你好 / Hello / こんにちわ
This is Zhangyi (章一). You can call me Lizzie if the mandarin pronunciation is hard for you. My pronoun is she/her. I am currently a senior student studying sociology and anthropology in Beijing. I’m interested in how cultural phenomena and various power relations intersect, especially the gendered and sexual, shaping affect experiences of people in certain cultural communities.
The starting point of my academic journey may seem a bit bizarre. Like many Chinese millennials, I absorbed anime, manga, BL* and other cultural genres imported from Japan as I grew up. Being an obsessive lover of BL since I was a child has led me to intuitively identify with affirmative actions for gender and sexuality. Both BL and LGBTQ-related discussions are under perennial censorship in mainland China. Since 2019, the shuttering of advocacy groups for LGBTQ+ rights and the constant arrest of BL authors have been contemporaneous scenarios that shaped my conception of “society” in China and my position inside it.
*BL (Boys’ Love) is a subcultural genre addressing homosexual romantic relationships, mostly appreciated by females.
When I was seventeen, I conducted a sale activity titled “No Homophobia Tomorrow” at the annual student festival in collaboration with other BL lovers in my high school. We sold goods with LGBTQ+ signs designed by ourselves to raise funds. We brought various elements from BL fictions into play, including comics, novels, and poems, to deliver anti-discrimination themes. This action provoked vigorous responses in the mass media and we eventually donated proceeds to Beijing LGBT Center, which stopped operation after two years.
What motivated this action and my following studies is the desire to navigate a livable life in the rising precariousness of contemporary China, by thinking from some “peripheries”. This is a question about the survival of “alterity” in China, which seems overly ambitious and idealistic yet indispensable to my life.
Writing about youth and culture in today’s China will be inevitably confronted with the casting of “cool Japan” and Korean popular culture. Given the permeation of xenophobia in mass media, can we still imagine a sort of hope of connection in East Asia? Can popular cultures and subcultures, planted and transmitted in transnational capitalism, be employed to bridge a heuristic conversation? Taking “Self as Method”, I will explore and contest answers beginning from my own experiences.
Me at Ube Shinkawa Station
「耳障りな声で
君と歌うけれど」
——ずっと真夜中でいいのに。「正義」
“With my slightly unpleasant tone,
I sing to your voice.”
