Author ORCID Identifier
0009-0009-2626-5254
Abstract
This article examines female-centered mengnü fan-fiction emerging on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu as a feminist recontextualization of heteronormative romantic narratives. Unlike conventional mengnü fiction, which centers on male protagonists and heterosexual desire, these storiettes center female celebrities and intimacies between women. Drawing on frameworks of post-romantic culture and feminist criticism, this article read texts of this new genre through two dimensions. First, it examines how these narratives articulate emotionally intense yet ambiguous relationships. From these emerge nomadic, non-binary, and nonteleological forms of intimacy that resist fixed binary categories. Second, the study investigates how these fantasies of nomadic intimacy become sites of aspirational self-fashioning, where female celebrities are projected as ideal selves. Yet this process also risks ignoring systemic gender hierarchies while entangling neoliberal labour ethics with female empowerment. This article argues that female-centered mengnü fan-fiction is not merely a fandom practice, but a feminist discursive mode through which women rework and reimagine the scripts of love and intimacy. These texts center female agency, autonomy, and subjectivity, and reflect how young women in China explore new modes of attachment and self-making beyond the constraints of conventional gendered scripts.
Recommended Citation
Sun, Gemma Yantao
(2026)
"Beyond Romance: Feminist Imagination of Intimacy in Female-Centered Mengnü (Dream Girl) Fan-fiction on Chinese Social Media,"
Kritika Kultura:
No.
49, Article 19.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.13185/1656-152X.2258
Available at:
https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss49/19
