Date of Award
5-11-2025
Date Published
June 2025
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
Media Studies
Advisor(s)
Srividya Ramasubramanian
Subject Categories
Communication | Social and Behavioral Sciences
Abstract
This study examines how Chinese slash fans circumvent censorship through coding and decoding strategies (Hall, 1980). Based on online ethnography and participant observation of a 20-year slash fandom of a popular online novel, DMBJ, I find that fans employ linguistic wordplay across morphological, phonetic, and semantic dimensions with their linguistic literacy in Chinese. Fans actively extract scenes or descriptions from the original novel that align with erotic contexts and collage them into new slash fiction. This form of creation is not entirely original but involves poaching and recombining canonical texts to assign new sexual meanings. At the same time, fans selectively appropriate terms associated with male characters—often those connoting masculinity—and, through repeated use in community communication, gradually link these terms to sexual scenarios. These terms then gain coded meanings in writing, allowing fans to avoid common sexual expressions that are more likely to be flagged as sensitive. As commercial platforms grow increasingly restrictive, fan-operated websites have become primary spaces for preserving and circulating slash works. These sites often impose stricter entry requirements, such as registration quizzes and credit systems, and rely on a shared body of insider knowledge, which is argued as a game between senior and junior fans. Senior fans, already familiar with legacy norms, maintain a state of “strategic invisibility” by using traditional tactics like typing in traditional Chinese to reduce visibility. Younger fans engage more actively in the community, seeking guidance to pass entry barriers and maintain a visible presence within the fan site.
Access
Open Access
Recommended Citation
li, xiyin, "ENCRYPTED EROTICISM: ENCODING AND DECODING STRATEGIES AGAINST CENSORSHIP IN CHINESE SLASH FANDOM" (2025). Theses - ALL. 932.
https://surface.syr.edu/thesis/932
