Nisu reconfiguration: establishing gender-reversed fan-celebrity fantasies in Chinese society

ABSTRACT

Millions of Chinese celebrity fans online increasingly engage in nisu queer fandom—female fans imagining cisgender male celebrities as their girlfriends, wives, etc.—in a male-female gender binary social context. Based on unobtrusive observation and semi-structured interviews among nisu fans of four Chinese actors, this article foregrounds fans’ own perspectives to analyze how their gender awareness shapes their formation of gender-reversed fan-celebrity fantasies and thus their confrontations with mainstream gender ideologies. Findings are presented in two parts. First, nisu fans build three types of fan-celebrity connections: 1) praising actor(s) for performing feminine qualities, 2) gazing at actor(s) from a dominant position, and 3) appreciating actor(s)’ potential gender non-binary charisma. Second, nisu fans understand both how their emerging awareness and expressions of gender beliefs challenge traditional gender norms and how their practices remain intuitive and implicit rather than political. I conclude that nisu fans’ playful gender reconfiguration with fandom ultimately inspires meaningful developments of gender discourses in broader Chinese society.

KEYWORDS:

• Female nisu fans
• male celebrity(s)
• gender binary
• gender performance
• heterosexual queerness

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Dr. Carol Tilley and Dr. Kathryn LaBarre for their guidance in women’s studies, interview participants for sharing their important fandom experiences, and UIUC Writers Workshop consultants Martha Larkin and Dani Nutting for their writing support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In China, the public recognizes celebrities as cisgender men/women with expected masculine/feminine gender expressions (Chao 2017), unless the celebrities themselves announce their transgender identities. Since the vast majority of celebrities in nisu fandom are cisgender men, this article explores only the fandoms involving cisgender male celebrities and female fans.

2. The notion of “queer” in this article adopts Alexander Doty’s (1993) definition, “a flexible space for the expression of all aspects of non- (anti-, contra-) straight cultural production and reception.”

3. There are overlaps in target fan groups within this research. For instance, a Weibo (see page 9) user can be a nisu fan of both Ayanga and Xincheng, and their nisu fantasies with different actors are discussed separately in this article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Qiuyan Guo

Qiuyan Guo is a PhD candidate of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include media fan participation, gender studies, information literacy, and information behavior. Her work appears in Transformative Works and Cultures, Library and Information Science Research, Celebrity Studies, and has been presented at multiple conferences in the US.