Word of Honor and brand homonationalism with “Chinese characteristics”: the dangai industry, queer masculinity and the “opacity” of the state

Abstract

ABSTRACT Examining the dangai phenomenon and the web series Word of Honor (WoH), this paper investigates the entanglement of neoliberal management of queer desires, authoritarian regulation of consumer-citizenship, and traffic in various forms of nationalism. Creating an ambient space for queer agency, danmei practices is often regarded as utilizing queer “opacity” as liberatory strategy to outfox the state and societal constraints on non-normative gender and sexuality. Yet the dangai industry in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) shows that the economization of queerness finds “opaque” ways to profit through managing risk and anxiety of “missing out” even when a state explicitly censors queer commodities. Situating WoH in the “she economy,” the paper demonstrates the ways in which queer potential dangai is cahooted with neoliberal and authoritarian state imperatives for fostering proper gendered consumer-subjects and heteronormative social harmony for national building through embracing the “beautiful, powerful” but “caring and loving” nuan nan (“warm men”). Drawing connections between the newly constructed soft masculinity and other cultural exports such as the “wolf warrior,” the paper argues that dangai allows the militant masculinity to be “homonationalized” in service of rebranding Chinese nationalism in a time when Chinese global expansion is fiercely criticized on the global stage.