted in Taipei in 2005, this paper analyses the BL scene in Taiwan from the perspective of its social utility as a discursive arena enabling women collectively to think through transforming social ideologies around gender and sexuality. This form of participatory pop culture is most interesting, I argue, not because of any unilateral subversiveness vis-à-vis culturally dominant understandings of (feminine) gender or (homo)sexuality – although it does often contest such dominant understandings. Rather, it is important in providing a space for the collective articulation of young women’s in-process thinking on these que..