Gender fluidity versus homohysteria: How young Chinese male fans consume athletic bromance (2025)

A wen-wu approach to male teenage Chinese sports fans' heteronormative interpretation of masculinity

Feminist Review, 2023

This article analyses how performatively heteronormative, male teenage Chinese fans consume sports games through the prism of masculinity, using secondary school students' engagement with the NBA (National Basketball Association) as a case study. Drawing on focus groups of 23 participants, we discover that male teenage sports fans constantly evoke elite NBA athletes as male ideals to define a desirable, heteronormative wen-wu masculinity specific to the post-reform era. In this process, they often engage in a double-standard practice, manifesting as their appropriation of the CP (coupling) rhetoric to "ship" athletes and their problematisation of heterosexual women and LGBTQ fans' similar usage of it. This double-standard practice constitutes an attempt to monopolise the interpretation of masculinity both within and outside of the sporting context. It sheds light on the heteronormative male cohort's rejection of alternative masculinities, underscoring how aspects of gender politics unfolding in wider society are reflected in China's teenage sports fandom.

Sportswomen under the Chinese male gaze: A feminist critical discourse analysis

Critical Discourse Studies, 2022

This article offers a timely, critical analysis of the male gaze upon sportswomen in male Chinese fans' consumption of sporting megaevents. We use the most popular Chinese-language sports fandom platform, Hupu, as the data repository and scrutinise the threads of male Hupu users' postings about two elite sportswomen at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics as the case studies. Drawing on feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA), we elucidate the discursive strategies that male Chinese fans adopt to sexualise sportswomen and trivialise their accomplishments. The research findings showcase how China's sports fandom emerges as a masculine terrain, where men's visions of asymmetrical gender power relations are discursively negotiated and rationalised.

" Ice Girls, " " Pink Jerseys, " and " Inebriated Men " : Hegemonic Masculinity and the Imagined Communities of Sports Fandom

In this presentation, I argue, building on the theory of Benedict Anderson, that fans of sports teams form imagined communities. While these communities offer meaning and purpose in the context of the alienation and isolation of late capitalism, they also function as spaces that reproduce the logic of hegemonic masculinity. Through a reading of popular culture fan texts and an analysis of qualitative interview testimony from two women-identifying fans of hockey, I argue that sports fandom follows a patriarchal logic. The imagined community of sports fandom is designed for men who identify with conventional and constraining notions of gender and sexuality. If women are to participate, they must align themselves with the same gender logic – indeed, they must participate in their own objectification – or they will be made to feel uncomfortable and unwelcome. Ultimately, fan cultures work alongside the locker room culture of high performance sport to reproduce hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity.

“Love Sport, Even When It Breaks Your Heart Again”: Ritualizing Consumerism in Sports on Weibo

International Journal of Sport Communication, 2013

Social media have changed the way that social actors participate in sports events. “Prosumers” are able to directly offer different interpretations without journalists’ mediation when a social issue arises. However, social media do not fundamentally change the significance of cultural narratives in communication. This study focuses on discussions initiated by a commercial feed on a Chinese microblogging site during the 2012 London Olympic Games. Qualitative textual analysis was conducted. The study found that enduring cultural narratives create the predrafts of social-media communication; the instantaneity of microblogging referred to not simply its physical appearance but also the meaning of that appearance. In addition, social-media texts illustrate a society’s ongoing stories. Going beyond the limitations of previous control-vs.-freedom paradigms, this study explores a Chinese consumer society that is more dynamic and complex than previous studies would suggest.

The Emergent Masculinities and Gendered Frustrations of Male Live-Streamers in China

Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 2022

Live-streamers in China are predominantly female and heterosexual, so their heterosexual male counterparts barely receives attention. In this paper, we invoke the concept of "emergent masculinities" to critically examine how male live-streamers engage this typically feminine profession. They come in three main types of decreasing prestige: e-sports athletes; shopping guides; and affective entertainers who attract female audiences with friendship and intimacy. This last type enacts a women-pleasing façade that also contradicts the men's own hegemonic masculine upbringing. This tension highlights how China's emergent masculinities develop in conversation with the country's post-feminist sensibilities.

Gender Analysis of Sport Socialization and Components of Sport Fandom

Sport fandom is affected by various factors such as social class, life style, age and gender. In spite of increasing the number of females’ participants in sport events, gender is still essential factor in athletic and fandom sport role socialization. Socialization into sport role and sport fandom components, including sport identity, team identification and sport fandom-related behaviors, are indicators which reflect gender differences in sport fields. This study examines gender differences between female and male in socialization into sport and sport fandom components. Theoretical framework of the article is based on critical feminism. Questionnaire and in-depth interviews have been used for data collection. Relevant statistical tests, such as Mann-Whitney U test and Friedman test have been used for data analysis, with the significance level of 0.05. The results of survey among 224 respondents in Guilan University (Iran) demonstrate that, although peer group, mass media and siblings (sister/brother) respectively are the most important factors in the process of sport socialization between sport fans, there are significant differences between female and male sport fans in the level of socialization into sport and its social factors. In addition, males fan reported higher score in sport fan components than female fans, namely, sport identity, team identification and sport fandom-related behaviors.

The Maintenance of Masculinity Among the Stakeholders of Sport

Sport Management Review, 2009

Feminist and hegemony theorizing are used to explicate how sport and its ancillary organizations and occupations have managed to reproduce its masculinized nature despite the gains of second wave feminism that characterizes the broader culture. The author shows that contemporary sporting institutions largely originated as a political enterprise to counter the first wave of feminism, and describe how gender-segregation and self-selection permits sports' gatekeepers to near-exclusively draw upon a relatively homogenous group of hyper-masculine, overconforming, failed male athletes to reproduce the institution as an extremely powerful genderregime. The author suggests that, because orthodox notions of masculinity are institutionally codified within sport, it will take more than affirmative action programs to bring gender equality off the pitch; it will also require gender-integration on the pitch.

Changing the game? Gender, ethnicity, and age in mediated professional sport

2011

Love NBA, hate BLM: Racism in China's sports fandom

International Journal of Communication, 2022

This article aims to explore how racism plays out in China’s sports fandom in the wake of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement sweeping across the globe. To this end, we conducted a case study of basketball fans’ postings on the most popular Chinese-language sports fandom platform – Hupu. The research discovered that the often-negative assessments of the BLM movement established on Hupu were largely informed by racism deeply held in traditional Chinese thinking, which provided the grounding for Chinese sports fans to appropriate racial discourses to assess progressive equal-rights politics in Euro-American societies. The trajectory of such a discursive practice was twofold, enabling these sports fans to rationalise their political views pertaining to both international and domestic arenas. The research findings urge scholarly attention to the dynamic interplay between regional popular cultures and global equal-rights politics in the digital age in China and beyond.

Consuming Sport (Routledge, 2004)

Consuming Sport is the first book to explicitly and comprehensively address how sport is experienced and engaged with in the everyday lives, social networks and consumer patterns of its followers, the fans. It examines the process of becoming a sport fan, and the social and moral career that supporters follow as their involvement develops over a life-course. As well as developing a new theory of sports fandom and presenting a case for new ethnographic approaches to the study of sports fans, the book includes a wealth of unique research material. The text explores the argument that while concepts of authenticity, tradition, and locality continue to have importance, today, mass media and merchandising have a far greater influence on patterns of loyalty.