FEMINISM OR MISOGYNY? - EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BOY’S LOVE DRAMA EXPOSURE, THE FEMALE GAZE, FANDOM ENGAGEMENT, AND GENDER IDEOLOGY

Aug 20, 2026

Boy’s Love (BL) drama has become widely prevalent in recent years, challenging China’s heteronormative ideology and patriarchal dominance. Empirical evidence has been lacking on whether BL exposure strengthens feminist beliefs or produces misogynistic attitudes among women. Drawing on cultivation theory from an active-audience perspective, the study examines links among genre-specific media exposure, the female gaze, fandom engagement, and gender ideologies using a China-based survey. Results show exposure associates with both increased feminism and misogyny, with moderation by female gaze and fandom engagement. High engagement combined with a strong female gaze relates to greater feminism, leading to the concept of an ‘active feminist fan audience’.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages22

Reading Time55 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Research gap and motivation

Cultivation theory and audience perspective

TRAMES, 2024, 28(78/73), 4, 351–372 FEMINISM OR MISOGYNY? EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BOY’S LOVE DRAMA EXPOSURE, THE FEMALE GAZE, FANDOM ENGAGEMENT, AND GENDER IDEOLOGY Xi Luo1 and Haiyan Feng2 1Soochow University and 2Xiamen University Abstract. The prevalence of Boy’s Love (BL) drama in recent years has challenged China’s everlasting state-manipulated heteronormative ideology and patriarchy hegemony. However, it remains unknown whether exposure to BL drama makes female audiences more feminist or misogynistic. This study approached cultivation theory from a perspective of an active audience to investigate the relationship between genre-specific media exposure, the female gaze, fandom engagement, and female audiences’ gender ideologies. Based on a survey in China, this study found that exposure to BL drama related to both increased feminism and misogyny. However, the female gaze and fandom engagement can moderate their relationships. For audiences with high-level female gaze or fandom engagement, exposure to BL drama was associated with increased feminism. Based on these findings, this research raised a concept of ‘active feminist fan audience’ to depict the female audiences who view BL dramas from a feminist perspective of desire and actively engaged in fandom activities. Keywords: Boy’s Love drama exposure, feminist identity, misogyny, the female gaze, fandom engagement DOI: [https://doi.org/10.3176/tr.2024.4.03](https://doi.org/10.3176/tr.2024.4.03) Received 24 August 2024, accepted 24 September 2024, printed and available online 10 December 2024 © 2024 Authors. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License CC BY 4.0 ([http://creativecommons.org/](http://creativecommons.org/)[ ](http://creativecommons.org/)[licenses/by/4.0](licenses/by/4.0)) . 352 Xi Luo and Haiyan Feng 1. Introduction Boy’s Love (BL, also called Danmei, Tanbi and Yaoi), as a genre of fantasy stories that describes male-male romance, has become one of the most popular literary and cultural practices in the digital age (Tian 2020, Zhou et al. 2018) . BL originated in Japan and spread to mainland China in the 1990s. At the turn of the 21st century, benefitting from the popularization of the Internet and social media, BL has become an independently developing subculture in China (Xu and Yang 2013) . Since 2016, the popularity and phenomenal commercial success of BL drama Addicted & Heroin (adapted from a BL novel with the same title) has spawned a wave of well-received original BL novels adapted to web dramas, which extended BL’s influence from its subculture fan base to the general Internet public (Zhou et al. 2018) . Even though Chinese BL drama has carefully modified the homosexual relations in the original fiction into friendships or ‘socialist brotherhood’ as a way of getting past censorship (Ng and Li 2020, Hu and Wang 2021), its challenge to China’s everlasting statemanipulated heteronormative ideology and patriarchy hegemony has still attracted increasing scholarly attention (Chang and Tian 2021, Zhao 2020, Feng and Luo 2022) . However, although BL is a culture created by and targeted to women and is regarded as contesting claims of dominant culture (Yang and Xu 2016), whether exposure to BL drama makes the female audience more feminist or misogynistic remains ambiguous and not yet examined by empirical research. When studying the impact of TV exposure on female audiences, the theoretical perspective of cultivation theory is commonly used. However, when we examine the relationship between exposure to genre-specific media such as BL drama and the audiences’ gender ideology, two questions emerge us. Firstly, drawing from the cultivation theory, frequent exposure to specific media content can nurture beliefs that coincide with the content (Gerbner 1969) . However, previous studies have revealed conflicting evidence regarding BL storie

FAQs

Does exposure to Boy’s Love (BL) drama make female audiences more feminist or more misogynistic?

The study finds BL exposure is associated with both increased feminism and increased misogyny among female audiences.

How do the female gaze and fandom engagement affect the relationship between BL exposure and gender ideology?

The female gaze and fandom engagement moderate these relationships. For audiences with high-level female gaze or fandom engagement, BL exposure is linked to increased feminism.

What concept does the study propose to describe certain BL drama viewers?

It proposes the concept of an ‘active feminist fan audience’, referring to women who view BL dramas from a feminist perspective of desire and actively participate in fandom activities.

Aug 20, 2026

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