Ge, Liang;
(2025)
The Haitang Incident 2024 and the ugliness of danmei culture/industry.
European Journal of Cultural Studies
10.1177/13675494251326775.
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Abstract
The Haitang Incident of 2024 exposed the precariousness of danmei (boys’ love) culture and its creators in China under the dual pressures of state surveillance and platform capitalism. I critically interrogate the Chinese danmei cultural ecology through ugliness – not as a state-imposed stigma but as a critical lens and a generative conceptual tool. Departing from previous scholarship’s binary framings of danmei as either resistance or escapism, ugliness reveals danmei as a site of struggles, where censorship, commercialisation and danmei creators and fans as affective communities entangle in unstable yet persistent ways. I interrogate the precarious position of Haitang Literature City authors, and reveal the ugly convergence of digital governance and economic exploitation. Furthermore, I explore the fragmentation of trust within the danmei community, where fear, survival and mistrust complicate solidarity. Centring ugliness as a productive analytic can move beyond the limitations of binary resistance narratives to better account for danmei culture’s messiness, contradictions and ambivalences.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | The Haitang Incident 2024 and the ugliness of danmei culture/industry |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1177/13675494251326775 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494251326775 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © The Author(s) 2025. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). |
| Keywords: | Boys’ love, censorship, danmei, surveillance capitalism, ugliness |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Social Research Institute |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10206379 |
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