Your Love is Qing: Women in the Dangai Drama Word of Honor

Abstract

Since the reinforcement of censorship on homosexual content in China's mainstream media, dangai dramas - online series adaptations of male-to-male romance danmei fiction - have utilized queer subtext as a compromised representational strategy. This thesis analyzes the 2021 dangai drama entitled Word of Honor by employing Eve Sedgwick's concept of male homosocial desire and the Chinese literary concept of qing (情). The study's contribution is twofold. First, it challenges the Western binaries that Sedgwick identifies in nineteenth-century English literature - homosexual versus homosocial. Second, it develops a new and culturally specific theoretical framework - queer qing - for the analysis of subtextual male bonds in censored Chinese dangai dramas.

By analyzing three pivotal scenes meticulously selected through a systematic filtering process, this research traces how Gu Xiang facilitates the articulation and circulation of qing between the male protagonists, Wen Kexing and Zhou Zishu. As the drama's only major female character, Gu resembles a younger sister to Wen and Zhou. Rather than serving as a barrier or romantic rival, Gu Xiang performs a unique narrative and affective role: she mediates, interprets, and enables the development of queer qing between the two men all at once. In doing so, she legitimizes queer male bonds within heteronormative narrative constraints and reveals how Word of Honor transforms censorship into a site of creative negotiation.