Väitös (mediatutkimus): MA Lin Zhang

MA Lin Zhang esittää väitöskirjansa ”Making do with moving targets: Everyday resistance of Chinese boys’ love fans in a platformized environment” julkisesti tarkastettavaksi Turun yliopistossa perjantaina 25.9.2026 klo 15.00 (Turun yliopisto, Arcanum, Aava-luentosali, Arcanuminkuja 1, Turku).

Vastaväittäjänä toimii tohtori, professori Mel Stanfill (University of Central Florida, Yhdysvallat) ja kustoksena tohtori, professori Susanna Paasonen (Turun yliopisto). Tilaisuus on englanninkielinen. Väitöksen alana on mediatutkimus.

Tiivistelmä väitöstutkimuksesta:

How Chinese fans keep loving what they love, even when it’s forbidden

Imagine loving a book, a show, or a fictional couple so much that you write your own stories about them, share them with friends online, and build a whole community around that love. Now imagine that this thing you love could disappear overnight — banned, deleted, or made invisible — without warning and without a clear reason. This is the everyday reality for many Chinese fans of “Boys’ Love” (BL), a hugely popular genre of romantic fiction about male couples, mostly written and read by women.

This dissertation asks a simple but important question: how do people keep loving something when that love is treated as risky, embarrassing, or even illegal?

Over four years, the researcher followed Chinese BL fans across the many online platforms they use including social media, fan-fiction websites, messaging apps, and spoke with fans about their experiences. The study paid special attention to a major event in 2020, when a global fan-fiction website was suddenly blocked in China, forcing thousands of fans to scramble to save their favourite stories and find each other again elsewhere.

The research shows that fans rarely fight back directly. Instead, they develop quiet ways of surviving. They move between platforms when one becomes too risky. They keep archives and memories of banned content so that nothing is truly lost, even when it disappears from the internet. They also try to guess how the invisible rules of internet algorithms work, adjusting their behaviour to stay visible without attracting unwanted attention.

The study found that these fans tactics are not simply rebellious or obedient. The same person might follow the rules on one platform while breaking them on another. This is fans’ surviving within a confusing situation, where the rules themselves are unclear and constantly changing.

This research offers a new way of understanding resistance. Resistance is not as loud protest or open defiance, but as the everyday effort to protect something meaningful under difficult conditions. This matters far beyond BL fandom. Activists, minority communities, ordinary internet users, many people around the world face similar situations, where the rules are vague, enforcement is unpredictable, and speaking up directly is too costly. The tactics used by Chinese BL fans: staying mobile, staying flexible, and never giving up on what they care about, offer valuable lessons for understanding how people cope and resist in many other places where freedom of expression is limited.

The study also sheds light on how big technology platforms shape our everyday lives. Even outside of censorship, all of us increasingly live with algorithms and platform rules we don’t fully understand or control. Watching how BL fans creatively navigate these systems can help us all think more carefully about how much power platforms have over what we can say, share, and love, and how ordinary people find ways to hold on to what matters to them anyway.